Times of  Syria: US and Syrian researchers say that a battle destroyed one of the world's earliest cities in Mesopotamia, at around 3500 BC but artifacts are left behind.
    

The University of Chicago and Syria's Department of Antiquities say that the discovery provides the earliest evidence for large-scale organized warfare in the Mesopotamian world.
    
"The whole area of our most recent excavation was a war zone," said Clemens Reichel, of the University of Chicago.
    
Reichel was the co-director of the Syrian-American Archaeological Expedition to Hamoukar, an ancient site in northeastern Syria near the Iraqi border, in October and November.
    

 The researchers found extensive destruction with collapsed walls, which had undergone heavy bombardment by sling bullets and eventually collapsed in an ensuing fire. The excavators retrieved more than 1,200 oval-shaped bullets and some 120 larger round clay balls.
    
 "This clearly was no minor skirmish," Reichel said. "This was 'Shock and Awe' in the Fourth Millennium BC."