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.
The race to save Syria's antiquities
Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syria's Director-General of Antiquities and Museums, holds an ancient vase retrieved from the northeast city of Deir Ezzor.
Abdulkarim leads a team trying to prevent Syria's cultural heritage from being destroyed. Earlier this year they managed to rescue hundreds of Roman busts from Palmyra before ISIS seized the ancient city.
Abdulkarim's team evacuated every artifact from the National Museum of Damascus as the war closed in on the capital several years ago.
In the courtyard of the museum, concrete covers have been constructed around ancient sculptures to protect them from shelling.
Not all of the sarcophagi have been covered in concrete yet, and the garden has been hit several times by mortar rounds in recent years.
At a building inside the museum compound, dozens of volunteers catalog the tens of thousands of artifacts that Abdulkarim's team has managed to evacuate from various places in Syria.
This Roman statue was rescued from Palmyra ahead of ISIS' advance earlier this year.
The team evacuated 35,000 artifacts from Deir Ezzor alone. Each one is photographed and given a catalog number.
This fragment dates back to around 2,000 BC during the Mesopotamian era.
After being photographed and numbered, these priceless artifacts are shipped away to secret and safe locations across the country.
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.
Precious monuments lost in Middle East
Once the largest mosques in the world, built in the 9th century on the Tigris River north of Baghdad. The mosque is famous for the Malwiya Tower, a 52-meter minaret with spiraling ramps for worshipers to climb.
The site was bombed in 2005, in an insurgent attack on a NATO position, destroying the top of the minaret and surrounding walls.
Video: ISIS targets historical artifacts
An "oasis in the Syrian desert"
according to UNESCO, this Aramaic city has stood since the second millennium BC and featured some of the most advanced architecture of the period. The site subsequently evolved through Greco-Roman and Persian periods, providing unique historic insight into those cultures. ISIS now controls the ancient city and has
destroyed shrines, temples and monuments.
The most spectacular legacy of Buddhism in the war-torn country, among the tallest standing Buddhas in the world -- the larger at 53 meters, the other 35 -- had survived over 1,500 years since being carved out of sandstone. The Taliban considered the monuments idolatrous and
destroyed them with dynamite.
Yemen's capital city of Sanaa has seen several
suicide bombings for which ISIS claimed responsibility, and air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition -- although it is unclear who is responsible to the latest damage. These have affected both the old fortified city -- inscribed on UNESCO's
World Heritage List since 1986 -- and the archaeological site of the pre-Islamic walled city of Baraqish, causing "severe damage,"
according to UNESCO itself.
Continually inhabited for 2,500 years, and became the capital of the Romans' Arabian empire. The centerpiece is a magnificent Roman theater dating back to the second century that survived intact until the current conflict. Archaeologists have revealed the site is now severely
damaged from mortar shelling.
A world heritage site originally built in 715 by the Umayyad dynasty, ranking it among the oldest mosques in the world. The epic structure evolved through successive eras, gaining its famous minaret in the late 11th century. This was reduced to rubble in the Syrian civil war in 2013, along with serious damage to the walls and courtyard, which historians have described as the worst ever damage to Syrian heritage.
These 20-meter wide water wheels were first documented in the 5th century, representing an ingenious early irrigation system. Seventeen of the wooden norias (a machine for lifting water into an aqueduct) survived to present day and became Hama's primary tourist attraction, noted for their groaning sounds as they turned. Heritage experts
documented several wheels being burned by fighters in 2014.
The fortress spans at least four millennia, from the days of Alexander the Great, through Roman, Mongol, and Ottoman rule. The site has barely changed since the 16th century and is one of Syria's most popular World Heritage sites. The citadel has been used as an army base in recent fighting and several of its historic buildings
have been destroyed.
The covered markets in the Old City are a famous trade center for the region's finest produce, with dedicated sub-souks for fabrics, food, or accessories. The tunnels became the scene of fierce fighting and many of the oldest are
now damaged beyond recognition, which Unesco has
described as a tragedy.
This French-built suspension bridge was a popular pedestrian crossing and vantage point for its views of the Euphrates River. It became a key supply line in a battle for the city, and
collapsed under shelling. Deir Ez-zor's Siyasiyeh Bridge was also destroyed.
The
ancient Assyrian city around Nineveh Province, Iraq was home to countless treasures of the empire, including statues, monuments and jewels. Following the 2003 invasion the site
has been devastated by looting, with many of the stolen pieces finding homes in museums abroad.
The Crusader castle from the 11th century survived centuries of battles and natural disasters, becoming a World Heritage site in 2006 along with the adjacent castle of Qal'at Salah El-Din. The walls were severely damaged by
regime airstrikes and artillery in 2013, and rebels took positions within it.
The purported resting place of biblical prophet Jonah, along with a tooth believed to be from the whale that consumed him. The site dated to the 8th century BC, and was of great importance to Christian and Muslim faiths. It was
entirely blown up by ISIS militants in 2014 as part of their campaign against perceived apostasy.
Among Syria's most famous Ottoman-style mosques, which also shows
Mamluk influence through its light and dark contrasts. The vast site became a hub of the battle for Homs, itself a front-line of the conflict. The sacred mausoleum has
been completely destroyed, and much of the interiors burned.
A key city for the Greeks and Romans, established in 630 BC. Famed as the basis for enduring myths and legends, such as that of the huntress heroine of the same name and bride of Apollo. The ruins were some of the best preserved from that period, but in the wake of Libya's revolution,
vast tracts have been bulldozed including its unique necropolis complex.
Home to one of the world's most impressive collections, with over 100,000 pieces that cover the entirety of Islamic history. The Cairo site was first built in 1881, the museum recently underwent an eight-year multi-million dollar renovation. Shortly after re-opening, a car bomb targeting a nearby police building
caused catastrophic damage and forced the museum to close again.
This 121-year-old wooden building, humble but elegant, was home to the nation's first governor general Muhammed Ali Jinnah for the last phase of his life. The residency
was attacked with rocket fire by a separatist group in 2013, and almost completely demolished. A new structure is being built on the site.
A 15-year civil war of incredible brutality, successive battles with Israel, and sweeping urban development has robbed the 'Paris of the Middle East' of much of its visual lustre. Once known for its landscape of swaggering Ottoman, French and Art Deco architecture, officials say just 400 of 1200 protected historic buildings remain.
Before-and-after photographs of the destruction. The US and ISIS trade blame for
its loss.
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."
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