THE BIBLE
In 331 B.C. the Samaritans revolted against Alexander the Great and burned to death his prefect Andromachus. An avenging Macedonian army thereupon invaded Samaria, surrounded 300 Samaritan nobles hiding in a cave near Jericho, and by lighting fires at the entrance of the cave managed to asphyxiate the Samaritans.
For 23 centuries the bodies lay in the innermost recesses of the cave, buried beneath a growing cover of bat dung until some Arabs, poking around in the desert in the hope of finding some salable antiquities, stumbled on the Samaritan skeletons in 1962. Digging in the dung, they unearthed jewelry, pottery...
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