When your first blog gets hijacked by events

This is not the first posting I wanted to write on this blog.

I had it all so nicely laid out. I wanted to write a nice uncontroversial blog about the joys of teaching a well received day school in Adult Education. I had been working for weeks on this day school, digging out all the latest research reports, collating pictures from all sorts of sources, beginning to feel really comfortable with the subject, yes and also how spending that much time and money on a single course does not represent a great investment when looked at from a business perspective, but working that intensively on such a beautiful subject, does things to you. As somebody once said: Beauty is good for the soul - even an archaeologist's soul.

The lecture was given yesterday, and yes, I think the whole group enjoyed it. The topic - Palmyra. If you are reading this, are English speaking and you are older than about 25, then Palmyra is probably associated with the nice pictures in Iain Browning's Palmyra book (my edition is from 1979, but it has been reprinted so many times). It seems to be one of those ubiquitous books on Roman (and Near Eastern) archaeologists' bookshelves. This book no longer does Palmyra justice. So much work has been done in Palmyra since this book was first written, that it really is just a small taster on what amazing facts we now know about this town. I am not thinking about the art work, the Norwegian Institute in Bergen's landscape survey has completely changed our view of Palmyra as a desert town, the geophysical surveys by the Germans and others added entire new sectors of the Hellenistic city (and incidentally doubling Palmyra in size), the Japanese mission's work on the hypogea added detailed knowledge about the health and age of the inhabitants. And in between there are always more breathtaking finds.

So you can hopefully see, just how anybody can think themselves privileged to spend time with this topic.

That was the blog, I was hoping to write. Alas, this morning I took one look at the newspapers (for example the Guardian), and once again ISIS managed to get me very angry. I took the anger out on my garden (it is now bramble free), but coming back to it, I still need to say something about it.

ISIS decided to continue with their destruction of archaeological remains. This time it is a collection of funerary portraits from Palmyra, that somebody was trying to smuggle out of ISIS territory. We will never know, why. Was this one of the 'Monument men' trying to get this material out of ISIS' reach? Or was this one of the looters that have been descending on Palmyra since 2012 and despoiling many of the tombs (for more details see ASOR special report Palmyra - Heritage Adrift released June 2015)? In the aftermath of the 'trial', ISIS decided to destroy the funerary portraits in the public square.

The second part of the report is equally confounding. Apparently, they destroyed the Lion of Allat.
This is a huge statue, that was found 1977 in the area of the Temple of Allat on the Western end of the town. It had been reused, when the Romans built the legionary fortress of the Camp of Diocletian, but it was originally a temple guardian to the Allat sanctuary, warning everybody not to spill blood in the sanctuary. It was the largest of a whole series of beautiful reliefs and sculptures that adorned the first century hamama sanctuary of this deity and it was utterly unique. Unique in its art style, unique in its character a roaring lying protecting an antelope. My heart goes out to the researchers and technicians in the Polish Institute of the Mediterranean and the Curators at the Palmyra Museum, who spent so much time, effort and money, reassembling it and mounting it in the courtyard to the Museum to give us all a glimpse on how impressive the non-Graeco-Roman art of Palmyra was. It was in many ways the figurehead for all the non-Hellenistic cultural influences that shaped Palmyra and made it such a great place to study the way in which very different cultures could live together 2000 years ago and create between them something truly amazing and beautiful.

ISIS blew this up.