An oasis in the Syrian desert, northeast of Damascus, Palmyra contains the monumental ruins of a great city that was one of the most important cultural centers of the ancient world. From the 1st to the 2nd century, the art and architecture of Palmyra, standing at the crossroads of several civilizations, married Greco-Roman techniques with local traditions and Persian influences. Palmyra was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1980 and has been on the list of World Heritage in Danger since 2013.
The remains of the Temple of Bel today, Fri Apr 1, 2016. REUTERS/Omar Sanadiki
A 2010 view shows the intact Temple of Bel in the historic Syrian city of Palmyra. The temple, an ancient fusion of Near Eastern and Greco-Roman architecture named for the Mesopotamian god Bel, was dedicated in 32 AD. REUTERS/Sandra Auger
Palmyra: Before and after ISIS
UNESCO received several reports and satellite imagery released today by UNITAR-UNOSAT confirming the destruction of Palmyra’s tetrapylon and parts of the theatre’s proscenium.
“This destruction is a new war crime and an immense loss for the Syrian people and for humanity,” said UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova. “This new blow against cultural heritage, just a few hours after UNESCO received reports about mass executions in the theatre, shows that cultural cleansing led by violent extremists is seeking to destroy both human lives and historical monuments in order to deprive the Syrian people of its past and its future. This is why the protection of heritage is inseparable from the protection of human lives, and we must all unite to put this at the center of all efforts to build peace,” Ms. Bokova added.
Editor's Note: "Sturt W. Manning is chair of the Department of Classics at Cornell University. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author."
(CNN) In "The Art of War," Sun Tzu notes that;
"the whole secret lies in confusing the enemy, so that he cannot fathom our real intent."ISIS is developing this logic in an obscene and seductive way, using the world's media to cultivate its barbaric image and recruit new members.
The austerely beautiful ruins of the Temple of Baalshamin at Palmyra in central Syria are among the latest victims of staged cultural desecration, and bodies like UNESCO have reacted as ISIS hoped, by denouncing this as a war crime.ISIS gets publicity, attention, vilification. The world's media react and we supply ISIS their recruiting fuel and offer free advertising of more illicit antiquities soon to be on sale on the black market.
The destruction and looting of heritage across Syria and Iraq is on an industrial scale. The Syrian Heritage Initiative of the American Schools of Oriental Research, among others, tries to document this pillage and loss.
Truth is scarce in all directions. The destruction of the Baalshamin was announced Monday; ISIS released photos Tuesday purporting to show explosives rigged up, an explosion, and rubble. But other reports indicate the destruction occurred a month ago. The images released shock but fail fully to document.It is almost as if the horrific and pathetic beheading last week of Khaled al-As'ad -- the octogenarian antiquities expert in Palmyra who apparently refused to reveal to ISIS information about Palmyra's treasures -- failed to achieve sufficient attention (or income) and lacked the aesthetic impact value of demolishing a colonnaded temple.
There is competition and gaming even in this tragedy.Announcements of these outrages, and subsequent statements of verification, come from the rump Syrian government of dictator Bashar al-Assad and form part of its efforts to appear acceptable -- as the opponents of ISIS and iconoclasm -- and part of the fight against terror.
"My enemy's enemy is my friend" reaches literal and dangerous absurdity when the West finds itself almost de facto allies in this with Hezbollah and other unlikely bedfellows which comprise a Shia grouping against the Sunni extremists of ISIS.
ISIS would like to erase the rich history of Palmyra, so let's pause here to briefly explore it.
The city, dramatically silhouetted against a desert backdrop, first captured Western attention through the much-read "The Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires" by Constantin Francois de Volney and inspired even poetry, like Thomas Love Peacock's "Palmyra" (1806). A strategic oasis and nexus of trade, the city burst to wider prominence when a change in trade routes brought great prosperity and civic building as part of the Roman world in the 1st and 2nd centuries. The Roman Emperor Hadrian even visited around 129, attested by a bilingual inscription from the now-destroyed temple of Baalshamin.
Noted as a tolerant home to different faiths and ethnic groups where Greco-Roman and local cultures merged, Palmyra briefly stood center stage in history when it seized on a period of Roman weakness in the 260s to rebel under Queen Zenobia, controlling almost a third of the Roman empire in 271.
Warrior queens are those shocking characters of our western male-centric history that compel -- and necessarily end badly. Graphic violence is not new to the story either: The Roman governor of Egypt, Probus, was beheaded by Zenobia's forces. Roman Emperor Aurelian moved east and conquered Palmyra; the city rebelled again, and this time, in 273, Aurelian sacked Palmyra and its leading historical role was snuffed out.
The city was then a minor player in the Byzantine and Arab worlds -- indeed reuse of some monuments, for example the Baalshamin as a church, is why they were preserved so impressively until now. Timur (Tamerlane) sacked the city again in about 1400. The Palmyra oasis is a strategic location, unfortunately almost awaiting attention and thus disaster.
Usually ISIS justifies destruction by claiming representative art to be idolatrous and pre-Islamic religious objects or structures sacrilegious. It seeks to destroy diversity and enforce narrow uniformity. Evidence of a tolerant, diverse past is anathema. Prosaically, looted antiquities provide key funds to ISIS.Such cultural cleansing deserves condemnation, but attention is what ISIS craves.
What it fears is memory and knowledge, which it cannot destroy.
The West's response should be to remember -- and to provide educational resources to keep the rich and plural histories of Syria and Iraq alive and available, especially to those presently trapped under ISIS' enforced umbrella of ignorance.
The tragic irony for Palmyra is that Arab writers saw Zenobia's revolt as a proto-Arab precursor of the Muslim conquests starting in the 7th century. ISIS may not even know its own history -- but as Confucius said, we should;
"study the past if you would define the future."
Desecrated but still majestic: inside Palmyra after second Isis occupation
Ruth Maclean in Palmyra
Thu 9 Mar 2017 10.50 GMT
Laughter broke the silence at what was left of the Temple of Bel in the ancient city of Palmyra. A group of Russian soldiers had just screeched up in a car splattered with the mud of the Syrian desert. In helmets and full camouflage, they clambered out, Kalashnikovs slung from their shoulders and selfie sticks in hand.
Days before, these troops and other forces loyal to the Syrian government had recaptured the Roman city, a world heritage site and an important symbol of Syrian diversity, from Islamic State for the second time in a year.
Graffiti at the entrance read: “No entry without Isis permission – not even brothers.” The Russians crunched up the piles of rubble and posed for triumphant pictures under the arch – all that was left of the central temple.
The Palmyra ruins pale in comparison with the more than 400,000 people killed and millions displaced over the course of Syria’s six-year crisis. But the systematic attempt to destroy the ancient site has been described by the UN as a war crime that, according to Abdulkarim, was intended to terrorise the Syrian people.
“Destroying our heritage is the same as killing a child,” he said. Much of the ancient city could be rebuilt, Abdulkarim added, but apart from some urgent stabilisation, it would have to wait until peace returned to the country.
This week, troops lounged on the steps of Palmyra’s museum, guarding the few statues that were left after the effort to move them out, all of them pushed over or with their faces smashed in.
“He’s sleeping,” joked one soldier, pointing to a statue that would have been lying face down if it still had a face.
The Buddhas of Bamiyan
The main bodies were hewn directly from the sandstone cliffs, but details were modeled in mud mixed with straw, coated with stucco. This coating, practically all of which wore away long ago, was painted to enhance the expressions of the faces, hands, and folds of the robes; the larger one was painted carmine red and the smaller one was painted multiple colours.
The lower parts of the statues' arms were constructed from the same mud-straw mix while supported on wooden armatures. It is believed that the upper parts of their faces were made from great wooden masks or casts. Rows of holes that can be seen in photographs were spaces that held wooden pegs that stabilized the outer stucco.
They were dynamited and destroyed in March 2001 by the Taliban, on orders from leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, after the Taliban government declared that they were idols.
An envoy visiting the United States in the following weeks said that they were destroyed to protest international aid exclusively reserved for statue maintenance while Afghanistan was experiencing famine, while the Afghan Foreign Minister claimed that the destruction was merely about carrying out Islamic religious iconoclasm. International opinion strongly condemned the destruction of the Buddhas, which in the following years was primarily viewed as an example of the extreme religious intolerance of the Taliban. Japan and Switzerland, among others, have pledged support for the rebuilding of the statues.
Rising again from dust and rubble?
As a holgraphic projection!
A Chinese couple, Janson Yu and Liyan Hu worked to develop a projector at the cost of $120,000, which they first tested in China before bringing the system to the UNESCO World Heritage Site this past weekend. With the permission of UNESCO and the Afghan Government, they were able to project a 3D image into the slots in the cliffside that housed one of the statues. For the evening, the statues stood once again in a symbolic work of art.
While the statues are physically gone, they cannot be easily erased from our collective memory.
The Case for Rebuilding the Bamiyan Buddhas to Their Original Glory
Posted on March 4, 2017 by buddhistartnews
The Alliance for the Restoration of Cultural Heritage (ARCH)* supports full restoration of the Bamiyan Buddhas and has carried out a rigorous study of eight options for rebuilding them. This is a proposal that makes many conservators at UNESCO blanch. It was UNESCO that declared in 2011 that the statues would be best remembered by their absence. “The two niches should be left empty, like two pages in Afghan history, so that subsequent generations can see how ignorance once prevailed in our country,” said Zamaryalai Tarzi, a Franco-Afghan archaeologist. (The Guardian) This is the dominant school of conservation at Bamiyan, which has been the victim of continuous political wrangling from different organizations and experts. Official UNESCO policy is based on the 1964 Venice Charter, which demands that “original material” be used for the conservation and restoration of monuments and sites, and if this rule is disregarded, there is the threat of UNESCO striking the site off its World Heritage List.
The hesitation to reconstruct the images betrays a Eurocentric prejudice that has dominated UNESCO for too long, and ARCH’s report argues that a full restoration of the Buddha images would go a long way to restoring the faith of many people in the organization’s professedly unbiased assessment protocol, such as that of Michael Petzet of the German branch of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), who has made multiple statements in support of rebuilding at least Shamama. Lauren Bursey argued in 2014 that the Afghan administration felt that rebuilding the statues would be a symbolic triumph over the Taliban, and that Afghans saw not doing so as depriving future generations of the opportunity to see them.
The Eurocentric perspective is also evident in the priorities given to the nine criteria that UNESCO uses to determine a site or monument’s heritage value: design, material, workmanship, setting, traditions, techniques, language, intangible heritage, and spirit and feeling. The first three clearly betray a preference for “objectivity” based on the rationalist values of European art. At the end of the day, rationalism alone cannot reflect the non-material values of a Buddhist site: in Asia (the continent to which these carvings belonged before they were destroyed) building materials are often more transient, such as wood, unbaked clay, or stucco that formed the Buddhas’ robes.
The role of a locale for ritual purposes and its ties to antiquity or a meaningful event are much more important than the question of whether a commemorative or ritual structure, or its components, are “original.” While the Buddhas at Bamiyan were made primarily from stone, it is their location, in the heart of old Bactria and at the crossroads of civilizations such as the Hellenic world, old India, and China, that makes even the blasted cavities of the destroyed statues holy.
Asian conservation philosophy focuses on the intangible significance of a site rather than material or tangible “stuff,” and the relationship between the landscape itself and the monument, while UNESCO’s approach focuses disproportionately on the latter. Indeed, one might say that this attitude has divorced the structures of the Buddhas from the site at which they were carved—and this is untenable from the Buddhist perspective, where the “spirit of the land” matters much more. Language, intangible heritage, and spirit and feeling were only added as UNESCO conservation categories in 2005.
Cultural connections along the LODE-Zone line . . .
Indonesian Funds-In-Trust Project . . .
Promoting Intercultural Dialogue through Capacity Building Training for Museum Development at UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Indonesia and Afghanistan
Project Duration and Location
The project duration is from September 2014 – June 2017, with location as follows :
- Indonesia (Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Borobudur, Denpasar, Surabaya)
- Afghanistan (Kabul and Bamiyan)
The initiative for this project has grown from the close cooperation between Indonesia and Afghanistan that has developed in the reconstruction of the country after the fall of the Taliban regime. Indonesia has already supported the Afghan government in a number of key areas including in peace-building efforts, providing scholarships for Afghan students, as well as providing training in farming, health, waste management, and disaster awareness training.
At the 2011 Bali Democracy Forum the then President of Indonesia, H.E Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and the then President of Afghanistan, HE. Hamid Karzai, held talks on increased cultural cooperation. This cooperation was formalised on the 9th of November 2012 with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the countries respective Ministries of Culture.
Within the framework of the Indonesian UNESCO Funds-in- Trust, the Government of Indonesia requested the partnership of UNESCO to further develop this close collaboration between the two countries in accordance with UNESCO’s mandate to promote the building of international peace and cooperation through mutual understanding and in accordance with UNESCO’s expertise in the safeguarding of cultural heritage and museums.
In this regard, the UNESCO Jakarta and Kabul Offices conducted a detailed needs assessment involving key meetings with responsible officials in Afghanistan and Indonesia. One of the key areas of need identified was that of museums capacity training, especially around World Heritage sites.
Project Objectives
To support peace reconciliation and reconstruction in Afghanistan through strengthening capacity in World Heritage interpretation and museums management, whilst supporting cross cultural dialogue between Indonesian and Afghanistan through south-south cooperation in the field of culture.
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