Islamic State’s vandalism highlights archeologists’ devotion to the past

An exhibition of Syrian artefacts highlights the devotion of historians in the face of Islamist vandals.

The bust of Hagar, a wealthy woman from Palmyra, at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne.

Many years ago I was involved as a guest in a think tank discussing future scenarios in economics and politics. A lot of plausible futures were proposed by different speakers, but what struck me was that the most dramatic events of comparatively recent times had not been plausible at all until they happened. Had one been considering, 40 years ago, what the future might hold for British farming, for example, anyone who had raised the possibility of a cattle epidemic that could lead to the decimation of the national herd would probably have been regarded as a crackpot. And then mad cow disease appeared.

Similarly, anyone who had suggested, in a discussion of East-West politics in Europe, that the Berlin Wall suddenly might be brought down by a spontaneous popular uprising and that the consequences of this event could include the collapse of the whole Soviet empire, they would have been treated with derision. In fact there is little doubt anyone who had so much as asked such a question 30 years ago would have been regarded by the left as a fascist and by the right as a dreamer. And then there were the events of 1989.

More recently still, if a would-be future scenarist had floated, even long after the Iranian revolution of 1979, the idea that a rise in religious fanaticism could be among the great threats of the new millennium, the consensus would have been that religion was a spent force in history. We in the West had last experienced religious wars in the 17th century, and since then the progress of science and technology had correspondingly reduced the place of religious belief in modern life.

Little did we know that the plague of Islamic fundamentalism was about to erupt and to destroy political stability throughout the Arab world. In hindsight, we can see complex reasons behind this phenomenon, including misjudgments in Western policy and the deliberate fostering of extremism in nations from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, but the imponderable factor was the release of profound and irrational, ultimately psychotic rage that found an alibi in religious bigotry.

Where did this rage originate? Was it in the political impotence of populations living under military dictatorships? The economic despair of people toiling in backward economies? The sexual frustration of young men living under a regime that prohibited sex before marriage? Or some poisonous combination of these factors? Whatever the root causes, the result manifested itself in worldwide outbreaks of violence against everything the modern world had worked hard to achieve: democracy, secular government, freedom of speech and religion, and the rights of women.

The arch of Palmyra, which was destroyed by Islamic State. Picture: Jamieson 1989, Lee McCrae 2016

What has been most striking in the savage behaviour of groups such as the Taliban, Boko Haram and most recently the so-called Islamic State is they seem to relish extremes of behaviour that any normal society regards as abhorrent: not just killing or torturing prisoners but systematic rape, slavery, the murder of women and children, burning people alive, beheading men in front of their families.

How they managed to persuade themselves this kind of behaviour could be pleasing to God and merit a place in heaven is hard to understand. It is clearly akin to the corrupted logic by which members of totalitarian states in the 20th century could convince themselves they were putting people to death to create a better world. The moral of all these cases is not to believe the ideas in your head, especially if they involve harming other people.

The cultural vandalism of the Taliban many years ago when it blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas and more recently the devastation caused by Islamic State in Syria are obviously not comparable as acts of wickedness to, say, the butchery of religious minorities such as the Yazidis. But in a sense, precisely because they are not so immediately ethically reprehensible, they represent the spirit of evil, the face of hatred, in a pure state.

What does it mean to destroy the monuments of the past, to smash artefacts or to demolish buildings that have survived for 2000 or sometimes even 3000 years? It is not only to demonstrate a radical lack of respect for people who came before us, and for what is left of their images and their voices: it is quite simply an attempt to kill them, to destroy their memory. It is the odious act of a delusional mind that would annihilate anything that contradicts or relativises the ideas by which it is possessed.

Islamic State has vandalised much in Syria, but by far the most prominent victim of its destructive passion was the ancient city of Palmyra, once a prosperous hub of commerce, situated in an oasis between the shores of the Mediterranean and the Euphrates River. And one of the most dramatic and poignant losses was that of the ancient Roman arch that formed the centrepiece of the ruined city.

The destruction of the arch of Palmyra struck the world so forcibly that an international project was mounted, involving scholars and technicians from Oxford and Harvard, to apply digital technology to the carving of a stone replica. The result was unveiled by Boris Johnson in Trafalgar Square, as we see in a video shown in the present exhibition.

It obviously is not a substitute for the original but it does demonstrate, curiously, the futility of Islamic State’s attempt at obliteration. Today, however much the group may, in a dark spirit of nihilism, aspire to expunge the past, it is no longer possible. The past is documented, registered as data and can be reproduced at least as a kind of simulacrum. However much vicious fanatics may rape and murder, the erasure of human memory is beyond their reach.

Hatred is never a good premise for human life. The work of the archeologists illustrated in this exhibition represents the opposite disposition: the publications of digs at various sites lie open in display cases, with their detailed diagrams of modest, fragmentary objects, meticulous surveys of sites with their carefully plotted contour lines: all of these speak of an attitude of care and respect, a humble devotion to recovering even the faintest traces of the lives of people who came before us.

One of the most interesting sites covered by the exhibition has been jointly excavated by the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne since 1986. It is known as Jebel Khalid, although it was a Greek city and originally may have been called Amphipolis. It was founded early in the 3rd century BC as a military colony on the Euphrates by Seleucus I Nicator, the former general of Alexander the Great who, after the latter’s death, became the founder of the Seleucid Empire, with its centre in Syria.

After the Romans assumed power in the east, the city eventually was abandoned around 70BC; the inhabitants seem to have moved elsewhere, taking most of their valuable furniture and other possessions with them. The shell of the city gradually fell into dilapidation until, in the 4th century AD, there is evidence of a temporary Roman camp on the site. Later still, there are traces of Christian hermits or anchorites making their homes in the ruins.

Eight hundred years of diverse human experience thus lie almost forgotten beneath the rubble, and its recovery is made even harder by the fact the population left in good order, with the removal of so much significant material. But even from the scraps that remain, archeologists are able to recover fascinating traces of the culture of the city in its heyday.

It is clear, as one would expect, that it had a mixed population of Greek and Macedonian settlers on the one hand and native Syrians on the other. The latter became progressively Hellenised in language as well as in cultural habits but never wholly lost touch with their own traditions, which also began to influence the native Greeks. It was the same kind of cultural exchange and mutual influence that occurred to varying extents from Hellenistic Egypt to the Greco-Indian kingdom of Gandhara in what is now Pakistan.

One of the most famous products of this Greco-Syrian cultural fusion was Lucian, an outstanding writer of the 2nd century AD, two centuries after the abandonment of Amphipolis, if that was its real name. Lucian was ethnically Syrian but became one of the most refined Greek prose stylists of his time. And one of his most famous essays, On the Syrian Goddess, in which he pastiches the style of Herodotus, deals with the ecstatic cult of the goddess Astarte or Atargatis, represented here in several terracotta fragments, side-by-side with other fragments of the Greek goddess of love and sexuality, Aphrodite. The Astarte figure is wearing Persian dress, and some other traces of Persian culture remind us that this region, although Syrian and ethnically Semitic, had been part of the Indo-Aryan Persian Empire since its conquest in the 6th century BC; so the cultural overlays are even more complex than we may imagine, in a region of the world that has always been a meeting-place of civilisations.

Meanwhile, ceramic pots and handles of broken amphorae that brought wine from Rhodes remind us of the trade links that connected all of these cities in the broad Hellenistic world, which for a time covered much of the heart of the Eurasian continent and included routes that ultimately, if through many intermediaries, ran all the way from the Mediterranean to China.

It is fitting to end with a work that marks the beginning of the exhibition: a handsome funerary bust of a wealthy woman from Palmyra. She is dressed for the afterlife in her finest costume and jewellery, including necklaces and bracelets whose originals must have been in gold inlaid with lapis and other precious stones. She carries in one hand the spindle and distaff, reminders of the traditional crafts of women and of her role as head of a household. We even know her name: Hagar, like Sarah’s handmaid in Genesis.

The statue was given to Harry Chauvel, commander of the Australian Light Horse, by an Arab sheik, and he in turn gave it the Australian War Memorial. No doubt the sheik had scant concern for the integrity of the tomb to which it belonged, and considered the sculpture simply as an antiquity that a foreigner would be likely to appreciate. But, as is more often the case than we may want to admit, the removal and subsequent export of this Palmyran matron has saved her from destruction. Islamic State would have turned her to rubble; instead she enjoys a completely unexpected afterlife in her new antipodean home.

Syria: Ancient History — Modern Conflict

Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne. Until August 27.