In the 1920s, Jesuit priest Antoine Poidebar made a biplane flight over the Syrian desert. He noticed the rough outlines of old buildings that he suspected were ancient Roman castles. In one of the first aerial archaeological surveys, a French pilot mapped and photographed more than 100 objects found within a 1,000-kilometer area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. For decades historians assumed these were the remains of frontier fortifications built around AD 300 to repel the Sassanid Empire. Recently released satellite images provide greater clarity.

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Thanks to the declassification of data during the Cold War, archaeologists have many images of this region. According to sources, hundreds of additional buildings were noticed here that Antoine Poidebar did not discover. Scientists say these were probably fortresses designed to protect caravans and merchants from bandits and to tax them, and not for defense against attacks by enemy armies.

The photographs were taken from low-orbit satellites at the height of the Cold War and made public in the 1990s. Because the photographs were taken before the industrialization of agriculture, they depict landscape features that have existed since then disturbed or destroyed by mechanized plows.

Found in general 396 square or rectangular buildingsIt resembles Roman castles. Instead of a single row of small castles stretching from north to south, the new photos show hundreds of castles stretching from east to west. They are not located along the ancient border, but along the trade routes of that time.

Ruins of one of the castles / Photo: Jesse Kazan

These small, scattered castles might protect merchants from bandits or lions, but they wouldn’t offer much resistance against an invading army.
– says archaeologist Jesse Kazana from Dartmouth College (USA).

The Syrian desert is different from Rome’s other frontier regions. Hadrian’s Wall or the Rhine represented stable, militarized borders, but in Syria the Romans and Sassanids may have competed for influence over local tribes and kingdoms. It was a huge buffer zone.

Archaeologists now need to dig to confirm the findings, but the war has made the area extremely dangerous and field research may not be possible anytime soon.