Palmyra and Palmyra: Look On These Stones, Ye Mighty, And Despair

Abstract

Palmyra and Palmyra: Look On These Stones, Ye Mighty, And Despair MARY BERGSTEIN On 18 august 2015, the Syrian archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad, keeper of the remains of ancient Palmyra, was murdered by command of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. He was beheaded and his body strung up with his own head at his feet, the epitome of cruel revenge for one whose profession was conserving Syria’s ancient past. At the same time, the temple of Baalshamin, already in ruins, was detonated by explosives , shelled, shot at, and destroyed, together with the temple of Bel and other Palmyrene monuments and their figurative and decorative sculpture, even as the museum at Palmyra was rather unsystematically looted by various interests. The practices of archaeology and its sometime opposite, iconoclasm, have always been keenly allied to geopolitical interests, but the assassination of Khaled al-Asaad was a shock that seemed to defy our bleakest expectations.* Judaism and Islam prohibit figurative art (especially sculpture ) depending on time, place, and interpretation. One need only think of the Jewish Tetragrammaton (“YHWH”) to remember that the Hebrew deity is not to be represented pictorially , nor his name even written or spoken. The Quran specifically condemns idolatry, if not all pictorial art, and Islamic cultures are given to abstraction in the thought and representation of spiritual ideas. Anatolian carpets of abstracted flowers, the mosaic or tile qibla walls and mihrab niches at mosques, and medieval Quranic manuscripts are objects frequently used as comparanda with regard to the art of the West. Students of visual culture learn early on that the muscular art of the GrecoRomans is historically sui generis. The heroic nude in sculpture, arion 24.2 fall 2016 as we know it from Polykleitos (Doryphoros), the Hellenistic bronze statues at Riace, and Michelangelo (David), is only characteristic of Classical culture as shaped by the West. At Palmyra, however, the soldiers of the Islamic State were as fervent in their destruction of decorative, abstract art as they were in the funerary sculpture of the long-defunct semiHellenized ancients and the images of their deities. And the carved stones these Islamists destroyed were from at least three centuries before the foundation of Islam (AD 610)—fifteen centuries before the present. The Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud’s observation in The New York Times on the first of this year (2016) that the Islamic state “seeks to negate and destroy any evidence of the passing of time, in Palmyra and elsewhere,” is particularly resonant. ISIS, he stated, “tries to extend the desert’s domain: to replace walls with sand, to flatten out landscape, to return to a vacuum so as to start history all over again.” The passion of the Islamic State for destroying pre-Islamic monuments is therefore not so much aniconic as it is nihilistic. war photography at palmyra one of the ways I learned about present-day Palmyra, inflicted with warfare and atrocity, was from the work of the awardwinning war photographer Joseph Eid. Born in Beirut in 1976, Eid studied political science, history, and photography, and then joined the Lebanese Broadcast Corporation International. He joined the photo department of Agence France-Presse in 2006, where he was picture desk editor in Baghdad until 2008. Since 2009, he has been AFP’s photo-coordinator and photographer for Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. As a visual reporter, Eid has a brilliant eye. His photographs of Syrian refugees in Lebanon are powerful statements of the plight of fugitives currently walking and swimming the Mediterranean in search of safety. He has also photographed the ruins of Palmyra. I first noticed his photograph of a window of the shelled Temple of Bel with a view to some devastated Corinthian columns (fig. 1). Contemporary palmyra and palmyra 14 Fig. 1. Joseph Eid, Window at the Temple of Bel, Palmyra 2015. Credit: Getty Images. Mary Bergstein 15 terrorism has deliberately mutilated, if not destroyed, the Classical building forms of this temple and the other architectural remains at Palmyra. Eid’s palette is exacting and beautiful; and the rosy patina of the exterior limestone wall, shattered down to its friable white—tracing the “spray” of gunfire and explosion—is painterly to the beholder...