When the news broke last week that the Islamic State (IS) group, now occupying most of northern and western Iraq and much of eastern Syria, had moved its forces into the ancient site of Palmyra, the reaction among scholars and archaeologists worldwide was one of immediate consternation. Since it took over northern Iraq last year, the group has been responsible for attacks on important ancient sites in the areas under its control, even making the destruction of antiquities and monuments part of its worldwide propaganda effort by releasing videos on the Internet. In February, the group released a video showing activists destroying objects in the Mosul Museum in northern Iraq, including irreplaceable Assyrian works. In April, a further video was released showing the destruction of the northwest palace of ancient Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, also in northern Iraq. In both cases, the voiceovers of the videos said the group was destroying the ancient remains in order to combat what it said was “idolatry”. The group has also been destroying the Islamic heritage of northern Iraq and eastern Syria. In January it was reported that IS had destroyed mosques, mausoleums and Sufi shrines in Mosul, along with the shrines of the prophets Seth, Jonah and Daniel. It has also reportedly destroyed a number of Christian churches in or around Mosul and blown up parts of the mediaeval Tal Afar Citadel. Fears are now growing that the group's capture of the central Syrian town of Tadmor from forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad and the surrounding district, which includes the site of Palmyra, could lead to destruction of the archaeological site. Speaking to the French newspaper Le Monde last weekend, Syrian archaeologist Michel Al-Maqdissi, formerly director of excavations at the Syrian Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM) and the last person to carry out excavations at Palmyra, described the capture of the site by IS as “a cultural and humanitarian catastrophe.” There is now a risk that the group will carry out the same campaign of destruction at the site as it has done elsewhere, he said, permanently damaging the ruins or causing their loss to humanity as a whole. “Very little excavation work has been carried out at the site, despite the work done in the past by French, Danish, Swiss, Polish and Syrian teams. I would say that perhaps only 20 per cent of the site has been excavated, though it is difficult to be sure because the extent of the necropolises around it is not known,” Al-Maqdissi said. Writing in Le Monde after news of the IS occupation of Palmyra broke last week, French historian Maurice Sartre, an authority on the ancient Near East, said, “Islamic State in Palmyra is like Islamic State in the Louvre. To destroy Palmyra would be like destroying the Mont St Michel [in France] or the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. “The news of the capture of the site by Islamic State raises fears that this priceless jewel of world culture, of which Syria has been the guardian, will disappear in the face of the destructive fury of Daech [Islamic State].” Any attack on Palmyra, he said, would be an inestimable loss for the world as a whole, particularly since the visible parts of the site only constituted a small part of its importance. “In the Roman town alone there are dozens of hectares that have not been excavated, and recent work by Polish archaeologists has shown us what we can expect from the excavation of areas north of the grand colonnade … Excavation has also only just started on the ruins of the Christian town … and Islamic Palmyra remains to be studied, including its role as a military post until the 13th century and the construction of the Fakhr Al-Din fortress in the 17th,” Sartre said. Palmyra has been registered as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, the UN's cultural arm, since 1980, and it is one of six such sites in Syria. According to UNESCO's description of the site, the ruins of Palmyra, “rising out of the Syrian desert in an oasis northeast of Damascus, are testament to the unique aesthetic achievement of a wealthy caravan oasis under the rule of Rome from the 1st to the 3rd century CE.” The city flourished particularly during the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, when it lay on an important trade route connecting the Roman and Mediterranean world to Asia. It was at this time that many of the city's outstanding monuments, the remains of which can be seen today, including the theatre, colonnade, and monumental arches, were built. Owing to its position as a frontier city on the borders between the Roman and Persian Empires, Palmyra's population was always mixed and came from various religious and ethnic backgrounds. According to Sartre, it was a “multicultural city, open to the world,” and this is reflected in its characteristic orientalised Roman architecture. While Greek and Latin were the official languages, Aramaic was more widely spoken, and the city's inhabitants followed a variety of different religions. “Like most cities in the Roman Empire, there was a local pantheon of gods, in Palmyra's case dominated by the god Bel and his acolytes,” Sartre says, these being worshipped in the Temple of Bel, the remains of which can still be seen at the site today. “But gods from Mesopotamia can also be found at Palmyra (Nabu), as well as from sedentary Syria (Baalshamin and Atargatis), Phoenicia (Astarte and Shadrapha) and the desert Arab tribes (the female warrior god Allat). Greece and Rome are not absent either, seen in reliefs of Hercules found at the site and of the goddess Athena identified with Allat.” Palmyra achieved a wider fame in the late 3rd century CE, when Zenobia, the city's queen under Roman suzerainty, rebelled against Roman rule and temporarily conquered the Roman province of Egypt, killing the Roman prefect. She ruled Egypt and much of the Near East until 271 CE, when she was defeated by the Roman Emperor Aurelian and taken to Rome in triumph. Zenobia has since been seen as an intriguing example of the kind of military-minded ancient female ruler perhaps epitomised by Cleopatra. However, while Cleopatra famously committed suicide following her defeat at the hands of Augustus Caesar in 31 BCE, refusing to surrender Egypt to Roman rule, following her defeat by Aurelian's armies in 271, Zenobia was given a villa in Rome and a retirement pension. Palmyra had fallen into decay by the time it was taken by the Arabs in 634 CE, and it was renamed Tadmor in Arabic. A fortress was built at the site in 1230, and this was extended and restored in 1630 by the local Ottoman-era ruler Fakhr Al-Din. Its remains can be seen above the classical site today. Since the outbreak of the conflict in Syria in 2011, Palmyra has been spared much of the kind of destruction seen in other parts of the country, possibly because of its remote location. It was reported in January 2015 that minor damage had taken place at the site as a result of armed clashes and that funerary busts and sculptures had been looted from surrounding tombs. According to a DGAM report in February this year, artefacts have been removed for safekeeping from the site museum and protective measures taken against casual theft and vandalism. However, satellite images taken in December 2014 show military roads crossing the site and the movement of military and other equipment, potentially damaging the remains and making the site as a whole a military target.
