Dutch archaeologists have discovered evidence proving that Roman emperor Julius Caesar traveled to the Netherlands, where he engaged and defeated a pair of Germanic tribes at a site near the modern-day village of Kessel in the southern province of Brabant.
According to The Guardian, the battle would have taken place in 55 BC and resulted in the death of approximately 150,000 people from the Tencteri and the Usipetes tribes, who had purportedly gone to Caesar seeking asylum only to be wiped out by the emperor’s legions and cavalry. The findings were announced during a press conference held Thursday at the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam.
Skeletal remains, weapons, and armor extracted from the area provide the first concrete evidence that Caesar’s army had indeed entered what is now Dutch territory, Popular Mechanics wrote on Friday. Carbon dating, along with historical and geochemical analyses, indicate that the artifacts originated from the first-century BC, around the time of the battle.
While Caesar himself had discussed the battle in his account of the Gallic wars, Commentarii de Bello Gallico, Nico Roymans, an archaeologist with VU University in Amsterdam, told reporters that his team’s research marks “the first time the presence of Caesar and his troops on Dutch soil has been explicitly shown.”
Women, children among the at least 150,000 dead
In Commentarii de Bello Gallico, Caesar said that he encountered and wiped out the two tribes, which would have put the death toll over 400,000. However, Roymans and his colleagues noted that the actual number of fatalities would have been closer to the 150,000 to 200,000 range.
The Tencteri and the Usipetes originally came from a region east of the Rhine and asked Caesar for asylum when he instead had his army turn their swords upon them, the Daily Mail said. Even though the account of the battle was well known, its exact location (and the degree to which the Roman emperor exaggerated his conquests) had remained a mystery until now.
Roymans’ team found hundreds of bones at the site, along with swords, spearheads, a helmet, and belt hooks. The enamel on teeth found at the site were analyzed in order to determine the victims’ ages, and the analysis revealed that women and children were among those killed in what the VU University researchers said would have been declared an act of genocide today.
“Though Caesar did not explicitly pronounce a desire to destroy Germanic tribes, he must have realized that his actions resulted in the partial destruction of [these] ethnic groups,” they said. “Remarkably, in the then Roman political culture no moral objections existed for mass murder on a defeated enemy, especially when it came to barbarians.”
“Interestingly, some swords were deliberately folded or bent. This may indicate that the deposit of the battlefield remnants at the time was accompanied by rituals,” they added, according to the Daily Mail.
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