Monument to militants’ hubris: ISIL’s destruction of history

The destruction of Nimrud by ISIL suggests a grim future for the cultural treasures of the region

A social media account affliated to ISIL trumpeted the terrorist group’s sledgehammer attack on ancient artefacts in the museum in Mosul, Iraq, to the world last month. Extremists have destroyed shrines, including Muslim holy sites, to eliminate what they claim is heresy. Militants are also believed to have sold artefacts on the black market to finance their military campaign across the region. AP PhotoShow less

Not content with their brutal decapitations, ISIL is ripping out the heart of humanity, ruling treasures of towering stone that have stood for thousands of years are heretical. But cold, hard cash can also trump terrorist ideology.

In his History of the Prophets and Kings, written more than a thousand years ago, the Islamic historian Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Jarir Al Tabari tells of a great tower intended to reach Heaven, built at a place called Babil by Nimrod, a grandson of Noah.

The tower is destroyed by Allah, who punishes the people of Nimrod by dividing their common language into 72 tongues.

Similar stories can be found among other faiths. In the Bible, Nimrod is “mighty as the Earth” and “a mighty hunter before the Lord”. In both Muslim and Hebrew traditions, stories tell of a confrontation between Nimrod and Ibrahim, in one account casting the Prophet into a fire from which he emerges unharmed.

The city of Nimrud, generally believed to be named after the ancient tyrant and builder of the Tower of Babel, has not emerged unscathed from the current conflict devastating Iraq.

Last Thursday, it was revealed that ISIL militants had taken bulldozers to the ruins of the 3,000 year-old settlement on the grounds that it encouraged blasphemy. Statues, walls and a castle are reported to have been reduced to rubble in what Unesco, the United Nations cultural organisation, called an act of “cultural cleansing”.

Iraq’s ministry of tourism and antiquities has said it is not yet able to assess the extent of the loss.

The destruction of Nimrud seems to take ISIL’s barbarism in a new direction. Over the weekend, the militants sent bulldozers to Hatra, a 2,000-year old fortified city in northern Iraq and a Unesco world heritage site.

Again, the extent of the damage is unclear, but some reports say Hatra, founded by the Parthian Empire and whose ruins include temples and walls, has been levelled, possibly by explosives as well as heavy machinery.

Dr Lamia Al Gailani Werr, an Iraqi archaeologist, says that if the reports of destruction at Hatra are true, “it will be more catastrophic than what happened to Nimrud”.

She calls Hatra “the best standing ancient site in Iraq”.

“The centre of the town had a number of temples. The main temple was devoted to the Sun god Shamash. All contained statues of worshippers: kings, princesses, military commanders, priests and more,” she says.

“I remember when I visited the site in the 1960s. There were so many statues lying on the ground that we had to jump over them.”

In a joint statement, Irina Bokova, the director general of Unesco, and Abdulaziz Othman Altwaijri, the director general of the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Isesco), said the behaviour of ISIL “shows the contempt in which it holds the history and heritage of Arab people”.

It will be some time before any full estimate of the destruction at both Hatra and Nimrud can be made. The Assyrian city of Nimrud covers more than three square kilometres and is located 35 km south of ISIL-controlled Mosul, where militants destroyed statues in the city’s museum last month and burnt the library.

The site is dominated by a citadel mound and the palaces of Assyrian kings dating back 3,250 years. There are also several temples, including one to Nabu, the god of writing.

Footage released by ISIL showed one militant with an electric drill attacking a huge winged bull of stone, thought to be the Nirgal Gate at Mosul and once one of the entrances to the ancient city of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire.

The video is released by the “press office of the province of Nineveh” and includes one man explaining the destruction by saying, “These statues and idols, these artefacts, if God has ordered its removal, they became worthless to us even if they are worth billions of dollars.” If there is scant consolation, it is that thousands of artefacts are safe in museums many miles from the depredations of ISIL. The Nimrud Project, established by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council in 2013, has identified 76 museums holding objects from the site.

They include a world-famous collection at the British Museum in London, with huge statues of winged bulls and 65 carved panels uncovered in the 19th century when the site was first excavated.

The museum also holds thousands of pieces of carved ivory from Nimrud, many found in the 1950s by an expedition that included crime writer Agatha Christie.

Many of the ivory objects that remained in Iraq were damaged or looted in the chaos that followed the American-led invasion of 2003. That heritage now seems more threatened than at any time in its history.

In addition to destruction, ISIL may be attempting to raise funds by selling looted artefacts on the black market. It is only the pieces that are too large to transport that are destroyed.

Now there are fears that ISIL’s tactics in Iraq may be adopted elsewhere, particularly in Libya, falling into chaos and civil war. The country is home to five Unesco world heritage sites, including Cyrene, an ancient Greek city on the Mediterranean, and the huge Roman amphitheatre at Sabratha. Inland is the 2,000-year old oasis city of Ghadames, known as the “pearl of the desert,” and a huge collection of prehistoric rock art, some 14,000 years old, in the Acacus Mountains and perfectly preserved in the arid desert conditions.

This month, Paul Bennett, head of mission at the Society for Libyan Studies in London, contacted Unesco out of concerns over ISIL’s “criminal vandalism”, writing of his “extreme concerns for the antiquities of Libya”.

Cyrene is located between the ISIL-controlled town of Derna, and Benghazi, where extremists are still fighting, while Libya’s official government is poised to launch an attack on the coastal city of Misrata, barely an hour’s drive from the Roman city of Leptis Magna, another Unesco world heritage site.

Like Hatra, in Iraq, many of the Libyan sites have museums filled with coins and smaller artefacts ripe for plunder. In the face of such threats, there is little that museum staff can do, beyond hide what they can and barricade the entrances.

By some estimates, the Middle East and North Africa may have between 3 and 5 million archaeological sites, some of which are in immediate danger but almost all at some risk in the future.

The estimate comes from Endangered Archaeology, a project by the UK’s Oxford and Leicester universities and supported by the Arcadia Fund, a charity founded by Swedish philanthropist Lisbet Rausing to preserve endangered cultural treasures.

Launched last month, Endangered Archaeology will use satellite photography and resources like Google Earth to record and monitor sites. Urban sprawl and agriculture have damaged many sites; now conflict threatens more. Often, fighting makes it impossible to carry out physical inspections.

According to Dr Robert Bewley, of Oxford University’s School of Archaeology, “The threats to the region’s most important archaeological sites are increasing at an unprecedented pace and the situation is only going to become more critical if we don’t act now.’

The project points out that the region “contains some of the best preserved archaeology any where in the world”, but that “unfortunately this is a region where the destruction of archaeological sites and entire ancient human landscapes is increasing as a result of population explosion, migration and refugees, conflicts and civil wars”.

Endangered Archaeology will record and evaluate the condition of sites to a uniform standard and offer information for their conservation and protection to the local authorities.

In the present political climate, the danger is that much of Endangered Archaeology’s work will serve only as an obituary of what has been lost.