Salve,
a sad list
here - the National Geographic published a tentative list of the damaged, looted and destroyed
I always wonder if without the
invasion of Iraq and the
Arab Spring/Syrian Civil War these places would have survived and been preserved like before the war.
The ancient city of Palmyra tops the list, I
wrote about the site and dr Khaled Asaad,the archaeologist who died, AD 2015, defending the integrity of this place on my blog in the past since they recaptured the town and site from the Syrian government troops, and recently they lost it again to ISIS.
there are many places on this list:
Dura Europos -
wrote about the horsemen from this ancient fortress.
St. Elian Monastery - desecrated and destroyed , also another monastery
Mar Behnam fell prey to the barbarians - in short the ISIS is waging a very successful war against the oldest Christian communities in the world ( aside from Turkish Anatolia and Armenia).
Apamea -
in photos from 2015,
Khorsabad
Hatra - very important in the Parthian and pre-Islamic Arabia
Niniveh et al
eh... time of the barbarians - but we should not overlook that looting is done for profit, to be passed to some clients, and some of these objects might be eventually sold to our own Western universities, museums and collectors.
Interesting article
here
I do have hope - the
new American leadership,(the former being a total failure, including the gender politics played within the Armed Forces and allowing the Putin's Russia annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine) - I am thus optimistic especially since the new team includes the new secretary of defense,
James Mattis (I wonder if he is of Polish descent - from the immigrants arriving in the late XIX century) - look at
his reading list for the Marine Corps from 2007.
Sun Tzu wrote - "Know the enemy, know yourself, and victory is never in doubt, not in a hundred battles," (The Art of War.")
ps
some of my quick watercolor sketches on the Parthian (Tang-e-Sarvak) and Hatrene theme of the armored warriors.
