Top 100 Stories of 2008 #66:
While the corpses of their enemies still lay on the battlefield, the victors celebrated by slaughtering cattle and holding a gigantic feast. Then they dumped the war dead into a pit, heaved in the animal bones from their repast, and tossed their plates on top of the pile.
Now—nearly six millennia later—the unearthing of these remnants in what is now northeastern Syria is a spectacular archaeological find, one of several important discoveries made recently at Tell Brak, a 130-foot-high mound jutting above the northern fringe of the Mesopotamian plain.
Archaeologists from the University of Cambridge, the University of Edinburgh, and Harvard University say Brak was one of the earliest and largest cities in the region—and therefore the world. That assertion is shaking up Near Eastern archaeology, since scholars long assumed that the first substantial cities arose in southern Mesopotamia in today’s Iraq