discovery of a 3700 year old crime

The two skeletons were found in an old grain silo at the Tell Mohammed Diyab site in Syria. The arrangement of the bodies clearly shows that they were thrown into the pit, with one of the skeletons resting above the first (folded in half, legs above the head). Virginia Verardi, courtesy Mission de Tell Mohammed Diyab

In northern Syria, a French archaeological mission has discovered the remains of two homicide victims.

No body, no homicide… That’s one of the best possible defenses in murder cases. The absence of a corpse leaves room for doubt, and the doubt benefits the accused. This principle is well known, but it is rare to discover a perfectly made-up crime scene several millennia after the fact. This is the case with two 3,700-year-old skeletons discovered in northern Syria, at the site of Tell Mohammed Diyab by French archaeologist Virginia Verardi. The excavations in question actually date back to 2008, but that story was only recently revealed by the journal The Ancient Near East Todaybefore being included in Science and Future, from a publication published in 2021 in the Journal of Assyriology and Oriental Archeology.

The site of Tell Mohammed Diyab is an ancient metropolis of Northern Mesopotamia which may have housed between 2,000 and 2,500 inhabitants from the middle of the III^e millennium at the beginning of the II^e millennium BC Excavations began there in…

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