What Is the Oldest Known Siege?

The first cities were built partly as defenses during wars, but attackers soon developed siege tactics to overcome them. Ancient evidence of sieges includes traces of scaling ladders used to climb high city walls, battering rams to break down gates, underground tunnels to create breaches—a key tactic—and signs of blockades and starvation.

“Siege warfare was the most brutal form of war in the ancient world,” the American historian Paul Kern writes in his 1999 book Ancient Siege Warfare. “Typically involving whole urban societies, ancient siege warfare often ended in the sack of a city and the massacre or enslavement of entire populations.”

But even the most ancient evidence for sieges has been relatively late in historical terms, until now: Archaeologists have unearthed the earliest evidence of a siege, including mass graves, fortifications and widespread destruction, from the Middle Bronze Age in Mesopotamia nearly 4,000 years ago.

The evidence comes from 2026 excavations in northern Iraq by an American and Iraqi team, co-led by the University of Central Florida's Tiffany Earley-Spadoni. Their discoveries include evidence of fortifications, destruction and mass deaths that the researchers have linked to a siege of the ancient city-state of Qabra. The siege is recorded on the Victory Stele of Dadusha, a stone monument commemorating the siege, which was found in northeastern Iraq in 1983.

The stele “describes allied forces moving into the area, taking over smaller settlements, and finally surrounding Qabra and systematically breaking through its walls,” Earley-Spadoni says. “The story ends with Qabra’s ruler being defeated and his head taken as a trophy.”

Ancient writings indicate that Qabra was an independent city-state between the Upper and Lower Zab rivers. Its strategic location and fertile lands brought it to the attention of Shamshi Addu, an Amorite leader who had already conquered the Assyrian capital of Assur as he expanded his empire in northern Mesopotamia. Shamshi Addu then forged an alliance with Dadusha, the king of the nearby city of Eshnunna, to bring Qabra under his control.

Archaeologist Charlie Trimm of Biola University in California notes that Qabra was besieged for 10 days with “a surrounding siege wall, by heaping up earth, with the help of a breach, an attack and my great strength,” Dadusha wrote on the victory stele. “Given that kings in the ancient world tended to exaggerate their accomplishments, these kinds of statements must be taken with a grain of salt,” Trimm says. But the recent discoveries help experts “envision more clearly the horror of what ancient sieges were like to experience.”

Signs of the ancient siege include collapsed structures, burned layers and piles of debris that suggest a coordinated, possibly prolonged assault. Researchers also found skeletal remains from 17 people. “The charred debris, the large number of ceramic vessels, and individuals who met untimely deaths and were buried in the destruction layers provide the clearest archaeological case of Middle Bronze Age siege warfare yet discovered in northern Mesopotamia,” Earley-Spadoni says. “The individuals were not formally buried and had no associated grave goods … some appear to have been left where they died, including possible palace workers. One individual was found face down over a stone basin.”

Researchers also unearthed about 20 clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform that document Qabra’s administration until the siege. “They record the final month, days and year when bureaucrats stopped working there,” Earley-Spadoni says. The finds could help historians and archaeologists better understand the Amorites, a Semitic-speaking people from the Levant and northwestern Syria who were mostly nomadic before rapidly rising from a minor power to rule much of Mesopotamia. “Research programs such as this, and their brilliant discoveries, allow us to ask and to answer fundamental historical questions otherwise inaccessible,” says Yale University archaeologist Harvey Weiss.

Qabra offers an unprecedented record of a siege from this time. “Direct archaeological examples of siege warfare are extremely rare in the Bronze Age,” says Earley-Spadoni, and most of the evidence for sieges dates to much later, often during the Iron Age in Mesopotamia.

Sieges are illustrated in Neo-Assyrian palace carvings, which were made no earlier than 2,900 years ago. They show siege engines—wheeled and armored towers as high as a city’s walls—as well as fighting by desperate defenders and the deportations of captive people. But only hints and written accounts of earlier sieges existed before now.

The evidence from Qabra will also help scholars better understand two ancient sieges recorded in literature: the biblical story of Joshua at Jericho and Homer’s Trojan War. Joshua’s attack on Jericho, in which the Israelites marched for six days around the walls of the city and toppled them on the seventh day after a trumpet blast, may contain a kernel of historical truth about an actual siege. But a layer of destruction found at Jericho from the right time—about 1400 B.C.—includes evidence that the attack was not prolonged.

In the case of the Trojan War, which may have happened around 1200 B.C., experts are more satisfied. Kern wrote that Homer describes a long blockade, with the story of the Trojan Horse as a stratagem to gain entry to the city: “When direct assault and prolonged siege had both failed, the Greeks resorted to deception,” he wrote in Ancient Siege Warfare. “The fall of Troy … conforms to the typical pattern of ancient siege warfare: the city is finally taken, its men slaughtered, its women and children enslaved, and the city itself burned to the ground.”