Hamoukar and Tell Brak: The First War We Can See

Around 3500 BC, in a storeroom of a town on the plains of north-eastern Syria, someone rolled wet clay from old jar sealings into egg-shaped sling bullets and laid them in a row to dry. The town was under attack, and the bullets were never thrown. This film tells the story of Hamoukar and Tell Brak, the towns of the Khabur plain that grew large centuries before writing: Agatha Christie and Max Mallowan on the mound at Brak, the Eye Temple and its thousands of little idols, the mass graves at Tell Majnuna, the black obsidian of Hamoukar's fields, the burnt town wall pocked by more than a thousand clay bullets, the slingers of the plain, the southerners from Uruk who came after the fire, and Nagar, the city Tell Brak became. 0:00 Bullets in the soaking pit 2:20 The plain that rain could feed 4:24 Mounds made of houses 6:09 A world before writing 8:57 The novelist on the mound 11:07 Twenty thousand eyes 13:22 A city under the city 16:37 The town that grew together 19:09 The dead in the rubbish mound 23:28 The town of black glass 26:32 Bullets in the rubble 28:48 The fall of Hamoukar 31:22 The shepherd's weapon 33:10 Who came after the fire 35:21 A southern face on a northern temple 36:50 Nagar, and the silence Photographs from Wikimedia Commons. Those under Creative Commons licences, by author and licence, with the time each first appears: Zoeperkoe, CC BY-SA 3.0: 2:20, 4:24 Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 4.0: 4:55 Dorieo, CC BY-SA 4.0: 33:25 Dosseman, CC BY-SA 4.0: 35:56 Erhan Veli Gül, CC BY-SA 4.0: 6:45 Françoise Foliot, CC BY-SA 4.0: 37:51 Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0: 6:09 Photograph by Mike Peel (, CC BY-SA 4.0: 32:38 Raki_Man, CC BY 3.0: 24:56 SpeakingArch, CC BY-SA 4.0: 11:53 Zunkir, CC BY-SA 4.0: 11:27 The rest of the photographs are in the public domain or under CC0, from (Jasmine N. Walthall, U.S. Army), Andrew Cattoir (Lake Mead National Recreation Area) and Gerda Arendt. Maps drawn for this film from Natural Earth (public domain) and Terrain Tiles elevation and sea depth (SRTM, GMTED, ETOPO1). Music, our own piano recordings of songs from public-domain scores: César Franck, Larghetto, String Quartet in D major, third movement; Édouard Lalo, Adagio non troppo, String Quartet, Op. 19, second movement; Antonin Dvorak, Lento e molto cantabile, String Quartet No. 14, Op. 105, third movement; Johann Sebastian Bach, Prelude from the Suite in C minor, BWV 997; Robert Schumann, Die alten, bösen Lieder, Dichterliebe, Op.48, No. 16; Gustav Mahler, Oft denk' ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen, Kindertotenlieder No. 4; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Als Luise die Briefe ihres ungetreuen Liebhabers verbrannte, K. 520; Franz Schubert, Der Tod und das Mädchen, D. 531. Made with AI: the narration is a synthetic voice, and the paintings in the film and the channel's opening and closing pictures were made with AI. The photographs and maps were not. #Mesopotamia #archaeology #documentary