Daily History Challenge · No. 98 · Sunday 4 October 2026 · Gauntlet
Puzzle No. 98: Gauntlet
The Sunday Gauntlet: three before or after calls, four events to order and a final When? on Shapur I captures Emperor Valerian at the Battle of Edessa.
Act 1: Chain, against Invention of the integrated circuit (1958 CE)
Before Invention of the integrated circuit
Before Invention of the integrated circuit
Before Invention of the integrated circuit
Act 2: Order, earliest first
Act 3: When?
Near Edessa in northern Mesopotamia, the Sasanian king Shapur I decisively defeated a Roman army under the emperor Valerian and captured the emperor himself, along with much of his staff. It was the first time a reigning Roman emperor had been taken prisoner in battle, an unprecedented humiliation that Shapur commemorated in monumental rock reliefs at Naqsh-e Rostam. Valerian died in Persian captivity; later Christian writers such as Lactantius circulated lurid accounts of his treatment. The disaster came amid plague and simultaneous pressure on the Rhine and Danube frontiers, and it shattered Roman prestige in the east. In the aftermath the empire fragmented, with the Gallic Empire breaking away in the west and the city of Palmyra, under Odaenathus and later Zenobia, assuming control of much of the eastern provinces. The capture of Valerian thus stands as the nadir of the Crisis of the Third Century and a vivid demonstration of the renewed power of Sasanian Persia, Rome's most formidable rival, whose rise reshaped the balance of power across western Asia.