They waited just a little too long to try to steal this gold bowl

IN 1958, archaeologist Robert Dyson was excavating the long-buried citadel of Hasanlu in Iran when he came across this beautiful gold bowl.  But after a moment in the international headlines, the bowl and citadel were largely forgotten.

And so the unique circumstances under which the precious vessel fell to the bottom of a refuse shaft 2800 years ago are only now coming to light, as Dyson's former student Michael Danti of Boston University revisits the excavation notes.

Today, Hasanlu looks like a large dirt mound that rises 25 metres out of the Solduz valley in north-west Iran, but beneath the earth are the remains of a settlement that was occupied nearly continuously for millennia, from 6000 BC.

Dyson found the bowl in the burned remains of one building.  Next to the bowl were three skeletons. The helmets and maces found near the skeletons show they were not people from Hasanlu, but rather marauding soldiers trying to flee.  In 800 BC, the city was invaded and destroyed by an organised army. The invaders swept through the city, killing everyone and setting the wooden houses alight.

The skeletons belonged to soldiers who were robbing the treasury. Waiting too long to do their looting, the fires set in the city quickly burned up to them, so they headed for the stairs – but too late as the flaming building collapsed on top of them. This sent them hurtling down into a waste-disposal site. It's a scene straight out of a Hollywood adventure movie.  Then, their corpses and the loot they intended to steal lay mouldering for centuries, until their flaming story was again revealed by Mr. Dyson.

The fires the army started, combined with the soldiers' greed, led to their demise in the conflagration they themselves started.