“At length we stood on the end of the col and looked over Palmyra,” wrote British traveler, archeologist and poet Gertrude Bell on May 20, 1900. “I wonder if the wide world presents a more singular landscape. It is a mass of columns, ranged into long avenues, grouped into temples, lying broken on the sand or pointing one long solitary finger to Heaven. Beyond them is the immense Temple of Baal; the modern town is built inside it and its rows of columns rise out of a mass of mud roofs. And beyond, all is the desert, sand and white stretches of salt and sand again, with the dust clouds whirling over it and the Euphrates five days away. It looks like the white skeleton of a town, standing knee deep in the blown sand.”
Bell, the so-called “Queen of the Desert” — whom Nicole Kidman plays in a new film directed by Werner Herzog — was entranced by what she saw. She wrote that “the stone used here is a beautiful white limestone that looks like marble and weathers a golden yellow like the Acropolis.” As she rode on a camel into town, she passed the “famous Palmyrene tombs,” “great stone towers, four stories high, some more ruined and some less, standing together in groups or bordering the road. Except Petra, Palmyra is the loveliest thing I have seen in this country.”
Bell was admiring what has become known as the “Venice of the Sands,” the ruins of an ancient city that, between the first and third centuries AD, rose in splendor as an oasis of date palms and gardens in the Syrian desert, sometimes independent and at other times under the control of Rome and which, for 1,500 years, remained one of the best preserved sites from antiquity.
Illustration: Yusha
Later scholars have gone further than Bell in praising the city.
“Among the great cities of antiquity, Palmyra is comparable only to Petra in Jordan, Angkor Wat in Cambodia and the Athenian Acropolis in Greece,” said G.W. Bowersock, professor emeritus of ancient history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
However, since last Monday, the view Bell savored no longer exists. The splendor Bowersock hymned is fast disappearing. Ancient Palmyra is, seemingly, turning Ozymandian and being integrated with the surrounding desert, as the buildings that made it worthy of being a UNESCO heritage site are reduced to rubble. Last Monday evening, after comparing satellite images taken before and after an explosion in Palmyra, the UN Training and Research Agency confirmed the destruction of the main Temple of Bel (also known as Baal or Ba’al) and a row of columns nearby.
Ross Burns, adjunct professor of ancient history at Macquarie University in Sydney and author of two works on the archeology and history of Syria, explained what the world has lost.
“This is one of the most important of the great temple sites of the Roman eastern provinces. The central shrine, or cella, stood in an enormous colonnaded courtyard. The shrine itself was also surrounded by a columned portico on all sides and was blown up with great proficiency. The only part that appears to be standing is the remarkable western doorway into the shrine, which was a spectacular entry with a richly decorated frame that sloped inwards as it rose in an Egyptian-influenced style,” Burns said.
Burns said the temple’s shrine and courtyard were relatively large, reflecting the early Roman period’s tradition of enormous pilgrimage complexes, including the original Temple of Jupiter in Damascus, its even larger counterpart in Baalbek and the Jerusalem Temple built by Herod the Great.
“The Bel temple was the only one of these four to survive in fairly recognizable form. Its loss is a major blow and the building was the most significant in Syria from the Roman period,” he said.
Not just significant, but beautiful.
“The Temple of Bel was the most beautiful symbol of all of Syria. It was the most beautiful place to visit,” Syrian Director-General for Antiquities and Museums Maamoun Abdulkarim said earlier this week.
The temple was built 2,000 years ago and was the best known of the monuments of this ancient city visited by 150,000 tourists each year until war broke out in Syria in 2011. However, as a symbol of polytheism, it was also a glaring target to the Islamic State (IS), formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
The razing of the Temple of Bel was just the latest act of destruction by IS, which seized control of Palmyra in May. In addition to damaging sites in Syria, IS has destroyed statues, shrines and manuscripts in the Iraqi city of Mosul and demolished the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud.
However, in May, in an interview with a radio station opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Abu Laith al-Saoudy, the nom de guerre of the IS commander in Palmyra, pledged not to damage the city’s historic buildings, but only destroy statues.
“Concerning the historic city, we will preserve it and it will not be harmed, God willing,” he said. “What we will do is break the idols that the infidels used to worship.”
“The historic buildings will not be touched and we will not bring bulldozers to destroy them like some people think,” he added.
Soon after IS seized Palmyra, its fighters repurposed one of the city’s grand historic buildings, the majestic Roman theater, using it as the venue for the execution of nearly two dozen pro-al-Assad foreign fighters who had been resisting IS.
There were hopes, then, that — despite the killings and the destruction of statues — much of Palmyra’s ruins might survive the stewardship of IS. However, that promise of its military commander in Palmyra was detonated last month when photographs released by IS showed that Palmyra’s second most important temple, the Temple of Baal Shamin (a temple to a Phoenician god and different from the Temple of Bel, which was devoted to the worship of a Mesopotamian god), had been dynamited.
“It was a small temple,” said Burns, “thus easy to explode as the walls were intact, so containing the blast within the structure.”
Despite its size, the Temple of Baal Shamin had another major significance — it was built in the second century AD on a site used earlier for religious purposes.
It is worth pointing out that earlier Muslims who have occupied Palmyra did not see fit to destroy it. Under the Ummayyad Caliphate that controlled the city in the seventh century, part of the temple of Bel was used as a mosque. IS is erasing, then, not just pre-Islamic culture, but Islamic heritage, too.
In this iconoclasm — literally — IS has its place in a rich history of destruction. Moses reduced the Golden Calf, made from Israelites’ golden earrings, to dust. Centuries later, the 93 carved relief sculptures of the life and miracles of the Virgin Mary in Ely Cathedral’s lady chapel were hacked off during the Protestant Reformation.
In between Moses and the mutilation of Ely was something called the iconoclastic controversy in the history of the Eastern or Byzantine Christian church. Between 726 and 843, the then-emperors of Byzantium believed icons were not only a reversion to the pagan idolatry of the ancient Greeks and Romans, but that their existence was the chief obstacle to the conversion to Christianity of Jews and Muslims, to both of whom the image was anathema. Iconoclasm, then, is by no means only an Islamic thing.
However, as Burns argued, there are more important considerations in Syria this year than the preservation of ancient monuments.
“The physical damage to monuments has to be assessed against the scale of the human tragedy which has swept over Syria,” he said.
It is an important caveat: More than 240,000 people have died in Syria’s conflict since March 2011. Among the murdered is Khaled al-Asaad, the 81-year-old former director of the world-renowned archeological site at Palmyra, who was beheaded by IS last month. His body was hung on a column on one of the city’s colonnaded streets.
Important, too, is the likelihood that Palmyra is being destroyed not only for iconoclastic religious reasons, but also to supply loot for the black market. Indeed, one suspected reason for al-Asaad’s murder is that he would not, even under torture, give details of the whereabouts of valuable antiquities.
Another motive behind the destruction is publicity. Footage of murders is not as viewer-friendly as that of blown-up temples. As a result, to write about the fate of Palmyra is a questionable business: it risks encouraging IS to commit more media-friendly outrages; to ignore it, though, is to collude with IS in its erasure of history and memory.
“Without the Temple of Bel, it is much more difficult to understand the mix of cultures that made up this extraordinary civilization on the fringes of Rome’s empire,” Burns said. “The heart has been ripped out of this most illustrious of the great caravan cities of the East.”
Cheikhmous Ali, of the Association for the Protection of Syrian Archaeology, regards IS’ actions as “a way to pressure and torture the local population — to suppress their history and their collective memory.”
Perhaps one reason that Palmyra matters — apart from the distress its destruction causes in anyone with a sense of beauty or concern for human history — is that its very architecture was a creative meeting of West and East and so serves as inspiration to us now, a time when some seek to make such cross-cultural dialogues impossible. As Charles Gates noted in Ancient Cities: The Archaeology of Urban Life in the Ancient Near East and Egypt, Greece and Rome, the Temple of Bel showed a remarkable synthesis of ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman architecture.
More important than what ancient Palmyra and its obliteration means to Western travelers, archeologists and historians is what Palmyra signifies locally. Not so long ago, rebels in Palmyra proudly proclaimed that they were the “grandchildren of Zenobia,” expressing their fidelity with the city’s extraordinary third-century queen. She was an independent, cultured woman who challenged the power of Rome and established a salon in Palmyra of leading intellectuals. She led an army into Egypt and, Bowersock said, set herself up for a while as Cleopatra’s successor, though she was ultimately taken as a captive to Rome. And yet, she remained inspiring in the Arab tradition, where she is known as Bat Zabbai.
“It is moving to read in the first guidebook to Palmyra ever published by the Syrians, in 1966, that the images evoked by the objects at the newly built museum there ‘form a chain of our great Arab national heritage.’ That great chain is being broken link by link,” Bowersock wrote.
Burns feared worse is to come: “Now that IS is moving into the western parts of Syria, where the majority of the country’s most spectacular sites are located, it is opening a new front in a war whose consequences for the people of Syria have long exceeded the level of tragedy to become a catastrophe.”
As for Palmyra, were the losses irretrievable or might the city’s main buildings be reconstructed at some point, I asked Burns.
It would not be impossible, he said. He pointed to Syria’s impressive record in reconstruction and its nurturing of the stonemason’s craft. What is more, detailed drawings by Swiss, French and Syrian experts have been made since the 1930s.
“Reconstruction would be slow and would have to be painstaking, but it is not impossible. The Parthenon comes to mind in this context — and that has taken quite a few centuries.”
Time, wars and thefts reduced much of the 2,500-year-old Parthenon on top of Athens’ Acropolis to very nearly rubble, but, in 1975, the Greek government started a reconstruction project that still continues to this day.
British Archaeology editor Mike Pitts, said that Palmyra could be rebuilt to look at least superficially like the original. However, he added: “I think that would be wrong. IS will one day be history. Palmyra will be its permanent lesson, about the darkness into which oppression, ignorance and corruption can sink. To over-restore the ruins would be to create a fiction, denying the tragedy and devaluing what had genuinely survived.”
Instead, he calls for new research, leading to partial restoration and a better understanding and public appreciation of the site.
“We cannot predict what IS will yet do. However, it is likely that in terms of what we can learn about the people who created Palmyra, there will still be a lot left. Archeology is a science of forensic detection, of making tiny things tell big stories. I would expect archeologists to be able to recover a surprising amount of information. We will need to celebrate Palmyra,” Pitts said.
Pitts even sounded a cautious note of optimism.
“IS has chastised archeologists for digging up the past. Yet it cannot stop that from happening. And no amount of physical destruction can remove the knowledge of mixed cultures, creative thinking and love of beauty that bequeathed a desert ruin. In the face of heritage, at the end of the day IS is powerless,” Pitts said.
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