Looting and Archaeological Destruction in Syria: An Overview
The text below is an expanded version of a lecture that was delivered at a conference organised by the Iran Heritage Foundation in London on 16th December 2015. The event was entitled "Destruction of Monuments and Memory in the Middle East" and the original lecture can be watched on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF9xESKAO88
When surveying the situation in Syria with regard to the damage and destruction of the nation’s cultural heritage since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, it is important to approach the subject with a keen awareness of the problems that were already endemic in Syrian society before the outbreak of hostilities. The Syrian Arab Republic has an organised and effective Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums (hereafter referred to as the DGAM) which was put in place under the French Mandate of 1923-1946 and has continued to administer the museums, principal architectural monuments and archaeological sites of the country ever since. The business of the DGAM is conducted in Arabic and French and all foreign archaeologists and heritage professionals working with the DGAM sign French language contracts clearly explaining the legal limits of permissible intervention. Syria has strong and clearly worded laws prohibiting the export of antiquities[1] and permission must be sought to take all archaeological samples out of the country if the equipment necessary for testing is unavailable in Damascus. In short no Syrian archaeological artefacts can be sold legally unless their provenance clearly documents that they were exported from the country before 1963.
Obviously what is stated in principle is rarely the same in practice, and in reality there has long been an ongoing trade in looted antiquities over the porous borders with Turkey and Lebanon. In 1997 the author of this paper was introduced to mosaic thieves in the Muhafaza (province) of Idlib by acquaintances from Aleppo. An offer of a day trip to the country by a friend of a friend proved to be an attempt to glean specialist knowledge of ecclesiastical architecture in order to identify the best sites for looting. A price list was quoted of how much a square metre of mosaic was worth – ranging from a low value for geometric monochrome designs, via higher prices for polychrome foliate and animal decorations to the most valuable of all; naturally polychrome figural imagery. When asked how these looted mosaics were sold, the answer was a nonchalant boast that for a cut of the profits there were border guards on both the Syrian and Turkish sides who were happy to turn a blind eye.
Unfortunately looting was not confined to enterprising opportunists, but before the outbreak of the civil war was also happening on a larger and more disturbing scale. In 2010, the year before the outbreak of hostilities, the hierarchy of the regional administration of the DGAM in the Muhafazat of Raqqa and Deir Ez Zor was dismissed in its entirety when it was discovered that the local directors of the museums in the two cities had been stripping the storerooms of artefacts and selling them. The theft came to light when objects began to disappear from display cabinets, triggering an audit of the museums and uncovering the scale of the losses. Therefore in early 2010 the direction of the DGAM administrations in these two regions had been awarded to low-ranking members of staff who were deemed to have been too lowly to have taken part in the conspiracy.[2] Around the same time rumours were circulating that the reason the government had taken no action to prevent industrial scale looting at the Phoenician site of Amrit near the Lebanese border was because the perpetrators were themselves part of the ruling elite.[3] This brief anecdotal evidence is recounted here to acknowledge that looting was an endemic problem before the Syrian civil war and it is naïve to maintain otherwise; however the DGAM was trying to combat the problem and to bring prosecutions where it found evidence of wrongdoing. Whilst chronically short of resources, until the war, Syria had one of the most effective antiquities authorities in the wider region.
Naturally the situation has changed dramatically since 2011 and in a paper of this length there is not the time or space to catalogue the magnitude of the destruction inflicted on Syria’s cultural heritage thus far. Instead we shall consider the different modes of destruction and explore the differing rationales behind them in order to try and understand why Syrian cultural heritage has become a major victim in this conflict. Before beginning this consideration it is necessary to acknowledge that the reporting of damage is partial and it is extremely difficult to build up a coherent picture of the state of archaeological sites and historical monuments in Syria at the time of writing.[4] Damage is reported in different ways in the various regions and the veracity of the information varies according to the source and their motives for reporting the damage; for example in Idlib a network of FSA affiliated fighters has relayed information to Syrians in exile and therefore the region seems to be fairly reliably reported as it is in the interests of the FSA to report the destruction wrought by regime (and now Russian) bombs. In government held areas the information disseminated by the DGAM has to be approved by the ruling Ba’ath Party and so may be partial or designed to hide the role of the state in the destruction. When we reach territories held by Da’esh, the so-called Islamic State (IS), then we are reliant on propaganda videos and the only reliable information comes from brave ‘citizen journalists’ who are only in a position to report the events that they have witnessed personally or which have been recounted to them by equally courageous friends. These differences are outlined here to highlight the fact that, despite the claims of many groups to the contrary, any conclusions about the level of destruction sustained by Syrian cultural heritage can only ever be partial until the conflict ends and specialists can return to the field to assess the true levels of damage and destruction.
Categories of Destruction: Quantifying the effects of different processes
The first category of destruction we encounter is, as with all conflicts, that of accidental damage and entwined with this the issue of damage incurred by the targeting of historic sites and monuments that are being used for military purposes. At the time of writing it is impossible to unravel the competing claims and counterclaims as to which side was responsible for which action in every case, but it is clear that the government must accept responsibility in a large number of these situations as their opponents simply do not have the weapons capability to carry out such acts as the bombing of the Ma’arat al Numan Museum – a site which, whilst located in a rebel-held town, was of no strategic importance whatsoever and at the centre of a densely populated civilian area. Into this category we may also place the damage sustained by the iconic Crusader site of Krak des Chevaliers and the irreplaceable loss of the minaret of the Umayyad Mosque of Aleppo. The question of who was ultimately responsible for these acts must wait until the war ends, but the fact that both of the cases referred to above were UNESCO world heritage sites highlights the manner in which various sides in the conflict believe that they can act with impunity with regards to sites of international significance.
As highlighted above in the opening of this paper, looting has long been a problem in Syria, as it has been for much of the wider region. However the outbreak of a civil war has exacerbated the problem to unprecedented levels. One has only to consult the images on Google Earth taken from early 2011 onwards to see how extensive this looting has been on a number of high profile sites of international significance, with the aerial imagery being especially shocking in the cases of Apamea in the west and Dura Europos in the east; even the untutored eye cannot fail to observe the numerous pits dug since the outbreak of the war and to understand that irreparable damage has been done to these sites. However the reasons for this looting are no longer as simple as they were before the war, when such actions were solely criminal acts carried out to enrich the perpetrators. Testimony from exiled Syrians suggests that in regions such as Idlib, which are outside the control of both the government and IS and subject to relentless bombing, looting has become endemic as local people struggle to find a source of income with which to buy food, medicines and other basic necessities. The war has left many people unemployed and the region is too dangerous for NGOs to operate in, leaving no support mechanism for local inhabitants or for large numbers of the millions of internally displaced population. Under these circumstances looting archaeological sites has become the only way that a number of families have been able to earn the money to feed themselves and the items that they have taken are sold on via a network of middlemen and criminal gangs to dealers in Turkey and Lebanon.
In addition there is no reason to suppose that established antiquities thieves and smugglers have suspended their operations and these variant forms of looting, organised criminal gangs and small-scale looting by desperate civilians, are now joined by the ‘official’ plundering of sites authorised by IS which will be discussed in further detail later on in this paper. The scale of the resulting trade in stolen antiquities has been hotly debated with the number and value of looted items varying according to the agency cited, but a brief internet survey of organisations like the Association for the Protection of Syrian Archaeology[5] offers a number of clearly documented cases of artefacts stolen from Syria appearing on the market in neighbouring countries. Whilst it is almost certainly overstating the case to say that IS and other jihadist groups rely on looting as a crucial source of income, nevertheless it is equally disingenuous for those in the world art market to claim that the Middle Eastern artefacts that they are selling are all items from private collections acquired legally. The improbability of these claims has been highlighted in the field of numismatics by Ute Wartenberg Kagan’s article mapping the incidence of rare Middle Eastern coins being offered for sale over two hundred years and clearly demonstrating that there is no way in which the sheer volume of such items as have been offered over the last few years could possibly have all been legally acquired.[6]
Moving on from looting we reach the final and most distressing of the categories of destruction on this list; that of deliberate acts of destruction that in some cases have resulted in the complete erasure of the monuments in question. Whereas military action has resulted in catastrophic cultural losses elsewhere, with the destruction of the minaret of the Umayyad mosque and severe damage to the neighbouring suq both being notable examples of this in Aleppo, the conscious effort of deliberately erasing a monument is something that only happens in IS dominated territory. Da’esh are the only party in this conflict to emulate the kind of actions that have become depressingly familiar since the Taliban introduced such cultural barbarism into the contemporary Islamic fundamentalist narrative with the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. However protestations of IS spokesmen that they are acting in this manner to counteract superstition and polytheism ring increasingly hollow when their actions are examined in more detail.
Differing Patterns of Destruction: Can we discern underlying trends in the actions of IS?
Many commentators have sought to explain the actions of IS within the framework of Islamic Theology over the last few years, and in particular since they began their programme of destroying the cultural heritage of Iraq and Syria, but such an act is actually enabling the legitimisation of a mindless act of violence and, as such, should not be offered as an apology for their actions.[7] The reality of the situation is that the group has a pick-and-mix mentality with regard to Islamic doctrine, choosing whichever elements fit with its current ideas and discarding inconvenient interpretations of the law. This ignorance of established Islamic legal precepts coupled with extremist views that appear to be grounded in Salafism, mean that despite the impression often given by the western media, Muslims have suffered the most under IS rule. This hostility to variant forms of Islam has been physically enacted with the destruction of a number of shrines across IS held territory. Whilst Da’esh hostility towards Sufi shrines such as that of Sheikh Issa Abdelqader al-Rifai in Busaira seems obvious given the fact that Sufism is viewed as a deviant form of Islam by IS, what is less obvious is the fact that a number of Sunni graveyards have also been destroyed. To a large number of Muslims graves are believed to be inviolable and so this desecration, carried out with the justification that remembering the dead is a form of superstition, is alien to the culture and traditions of the overwhelming majority of Syrian and Iraqi Muslims, whichever branch of Islam they follow.
Given that such brutal treatment is meted out to monuments and memorials that are sacred to Sunni Muslims, the destruction of sites belonging to other faiths and of pre-Islamic monuments comes as no surprise in this context. However it is worth pointing out that whilst a number of venerable Christian shrines have been destroyed in Iraq, so far the only ancient Christian site confirmed destroyed in Syria is that of the monastery of Mar Elian esh-Sharqi in Qaryatayn, which was bulldozed by IS in August 2015.[8] Interestingly it seems that the modern church at Dayr Mar Elian was allowed to remain once its bell was removed – which is in line with an early hadith that the Prophet Muhammad disliked the sound of bells – and all books, including all Bibles and prayer books, had been burned. The old monastery appears to have been destroyed because of the veneration of the ancient sarcophagus at the heart of the complex; to the Christians this housed Mar Elian esh-Sharqi or esh-Sheikh[9] and to the local Muslim population it was Sheikh Ahmed Khouri[10] buried there. This dual identity was reflected in a fifteenth century inscription above the monastery entrance where the local emir stated that all pilgrims to the site were under his protection and in the fact that, up until its destruction, the local Christians allowed their Muslim neighbours to cover the tomb with a green satin cover as is common practice at the tombs of all Syrian Muslim shrines. Apparently this veneration of a saint was seen as shirk by IS and therefore it was destroyed for the same reasons that the local cemeteries, Muslim and Christian, were destroyed.[11]
The explanation why there has been less destruction of ancient Christian sites thus far in Syria is because the region overrun by IS is overwhelmingly Muslim in population. Some of the Christian villages of the northeast have fallen, but most Christian villages and towns around Hassakeh and Qamishli remain in government hands or are now in the Kurdish zone of influence. This means that most of the damage has been inflicted on twentieth century churches which, whilst a major psychological blow to the local population, in the majority of cases has not meant that outstanding architectural monuments have been lost.
A notable exception to this is the Armenian Genocide Memorial Church in Deir ez Zor that was consecrated in 1991. The monument was built because Deir ez Zor was the site of Ottoman concentration camps where thousands of Armenians were murdered in 1915-1916. The extensive damage that occurred to the memorial in 2014 was even more painful as the loss of the site to Islamic extremists meant that Armenians were unable to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of the Genocide on April 24th 2015.
An IS Case Study: Palmyra
Moving on from religious sites we must now consider the most infamous act of destruction thus far carried out by IS in Syria; that of the demolition of a number of the most important monuments in the Roman city of Palmyra. It goes without saying that as the only one of Syria’s six UNESCO world heritage sites to fall to jihadists the propaganda impact of the fall of Palmyra was immense and there has been a flurry of recriminations both inside and outside the country over the failure to protect the city from these terrorists.
The geographical isolation of Palmyra at the heart of the Syrian Desert meant that the remains of the city were exceptionally well preserved due to climatic factors and to the relative inaccessibility of the site until the middle of the twentieth century. The fact that the Eqfa spring rises at this point is the raison d’être for a settlement that has been continuously inhabited since the Neolithic period. The original small encampment near the springs had expanded into a substantial town by the Hellenistic era and the inhabitants were wealthy enough to import dates from Egypt at this time – despite living in a large date palm grove themselves.[12] The city reached the zenith of its wealth and power in the second and third centuries AD and it is monuments from this period that make up the majority of the extant material at the site. It is also worth noting at this point that ‘Palmyra’ refers to the Roman era city, the modern town beside the ruins is known as ‘Tadmor’ which appears to be the older Semitic place name.[13] Therefore the importance of the site lies in the exceptional state of preservation of the Roman era monuments and in the fact that, as a client of the Roman Empire, the small kingdom centred on Palmyra had its own distinctive artistic, architectural and religious culture that mixed indigenous Semitic beliefs and material culture with elements of Persian and Roman art and religion as the Palmyrenes lived at the meeting point of these two world empires.
When IS took Tadmor and overran the neighbouring ruins of Palmyra at the end of May 2015,[14] the international community naturally began to fear for the safety of the monuments in the ancient city and their fears were realised towards the end of August 2015 when news reached the rest of the world of the destruction of the Temple of Baalshamin. It is very difficult to be precise as to when exactly this event had occurred as, although IS photographs showing the temple being blown up by explosives first appeared around 24th August, we do not know when the pictures were taken. Local people who have managed to make limited contact with the outside world have reported being prevented from accessing the archaeological site and all they have been able to do is to report hearing loud explosions which have later been linked to destruction events. Despite this it seems safe to accept that the explosion occurred in late August and what is clear from satellite imagery is that the temple was still standing in late June but that it had been obliterated by the time the next satellite picture was taken on August 27th.[15]
Once the destruction of the Temple of Baalshamin was announced to the wider world events gathered pace with news of the destruction of the cella of the Temple of Bel being confirmed by the UN on September 1st.[16] This was then followed by reports of the destruction of a number of Palmyra’s famed tomb towers over the course of the first week of September.[17] So what had happened in the three months since the fall of Palmyra to cause this orgy of destruction? Why did they wait and what was the significance of this hiatus?
The answers to these questions are not clear or obvious as we are trying to understand the reasoning of a group people at best seriously deluded and brainwashed and at worse criminally insane. However what follows are a series of personal suppositions as to what may have happened in the intervening three months.
In the September 18-24 2015 edition of The New Statesman there was an article by the BBC’s veteran Middle East correspondent Jeremy Bowen about five men who had fled Palmyra minutes before IS took Tadmor.[18] The men in question included the Director of Palmyra Museum and his three brothers-in-law, the sons of the celebrated archaeologist, Khaled al-Asad. The group drove a convoy of heavily laden trucks across the desert to Damascus to deliver the majority of the items displayed in the Palmyra Museum into the custody of the National Museum of Damascus. The fate of the octogenarian al-Asad became clear when IS announced that he had been publically beheaded and his body displayed in the street on 18th August 2015.[19] Later reports suggested that he had been held and tortured for a month prior to his murder but had steadfastly refused to reveal where hidden antiquities were located.[20]
Taken together these two events give us a clear indication of why IS did not begin to destroy monuments until late August, a week after their brutal murder of Khaled al-Asad. The simple answer seems to be that they were systematically stripping the site of any decoration that could be sold on the illegal antiquities market and that they held off destroying monuments until were sure that they had managed to loot the city in its entirety. When they moved on to phase two, the wholesale destruction of key monuments, more subtle and complex factors than a terrorist act come into play; here destruction seems to be linked to common-or-garden criminality.
The international community had already become accustomed to orchestrated orgies of violence such as those showing the destruction of Nimrud, Hatra and Mosul Museum in Iraq. Ömür Harmanşah has perceptively labelled them performative acts designed to shock and gain attention, rather than being the religiously inspired acts of devotion that they are claimed to be by the propagandists.[21] In Syria a video of the ritualised destruction of Dayr Mar Elian esh-Sharqi in Qaryatayn, mentioned earlier in this paper, followed the same pattern as the Iraqi material, but when the destruction of the Temple of Baalshamin was announced the pattern began to change. Instead of a video with the usual religious music in the background and men preaching as the destruction of the building was enacted, in this case a series of still photographs showed explosives being laid in the cella of the temple before the building was photographed enveloped in dust and crumpling to the ground. Whilst these images attested to the destruction of the temple several days before the fact could be confirmed by satellite imagery, the way in which this information was disseminated marked a new departure; something had changed.
When several days later local people reported hearing a loud explosion that they believed signalled the destruction of the Temple of Bel, the most important monument in Palmyra, followed several days later by stories that a series of tomb towers had been destroyed, IS remained silent and the subsequent confirmation that these reports were correct and the temple and tombs had definitely been destroyed came only through the analysis of satellite imagery. So why this sudden silence? Why were we not treated to the same spectacle that had become depressingly familiar from Iraq of a bearded ranting demagogue whilst men in balaclavas wield axes in the background? And, perhaps most intriguingly, why show the Temple of Baalshamin but not the others?
The answer to this question can be easily answered by anyone who has ever spent time in Palmyra; whilst the cella of the Temple of Baalshamin was small and perfectly preserved with only its ceiling missing, it was very plainly decorated. As with all other ancient temples, the cult niche had long since lost its devotional image and, although the door and window frames were beautifully sculpted, the only decoration was some fluted columns and Corinthian capitals; much of the beauty of the building was due to its austere and restrained decorative scheme. But what may be admirable to architectural historians is useless to looters as the Temple of Baalshamin had no elements that would be of particular interest to an unscrupulous collector of antiquities, failing as it did to possess even a simple vine-scroll motif; this was the reason why the temple was chosen as the subject of an IS news release and we were given the images detailing the laying of explosives and subsequent explosion enveloping the building. The release was deliberately intended to deceive as when news broke of the explosions at the Temple of Bel and the tomb towers the world automatically assumed the same process had been followed and that these monuments had been destroyed in a pristine state. However a closer consideration of the evidence would suggest a very different story.
It cannot be overlooked that no images were forthcoming of the later monuments before their destruction as well as after they were destroyed. What the Temple of Bel and the group of tomb towers, including the well-known Tower of Elah-Bel, had in common was their copious decoration. In the case of the temple, this mainly took the form of a series of carved limestone reliefs displayed to either side of the entrance to the cella and with the tomb towers this included stone statues of the deceased and polychromed stucco ceilings. In both cases there was a significant volume of figurative imagery, as well as foliate and geometric decoration and, despite a posturing against figural art the leaders of IS are only too aware of the fact that figurative art commands the highest prices on the black market. Piecing together the elements of the jigsaw; the delay between the fall of Palmyra and the beginning of the destruction, the escape of Khaled al-Asad’s son-in-law and sons with most of the museum exhibits and al-Asad’s subsequent refusal to divulge where he had hidden artefacts resulting in his murder, the sequence of destruction beginning with the Temple of Baalshamin proving to be much more secretive than past destruction events; we begin to see that there is something else going on here.
People have raised the question as to why IS would go to so much effort to present these monuments as completely destroyed, especially when there is clear evidence that they have annihilated objects and buildings in Iraq. Here there are a number of different factors to be considered; first of all IS have proved to be several steps ahead of the Western Powers in manipulating social media and public opinion throughout this conflict. They, more than anyone else, are all too aware of the fickleness of public reaction and will have realised that the destruction videos were losing their power to shock as people became inured to them and saw them as just another film in a series repeating the same actions. At the same time, it will also have become apparent that by destroying archaeological artefacts they were also losing out on potential income. Analysts have concentrated on trying to quantify how much money IS has raised from its trade in illicit antiquities[22] and yet they would be better advised to consider the matter from the point of view of an exchange economy. One eye witness held in an IS prison in Raqqa has referred the jailors as being of Saudi Arabian origin[23] and it is widely known that many jihadist groups are armed by donations from countries in the Arabian Peninsula. It therefore seems entirely feasible, particularly at a time when financial institutions are being urged to clamp down on money laundering, that artefacts are being used as currency to pay for shipments of arms and ammunition (for example). If we add into the equation that the Gulf states and the inhabitants of some former Soviet states are both known to harbour some extremely wealthy individuals with sympathy for a radical Islamist cause then there is clear potential for an exchange of priceless archaeological artefacts in return for donations of military materiel to IS.
If this is the case then the manner of the destruction of the Palmyrene monuments becomes more clearly understandable; if we think back to the lost art of the Second World War, no effort is put into tracing an item listed as destroyed (in a fire or bombing for example) but people are to this day searching for those items, such as the fabled Amber Room from Tsarskoye Selo, listed as ‘missing’ rather than destroyed. The actions of IS at Palmyra have led the world to assume that all sculpture or decorative plasterwork left in situ before the fall of the town was blown to smithereens when the temple and the tombs were destroyed, but the sequence of events strongly suggests otherwise; the delay in the destruction and the lack of imagery publicising these events presents us with evidence that, to this writer at least, suggests that an organised programme of looting was followed. Due to the well-known nature of the artefacts in question, they are worthless on the legitimate art market, but there is still a substantial black market where the unscrupulous and amoral super-rich take a gloating pleasure in owning a treasure believed lost by the rest of the world – it is naïve to assume that extremely well-known artefacts are completely unsaleable.
These suppositions are also supported by the fact that it is known that looting and destruction of archaeological sites in search of saleable antiquities is a ‘legally licensed’ activity in IS territory with ‘permits’ being issued by the bureaucracy in Raqqa and elsewhere giving permission to the bearer to plunder named sites and the level of tax payable to the IS hierarchy stipulated on the agreements.[24] Therefore it can now be demonstrated that in IS territory there is an organised framework in place to facilitate looting within their area of influence. This contrasts with the regions under government or Free Syrian Army affiliated control where it seems to occur on an opportunist basis or be linked to more conventional criminal consortia. However in both cases a network of middlemen primarily in Turkey, but also in Lebanon and Jordan, then facilitate the onward sale of artefacts. At this stage it becomes impossible to know who originally looted the items and so any buyer potentially funds IS as well as receiving stolen goods.
What can the International Community do?
The answer to this question is that there is depressingly little that can be done to safeguard Syrian Cultural Heritage until the fighting ceases and it becomes safe for archaeologists and other museum professionals to get back on the ground and assess the level of the damage to Syria’s ancient monuments. However, there are steps that can be taken to try and alleviate the situation and to offer practical support to Syrian archaeologists and heritage experts.
The first of these is for individuals and institutions to refuse to buy, authenticate or otherwise engage with sellers offering unprovenanced objects of Middle Eastern origin. It is disingenuous for anyone to claim they had no idea that an item was looted if it is for sale on a site like eBay; legal antiquities will be sold by specialist dealers and cost considerably more than a dubious, unprovenanced object on the Internet. In fact any object that is selling for under it’s usual value is likely to be looted or a forgery; artefacts that are legally imported and have a clear provenance are always reassuringly expensive! Equally reputable sellers are aware of all the established private collections specialising in Middle Eastern objects and therefore they cannot claim that an item offered for sale is ‘from a private collection’ without offering the relevant background. The onus is on them to provide clear information on the origins of any item that they sell; failure to do so must be taken as negligent at best, otherwise it is simply criminal behavior as they are facilitating the onward sale of stolen goods.
The next issue is that there needs to be a move away from the proliferation of groups engaged in simply mapping and listing reports of destruction, many of them all relying on the same sources of satellite imagery. Now is the time to move on to a new phase of liaising with Syrian professionals and asking them what they need in order to work on strategies for rehabilitation and preventative protection measures in the future. This kind of work should ideally be planned with co-ordination through regional or national hubs in order to avoid duplication of research and the unnecessary waste of scarce financial support.[25]
Finally heritage professionals, archaeologists and other interested parties need to keep pressure on the relevant authorities to live up to promises made to assist countries such as Syria in rebuilding their Cultural Heritage post-conflict and aiding with requests to trace looted objects and similar issues in the mean time. Here in the UK that means holding the All Party Parliamentary Group for the Protection of Cultural Heritage to account, and making sure that the funds promised to help rebuild Syrian and Iraqi museums and monuments do not end up squandered in payment to consultants in government quangos, but actually achieve tangible results on the ground.
[1] Legislative decree #222, 26th October 1963, last amended 1999.
[2] This information was gained in conversation with Syrian acquaintances when the author began the salvage excavation at Zalabiyeh in the Muhafaza of Deir Ez Zor. Due to the current situation, Syrian sources will remain anonymous in this paper for safety reasons unless the information is non-sensitive and gathered before the current conflict.
[3] As above.
[4] January 2016.
[5] http://apsa2011.com/apsanew/category/acts-of-plundering/stolen-objects/ Accessed 02.01.16.
[6] Ute Wartenberg Kagan, ‘Collecting Coins and the Conflict in Syria,’ http://numismatics.org/wikiuploads/EventsExhibitions/WartenbergSyria-CoinCollecting.pdf Accessed 02.01.16.
[7] For more on the reasons why we should not become apologists for these actions see Emma Loosley, ‘Archaeological Destruction,’ http://www.palgrave-journals.com/articles/palcomms201536 Accessed 02.01.16.
[8] The author of this article was the founder and director of the Dayr Mar Elian Archaeological Project (DMEAP) from 2001 onwards and the archive of the site excavations can be found at http://architectureandasceticism.exeter.ac.uk/items/browse?collection=1&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CTitle There is a link on this site to the material in its original format on the Archaeology Data Service site and on the ‘project team’ page there is a link to the relevant academia.edu page where all the site reports can be found without the accompanying images. This site is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 312602.
[9] St. Julian of the East or St. Julian the Old Man.
[10] Sheikh Ahmed the Priest.
[11] Again the source of this information must remain anonymous.
[12] Salah Shaker, member of the Syrian-German Mission to Palmyra, pers. comm.
[13] Tadmorto in Syriac means miracle and Fr. Antoun Deliapo, who taught the author Syriac claimed the ancient name referred to the oasis, which was believed to be miraculous in ancient times. Whether true or not, this explanation seemed to be widely accepted in Syria.
[14] It is difficult to verify the exact sequence of events but the occupation of the ruins by IS was widely reported in news sources on 21st May 2015, e.g.:http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/20/syrian-city-of-palmyra-falls-under-control-of-isis Accessed 08.01.2016.
[15] See for example the images and commentary in http://www.la-croix.com/Actualite/Monde/L-Etat-islamique-aurait-detruit-une-partie-de-Bel-le-plus-important-temple-de-Palmyre-2015-08-31-1350488 where a piece on the later destruction of the Temple of Bel also considers the evidence relating to the destruction of the Temple of Baalshamin a few days beforehand. Accessed 08.01.2016.
[16] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-34111092 Accessed 08.01.2016.
[17] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-blows-up-three-ancient-tower-tombs-as-destruction-in-palmyra-continues-10486314.html Accessed 08.01.2016.
[18] Jeremy Bowen, ‘Among the Ruins,’ The New Statesman, September 18-25, 2015, pp. 50-53.
[19] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/khaled-al-asaad-authority-on-the-antiquities-of-the-syrian-city-of-palmyra-who-was-devoted-to-10464467.html Accessed 10.01.16.
[20] See for example note 19 above.
[21] Ömür Harmanşah, ‘ISIS, Heritage, and the Spectacles of Destruction in the Global Media,’ Near Eastern Archaeology, Vol. 78, No. 3, Special Issue: The Cultural Heritage Crisis in the Middle East (September 2015), pp. 170-177, pp.175-176.
[22] See for example http://uk.businessinsider.com/isis-will-make-money-from-antiquities-in-palmyra-syria-2015-5?r=US&IR=T Accessed 10.01.16.
[23] As in note 2 above.
[24] http://ukblueshield.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/New-Documents-Prove-ISIS-Heavily-Involved-in-Antiquities-Trafficking-_-Gates-of-Nineveh_-An-Experiment-in-Blogging-Assyriology.pdf Accessed 10.01.16.
[25] In the UK the government has suggested that such research initiatives are evaluated by Peter Stone, UNESCO Chair in Cultural Property Protection and Peace at the University of Newcastle, so that duplication is avoided wherever possible.