Archaeologists aim to revive Syria's 'golden age' as fall of Assad raises hopes of cultural renaissance

New opportunities for research arise after years of civil war

The Roman Theatre at Bosra, a World Heritage Site, in Syria's Daraa province. AFP

The end of more than a decade of civil war in Syria and the fall of the regime of former president Bashar Al Assad have given archaeologists around the world renewed hope that the country’s cultural heritage can finally be protected and restored.

For Michael Danti of the University of Pennsylvania, the two decades before the civil war in Syria were “a golden age” for his archaeological work there. From 1990 to 2011, Dr Danti, who is also a consulting scholar at Penn Museum, directed projects in Syria’s northern Raqqa province, spending much of his time living in a village and immersed in the cultural heritage of a nation blessed with several important archaeological riches.

“Syria had it all: deep antiquity – ancient Mesopotamia, the early origins of villages and writing, development of complex societies, all the way up to incredible Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine remains,” he said. “And [there was] spectacular Islamic architecture from the early periods of the Umayyad caliphate up to the modern era. If you’re interested in the Mediterranean or the ancient Near East, I couldn’t think of a better place to work as an archaeologist, except for maybe certain parts of Iraq.”

With its extraordinary attractions, Syria attracted cultural tourists with a well-developed infrastructure of hotels, tour companies and knowledgeable guides.

Cultural damage

Then, in 2011, when civil war broke out, “Almost overnight it just blew up,” according to Dr Danti, who has yet to return to the country. There has been “unbelievable” damage to Syria’s cultural heritage through “theft, demolition and destruction by neglect”.

“Not only did you have regular combat damage, but you also had the deliberate targeting of heritage by ISIS, the Assad regime, Russians. Everybody was blowing things up, targeting it deliberately one way or the other,” said Dr Danti, who runs a US State Department-funded project to document and prevent the theft of cultural property.

“There was so much deliberate targeting, a lot of it for propagandistic purposes. Beyond that, everything was being stolen. If it wasn’t nailed down or too heavy to transport, they were stealing it. Thousands and thousands of valuable antiquities have been slowly wending their way on to the illicit market.”

The archaeologist Dr Michael Danti of Penn Museum at the site of Palmyra, Syria in 2010 before the Syrian civil war. Photo: Dr Michael Danti

He said the illegal trafficking of cultural heritage objects is part of wider transnational criminal activity involving human trafficking, illegal drugs and arms dealing.

On top of the actual damage to cultural heritage, Dr Danti said there had been many false allegations of damage to cultural heritage to stoke tensions. “There’s a lot of disinformation, particularly around cultural heritage, because it’s a great way to foment ethno-sectarian violence and destabilise things,” said Dr Danti.

The fall of Assad, however, offers hope that the looting of Syria’s cultural heritage can be better controlled.

Restoration hope

Most within the new regime “have open minds”, according to Adnan Al Mohamad, a Syrian archaeologist who is an honorary research fellow in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Mr Al Mohamad, who was last in Syria in 2016, has been in contact with officials at Syria’s Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums and hopes to assist reconstruction efforts either from outside or within his home country. He said sites in areas under the control of the interim government are unlikely to be subject to deliberate destruction of the kind carried out before. “In general all the archaeological sites under the control of the new government, it’s safe [from intentional destruction], but we need to ensure there are not any mines or weapons, explosives,” he said.

The years of armed conflict has left the country starved of expertise: hundreds of Syrian archaeologists, such as Mr Al Mohamad, left the country, while opportunities for others to be trained by taking postgraduate degrees in foreign universities dried up.

“All the nuts and bolts of running an antiquities inspectorate have gone,” said Prof Graham Philip, of the Department of Archaeology at Durham University in the UK. “So they need training, they need funding. Salaries for the antiquities authority are very low. But what we have heard is that the new regime is not hostile to antiquities. They understand that antiquities are of value for Syria … They’re not like the Taliban or ISIS.”

His Durham University colleague Dr Kristen Hopper, an assistant professor in archaeology on the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa Project, indicated that those archaeologists who remained in Syria faced significant challenges. “Some of them used to work for the DGAM, some of them worked at universities, and I think they’re the people who have the tough job now, as they’re the ones who are on the ground to be able to rebuild these institutions,” she said.

The EAMENA project, a collaboration between the UK universities of Durham, Leicester and Oxford, has, until now, been working with non-governmental organisations within Syria to promote preservation and monitoring efforts, including by using satellite imagery, but was unable to co-operate with the DGAM, as it was a government entity.

The Palmyra Theate. Photo: Adnan Al Mohamad

“We don’t yet know how things are going to pan out, but we do know that there’s a lot of these NGOs, civil society groups that are going to keep doing this work and, hopefully, as the country opens up a bit more there’s going to be more opportunity to bring people together across greater areas,” Dr Hopper said.

While some international archaeological groups operated in Syria under the Assad regime – something that Prof Philip said was a cause of controversy – researchers expect numbers to increase under the new government. The extent to which this happens will depend on how the situation with the new government develops, but Prof Danti expects that Syria will become more open.

“I think over the next few years, if the security situation continues to improve, there will be a real emphasis on getting the international community back in to work side by side with Syrian stakeholders to do excavations, restorations, the full range of cultural heritage preservation and protection,” he said. “There are amazing sites still there and huge amounts of cultural heritage that’s easily preserved or rebuilt, expertly rebuilt.”

Another hope is that Syria could again attract cultural tourists. They were a vital source of revenue, something that would incentivise the new government to look after cultural heritage.

Prof Philip, who led tour groups in Syria before the civil war, said the infrastructure of hotels, tour companies and local guides, needed reassembling, and the security situation – once a draw for visitors because of the lack of petty crime – would have to be restored.

“Getting that kind of order back will be essential,” he said. “Most Syrians will want tourists because it creates thousands of jobs.”