Rapid Fire: Ancient Blaze Leveled City in 3 Hours

About 3,000 years ago, a fire destroyed the Near East city of Tel Megiddo, leaving ash and burned mud-brick buildings in its wake. The findings, based on scientists' own experiments with homemade mud bricks, not only help archaeologists understand the destruction of this ancient city in the Near East, but also serve as a window into how fires affected other settlements, researchers said. "Mud bricks are important to study, because they account for as much as 90 percent of standing architecture i