According to the detailed account of Zacharias Rhetor, the city's sack was particularly brutal, and accompanied by a massacre of the population for three days and nights.
The city, behind its walls of black basalt, resisted desperately, resorted to cannibalism [5] before finally succumbing to the siege.
Indeed, it seems that some guards were drunk and fell asleep after celebrating a festival,[9] allowing the Persians to quietly scale the walls and get inside the city.
[10] A slaughter of the people of the city followed during three days until a priest went to meet Kavadh, begging him to stop killing, arguing that it was not a kingly act.
Emperor Anastasius I Dicorus reacted to the news of Amida's fall by sending a huge force of 60,000 men east, but the Byzantines were unable to recover the city until the conclusion of a truce in 505, when they ransomed it for 1100 pounds of gold.