Archaeological digs at Tell Hamoukar in Syria have yielded the remains of a body, possibly a war casualty.

Archaeologists digging in Syria, in the upper reaches of what was ancient Mesopotamia, have found new evidence of how one of the world’s earliest cities met a violent end by fire, collapsing walls and roofs, and a fierce rain of clay bullets. The battle left some of the oldest known ruins of organized warfare.

The excavations at the city, Tell Hamoukar, which was destroyed in about 3500 B.C., have also exposed remains suggesting its origins as a manufacturing center for obsidian tools and blades, perhaps as early as 4500 B.C.

The proximity to Iraq is not insignificant. Driven out of Iraq by the war and political turmoil, Western archaeologists who specialize in the first urban civilization that flourished in Mesopotamia have had to shift their digging to the northern fringes of the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys, in Syria and Turkey.

As a result, archaeologists are gaining a broader perspective on a transformative period in antiquity that saw the rise of the first cities, specialization in work, stratification of society and eventually, the first known writing. While the more thoroughly studied urban centers in southern Iraq may have been earlier and more powerful city-states that coalesced into empires, those in the north were not as peripheral as once assumed. Some of them developed robust cultures more or less independent of the south. Trade between the two regions was common, and so apparently was conflict.

Found throughout the site, top to bottom: clay bullets, obsidian beads and clay seals used to secure containers.

The more recent discovery of the city’s production of sharp and durable tools from obsidian, a volcanic glass, may prove to be significant in understanding the economy of northern Mesopotamia in relation to the south, archaeologists say.