Palmyra

The destruction of Palmyra's monuments in 2015 was extensively photographed, because it was designed to be. The killing of the man who had looked after them was not.

Khaled al-Asaad was born in Palmyra in 1932 and ran its antiquities for some forty years, from 1963 until 2003, remaining active afterwards. He excavated at the site, catalogued and translated Palmyrene Aramaic inscriptions, worked with Syrian, Polish and other foreign missions across four decades, and named one of his daughters Zenobia after the city's third-century queen. He had spent essentially his whole life on a single site.

When Islamic State approached in May 2015, museum staff evacuated a large part of the collection to Damascus. Al-Asaad stayed. He was detained, held for weeks, and interrogated about where the remaining antiquities had been hidden, the group's interest being partly ideological and substantially financial, since trafficked antiquities were a revenue stream. He did not tell them. He was murdered in August 2015, in public, in his eighties, and his body was displayed with a placard listing accusations that included representing Syria at conferences with infidels and being the director of idols.

The monuments followed in sequence: the temple of Baalshamin on 23 August, the cella of the temple of Bel on 30 August, three tower tombs including the tower of Elahbel on 4 September, the monumental arch on 5 October, and the tetrapylon and part of the theatre in January 2017.

In 2016 a replica of the monumental arch was erected in Trafalgar Square, produced by digital photogrammetry and machine-carved in Italian marble, and afterwards toured to other cities. It was widely reported as an act of defiance. It also drew sustained objection: that a two-thirds-scale marble arch in London responded to a European sense of loss rather than a Syrian one; that resources went to a replica abroad while Syrian heritage professionals lacked basic equipment; and that reconstructing the monument while the man who had died protecting it went comparatively unmarked inverted the priorities. Some Syrian archaeologists welcomed it. The disagreement was not resolved and is worth preserving rather than smoothing over.

Assessment since has been better than early reporting suggested: much of the site stands, with severe damage concentrated in a minority of it, and restoration has proceeded intermittently as conditions allowed. The tower tombs and the temple cellae are not recoverable.

Palmyra's most famous ruler was a queen who briefly carved an empire out of Rome's own territory, centuries before the temple built to honour the city's gods was destroyed by a very different kind of conqueror.

A queen who broke from Rome

In the third century CE, Zenobia, ruling Palmyra as regent for her young son, led a rebellion against Roman authority, rapidly expanding Palmyrene control over Egypt and large parts of Roman Syria and Anatolia before the emperor Aurelian defeated her forces and captured the city in 272 CE, ending Palmyra's brief period as the centre of an independent breakaway power.

What ISIS destroyed

During its occupation of Palmyra beginning in 2015, Islamic State fighters destroyed the Temple of Bel, one of the best-preserved major religious structures from the ancient world, along with the Arch of Triumph and other monuments, filming and publicising the destruction as a deliberate ideological statement rather than incidental war damage.

As this entry's companion article covers

The archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad, who was killed after refusing to disclose the locations of hidden antiquities to the occupying forces, is addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.