WHAT kind of people would feel propelled to go on a wanton rampage of destroying a society’s cultural heritage? The answer is simple: The uncultured one — a people driven by anarchic passions and nihilistic impulses.
For those of us who have studied, or at the very least explored as cultivated readers, the history of Palmyra, in Syria, the news that Daesh goons have used explosives to demolish a nearly 2,000-year-old site there, was shocking. For this columnist, whose visit to the legendary site as a teenager retains to this day its palpable magic, the news was gut wrenching.
The ancient city of Palmyra, roughly 130 miles northeast of Damascus, halfway between the Mediterranean Coast and the Euphrates River, was seized by Daesh last May. But it is doubtful that these semi-literate oafs had a sense of how precious was the history the place housed.
By the time Queen Zenobia (Zeinab, in Arabic) ascended the throne after her husband’s death in 267, Palmyra was progressively becoming one of the most important and prosperous cultural centers in the ancient world. Palmyrenes under Zenobia’s rule turned their city, an oasis of palm trees in the middle of nowhere, into the hub of a vast trade network, becoming the Venice of the Middle East - except their sea was the desert and their ships were camels - a vibrant Arab Semitic culture with its own identity, independent of nominal Roman rule.
Its architecture may have been Greco-Roman, but it combined local traditions and Persian influences, representing a remarkably creative synthesis of East and West. People wrote their own Semitic scripts, including Arabic, rather relying on Greek or Latin. Their queen evinced such a rebellious bent of mind that in 269 she defied Rome, expelled the resident Roman prefect and led her army, as a “warrior queen,” on a military campaign whose end result was the capture of Egypt and the entire Levant, creating an empire separate from Rome.
Zenobia was finally captured by the Romans and taken to their capital in chains. Historical accounts are not altogether clear about her ultimate fate. Some of these accounts have her committing suicide, others have her dying in a hunger strike and others still have her getting beheaded by the Romans. Yet another story had Zenobia being married to a prominent Roman senator and, well, let’s say, living happily ever after in the town of Tivoli, in northern Italy. (The latter fate was the one I preferred as a teenager tasked by our teacher with writing a paper about my visit to the fabled city.)
Throughout history, the name of this Arab queen has resonated not just in the Arab psyche — consider how many Arab fathers have named their daughters after her — but in the western intellectual tradition as well, where she is immortalized in opera, music, literature and sculpture. When you destroy a people’s cultural heritage you destroy more than their tangible heritage, such as monuments, or their intangible heritage, such as folklore, or their natural heritage, such as landscape. You destroy their human right to a literal way to touch their past and validate their memories, for only in that heritage is human consciousness scripted.
With every assault Daesh miscreants mount against our heritage, including their subversion of our faith, they mount it, by definition, on our cultural soul. Before destroying Palmyra last week, for example, the group had blown up another smaller heritage site, and in earlier months, as they seized more territory in Iraq and Syria, attacked a number of historic sites, smashing tombs, statues and other antiquities considered irreparable losses by UNESCO and other institutions.
Their venom knew no limits: That venom extended, on Aug. 18, to the beheading of Dr. Khaled Al-Asad, director of antiquities at Palmyra, who had spent a lifetime preserving archeological treasures and saving the relics of our ancestors for future generations. His crime was that the 82-year-old retired grandfather had refused to reveal the hidden location of artifacts to Daesh thugs. How can a group sink so low? How cowardly can they be? How savage is their mindset? Yes, the group has sunk that low, its cadre is that cowardly and its mindset is that savage.
If Daesh — God forbid — should prevail, that prevalence can be conveyed to us through the simplest, but nevertheless most terrifying, of metaphoric images — the fire of our civilization progressively dying in the grate.
