{"id":4514,"date":"2018-05-10T20:47:31","date_gmt":"2018-05-11T00:47:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/?p=4514"},"modified":"2024-12-21T12:08:06","modified_gmt":"2024-12-21T17:08:06","slug":"ancient-sites-savaged-in-yemen-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/content\/ancient-sites-savaged-in-yemen-iraq\/","title":{"rendered":"Ancient sites savaged in Yemen, Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Firsthand accounts reveal worse damage than expected in war-torn regions<\/h2>\n<div id=\"attachment_4515\" style=\"width: 709px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-4515\" class=\"size-full wp-image-4515\" src=\"http:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/syria-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"699\" height=\"393\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-4515\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Some Yemenis suggest that the 2800-year-old Marib Dam, one of the country\u2019s best known ancient sites (shown<br \/>before it was bombed), was deliberately targeted.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>A new front has opened in the destruction of archaeological heritage in the Middle East. Across northern Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State (IS) group devastated antiquities during its reign of terror starting in 2014, pulverizing classical statues such as those of Palmyra in Syria and bulldozing a 3000-year-old ziggurat at Iraq\u2019s Nimrud. The IS group has now been routed by Iraqi and Syrian forces, curbing the destruction but giving archaeologists a firsthand look at an aftermath that is grimmer than many had expected. Meanwhile, the assault on antiquity has extended to Yemen, 2000 kilometers to the south, another archaeological treasure house riven by conflict.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur immortal history has been wasted by wars,\u201d lamented Mohanad Ahmad al-Sayani, chair of Yemen\u2019s General Organization of Antiquities and Museums in Sana\u2019a.<\/p>\n<p>In Yemen, the cultural losses have gone largely unnoticed by the wider world but are keenly felt by archaeologists. Although the country has been far less studied than Mesopotamia, it played a critical role in the rise of empires and economies in the region starting around 1000 B.C.E., researchers said at a meeting here last week of the International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East.<\/p>\n<p>By 1200 B.C.E., the kingdom of Saba in what is now central Yemen controlled the export of frankincense, derived from a tree that grew only along the country\u2019s southern coast. The prized resin was burned for a millennium and a half in temples from Persia to Rome. The vast wealth of Saba\u2014home to the biblical Queen of Sheba\u2014funded impressive temples, cities, and engineering marvels.<\/p>\n<p>Among them was the Marib Dam, built on Wadi Adhanah in the eighth century B.C.E. to help expand agriculture in this arid region; some claim it is the world\u2019s oldest dam.<\/p>\n<p>Today, Yemen is racked by civil war and Islamic extremists who, in a campaign against heresy, have destroyed ancient mosques in the port city of Aden, and a multidomed shrine in the Hadhramaut region (see map, right).<\/p>\n<p>Bombs dropped by the Saudi-led coalition have wreaked the most damage, Al-Sayani said. The Marib Dam, in an unpopulated area far from the capital, was struck in 2015, leaving a deep gash in the well-preserved northern sluice gate. The regional museum of Dhamar in the southwest, which contained thousands of artifacts from the Himyarite Kingdom, was completely destroyed. The Himyarites conquered Saba in 280 C.E., took over the frankincense monopoly, and became key players in the expanding Indian Ocean trade between the Roman Empire and India until Ethiopian forces overthrew them in 525 C.E.<\/p>\n<p>Al-Sayani showed images from a dozen flattened or severely damaged sites, including medieval castles such Aden\u2019s Sira Fortress, and the centuries-old al-Qassimi neighborhood in Sana\u2019a. More than 60 sites have been destroyed or severely damaged since the conflict began in 2015, Al-Sayani said, chiefly from Saudi bombings. Although some were strategic targets, he charged that the Saudi attacks were a conscious campaign to wreck Yemen\u2019s heritage and demoralize its citizens. \u201cAfter 3 years of assessing the damage, I believe the bombing is being done with a purpose, since many of these sites are not suitable or useful for military use,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<p>The destruction seems deliberate, agrees archaeologist Sarah Japp of Berlin\u2019s German Archaeological Institute. \u201cThe Saudis were given information on important cultural heritage sites, including exact coordinates,\u201d by UNESCO, said Japp, who was based in Sana\u2019a before the war. UNESCO intended to protect the sites, but she fears that the data may instead have been used for targeting. \u201cThere is no reason to say all of these [bombings] are just accidents.\u201d The Saudi embassy in Berlin and officials in Riyadh did not respond to repeated requests for comment.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, 2000 kilometers to the north in Syria and Iraq, the damage wrought by years of IS group control is only now coming into focus. \u201cIt is nothing short of a catastrophe,\u201d said Michel al-Maqdissi, former head of excavations in Syria\u2019s antiquities department in Damascus, who now works at the Louvre in Paris and maintains contacts in Syria. Some of the worst reports come from Mari, a 60-hectare site on the banks of the Euphrates River that 4000 years ago was one of the world\u2019s largest cities. Just north of Sumer and the Akkadian Empire, Mari served as a key trading center for Mesopotamian goods and Anatolian metals and stone, and once boasted the best preserved early palace in the Middle East.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-4516\" src=\"http:\/\/www.andrewlawler.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/syria-map.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"371\" height=\"313\" \/>But no longer. Archaeologist PascalButterlin of Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris, who worked at Mari for years and has gathered information from Syrian sources, displayed an image of the palace from the ground that shows near total destruction of Mari\u2019s central area. The site\u2019s ancient statues were removed to museums long ago, so the reasons behind the destruction remain murky, although the IS group\u2019s desire to profit from antiquities is well-known. A nearby large moundcalled Tell Medkouk was bulldozed completely to unearth objects for looting. From satellite data on the center of Mari, Butterlin estimates that looters dug some 1500 pits, many of them more than 5 meters deep and 6 meters wide. The vehicle tracks \u201cmake it look like they had traffic jams there,\u201d he said. He suspects that thousands of looted cuneiform tablets, small figurines, and bronze objects won\u2019t show up on the art market for years, as sellers wait for international outrage to cool.<\/p>\n<p>The situation is even worse at Dura-Europos, which until recently was a remarkably well-preserved city upstream of Mari. From the first century B.C.E., this city lay on the frontier of the Roman and Persian empires, which took turns controlling it, and once held both one of the world\u2019s oldest Jewish synagogues and oldest Christian churches. \u201cThe scale of the disaster there is profound,\u201d said Chekmous Ali, a Syrian archaeologist now at the University of Strasbourg in France. \u201cThere are innumerable pits\u2014some 9500\u2014and the necropolis is gone.\u201d Across the border in Iraq, the old city of Mosul once boasted a host of Islamic and Christian monuments, many destroyed or damaged during the IS group\u2019s 3 years of control. But the worst devastation came last summer, when more than 30,000 bombs and missiles hit historic buildings during the battle for the city, said Karel Nov\u00e1c\u02c7ek of Palack\u00fd University Olomouc in the Czech Republic. \u201cThe old city was annihilated,\u201d he said at the meeting. He charges that the destruction continues, as Iraqi construction crews clear the wreckage without trying to preserve what\u2019s left or tally the damage.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe heritage management is nonexistent,\u201d he said. \u201cWe need careful removal of the rubble, but that is not happening.\u201d His team is assembling what data they can from old reports and photographs that could provide<br \/>\nsome basis for reconstructing historic sites. He plans to lead an on-the-ground assessment in June, in hopes of providing Iraqis a chance to mend what they can of their battered cultural heritage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Across northern Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State (IS) group devastated antiquities during its reign of terror starting in 2014, pulverizing classical statues such as those of Palmyra in Syria and bulldozing a 3000-year-old ziggurat at Iraq\u2019s Nimrud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-magazine"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Ancient sites savaged in Yemen, Iraq &#8226; Andrew Lawler<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Across northern Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State (IS) group devastated antiquities during its reign of terror starting in 2014, pulverizing classical statues such as those of Palmyra in Syria and bulldozing a 3000-year-old ziggurat at Iraq\u2019s Nimrud.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/science.sciencemag.org\/content\/360\/6385\/140\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ancient sites savaged in Yemen, Iraq &#8226; 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