Ruins and the Memory of Palmyra and Aleppo

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Writing Aleppo I wondered how I could write about this city without sounding like I was mourning a personal loss and not the thousands upon thousands killed in the Syrian civil war. I try to picture the faces of people who helped me find my way, who waited on me in stores, but I can’t recall them. I want to write Aleppo now, if only briefly.

The Great Mosque, whose minaret was built in 1090 and destroyed in 2013, stood for more than artistic mastery. I now see that holding space in memory is one way to honor people.

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Never Going Back I’m not sure any place in the world had so much for sale, but so little made by well-known international corporations. Aleppo had the largest covered souq in the world, giving a sense of the expansiveness of a medieval market. Goods were organized by clusters of shops selling the same things. In the soap market I bought small green cubes of Aleppo soap stamped with an image of the citadel (and smelling like olive oil). Elsewhere I found gorgeous hand-stitched table cloths to give as gifts when I returned home.

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All That Is Solid The most striking feature of Aleppo is its citadel perched on a rocky outcrop. It stands out even in the image of Aleppo

by Alexander Drummond from 1754. A bridge connects the fortiďŹ ed entrance to the citadel proper. The hill had long been used for defensive fortiďŹ cation, but like so many castles in Syria its modern appearance goes back to the Crusaders. The citadel like so much of Aleppo looked solid, but it was all about to melt into the air.

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Bus Drivers in Syria I mostly pointed my camera at historic buildings and ruins, but occasionally I’m taken aback by the faces I find as I sift through photos. Buses in Syria were often driven by a team, a driver and a second to sell tickets and take care of the cabin. I loved the colorful trucks and the brash drivers (though they were more than willing to overcharge on occasion!). Now I look into the eyes of these men, who drove me to a site outside of Aleppo, and I wonder what became of them. Best case scenario is that they got out. I’ll never know. These two faces are stand-ins for the hundreds of people I interacted with in Aleppo, none of us knowing the destruction to come.

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Reading a Windshield The Arabic for “Allah” stands out on the left, making clear the bus is operated by Muslims. Behind the sticker is a folded prayer rug, whose visibility makes a claim for religious practice. Also on the left is an image of Bashar al-Assad riding on a mountain bike with his young son.

Authoritarian leaders in the Middle East often make use of informal family images. A political image was pretty much required. In the middle is an image of the green-domed mosque in Medina, and perhaps this implies completion of the Hajj. On the right there’s a display of audio tapes of popular singers, so this side carries more personal and playful elements.

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Visiting Syrian Ruins Getting to Palmyra was a disorienting task in the summer of 2004. My friend and I took a bus from Damascus, and as we got to the outskirts of the city the driver followed the sign for Baghdad. That was the direction we needed to go if we were to reach the isolated ruins of Palmyra in the Syrian desert. But this was 2004, and the insurgency in Iraq was heating up. The terrible ďŹ ghting in Fallujah had taken place in March and April. For now that border still meant something. The next stop might be Iraq, but life in Syria was continuing along OK. The border of a nation state made the war feel distant, but it wouldn’t be too long before it gave way.

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The Geography of a Ruin Field The medieval castle provided an overlook onto the ruins of Palmyra. The central collonade lined the market street of Roman Palmyra. The rest of the city, built from less permanent material, sprawled from there. The site continues to be an oasis in the desert, which explains why humans have lived here for millennia. Palmyra’s importance in the first few centuries of this era was based on global positioning: it was the final stop for goods coming across Asia on the Silk Road before reaching the Mediterranean.

A percentage of that trade allowed for this construction. These ruins at Palmyra finally stand for a different global system, with different routes.

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The Temple of Bel The ruins of Palmyra trend toward the Temple of Bel, consecrated in 32 AD. At the end of the colonnade that ran the length of the Roman city, the triumphal arch framed the temple’s exterior wall.

From here the ancient visitor went up to the sacred enclosure and entered the temple. As ancient ruins are incorporated into a modern city, the spatial connections grow dim. The bareness of this vast ruin ďŹ eld allowed those connections to appear for the later visitor.

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Google Earth

The Destruction In 2015 ISIS forces destroyed the Temple of Bel in Palmyra. The large square enclosure still stands, but the structure once at its center has been obliterated. The monumental gate to the temple still stands, and in the above image casts a shadow at the center of the enclosure. The ruins were too extensive even for ISIS to spend the effort to knock down every column, but culturally significant structures were targeted. ISIS claimed to be combating idolatry, but since this area has been held by Muslims for about 1,400 years—by successive dynasties with varying religious inclinations—it’s a novelty to find grave offense in these and other ruins.

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Internet Capture

Perfection in the Wake of Destruction After the destruction of the Temple of Bel and other structures, there was an effort to preserve them through 3D imaging. Above is an image from the website #NewPalmyra, where visitors find this temple and can turn it this way or that to view it from any possible angle. I suppose the temple now exists as an eternal object, and perhaps the hope is that someone will reconstruct this temple at Palmyra? Odd that it’s the ideal structure— which hasn’t existed in many centuries—that’s preserved in 3D, not the imperfect ruin that historic visitors actually encountered. Perhaps it felt odd to “restore” an obviously damaged late version of the temple?

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Mint Condition Refashioning In 1750 English classicist Robert Wood arrived in Palmyra. Though current interest in Palmyra centers on its ancient hybrid culture, Wood saw purely Classical forms. His group carefully measured and copied these forms, almost as a compendium of Classical motifs for European use. Palmyra was in ruins, but the images in his book portrayed structures (like the Temple of Bel, above) as if they had remained in mint condition. Before and after the modern destruction visited by ISIS, images of the Palmyrene ruins converge on architectural perfection. But the pleasure of ruins, and what ISIS took away, is the visitor’s work of imagining life into a ďŹ eld of ruins.

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The Two Sides For those watching events from a distance, ISIS’s attack on the ruins of Palmyra was baffling. If we want to actually understand how people could destroy this World Heritage site, it will be useful to consider how people in the Middle East have been steadily alienated from their ruins. What I mean is evident from Egyptian currency. One side is always in English and features an ancient Egyptian artifact or site. That’s the side for tourists.

The writing on the other side is in Arabic and a mosque is shown. The background design is abstract instead of hieroglyphs. The message is clear: ancient Egypt belongs to tourists; Egyptians get to keep the Islamic past.

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It’s the Economy Stupid I came across this poster in a subway station in Cairo. The image of Abu Simbel on the Egyptian one pound note has been removed. Underneath the Arabic asks: “Try to imagine the pound note without tourism!” In other words, if ancient Egyptian sites were to disappear, the money that Egyptians rely on would be worth much less. The goal of this ad was to remind people to value the tourism that brings so much foreign money to Egypt. The ad also exposes the deep alienation between contemporary Egyptians and ancient sites. The way to imagine a pound note without tourism is to erase the great statues of Abu Simbel from that note.

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The Arab Village in the Temple When Europeans arrived at Palmyra they encountered an Arab village.

The village was built into the enclosure walls of the Temple of Bel. The picture above is by John H. Haynes, part of the 1885 Wolfe Expedition.

It’s an unusual photo since European visitors mostly looked at the ruins and right past the continued Arab presence. Eventually these structures were cleared by the French colonial administration. The village was a gross intrusion into Classical ruins. It’s another example of the way people in the Middle East are strangely alienated from ancient ruins. It’s no wonder: the colonial message was that they don’t belong in World Heritage space.

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What We Like about Ruins In 1695 the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society published the first European view of Palmyra. The main structures are represented along the back, and labelled. The foreground is dominated by the intense litter of ruins. In the accompanying text the author shows that for him the ruins served as a mental puzzle: “...our Eyes were presently accosted with an amazing sight of a multitude of Marble Pillars, standing scattered up and down, for the space of near a Mile of Ground... so dispersed as to afford no solid foundation to judge, what sort of Structure they formerly framed.”

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Internet Capture

World Heritage and Human Identity A month after ISIS was driven out of Palmyra, UNESCO sent in a rapid assessment team to determine the damage. UNESCO, the cultural branch of the United Nations, maintains a growing list of World Heritage Sites, ranging from the Pyramids to the Serengeti. It works with nation states to grant World Heritage status, but does so in the name of a universal human heritage. By implication, nation states represent an imperfect identity that should be subsumed by a common human identity. With its hybrid pagan past, placement in a national civil war, and conicting claims on it by ISIS and UNESCO, Palmyra has become a global site-avatar for identity claims.

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The Quran’s Case for Preservation The Quran frequently challenges its auditors to “Travel through the land.”

In Sura 30 verse 9 this is expanded upon: “Have they not travelled through the land and seen how their predecessors met their end? They were mightier than them: they cultivated the earth and built more upon it. Their own messengers also came to them with clear signs.”

The Arabs were long distance traders, well

aware of extensive ruin fields in their region. The Quran employs these ruins not as sites to be destroyed, but as sites that continue to speak a prophetic message about God’s punishment on great nations of the past.

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The Black Flag of Destruction

ISIS videos reached a zenith of sorts with the 2015 release of The Return of the Gold Dinar. It came at what looks to have been the furthest reach of ISIS control, as the group imagined it could circulate its own currency.

A hard currency points to the imagination of an orderly ISIS society. In the video this vision coexists with the ultraviolence that is their calling card. Even in the midst of representations of violence it’s possible to see symbols promoting a social identity. That black flag is the group’s central symbol, refusing allegiance to a Turkish or Arab Nationalist past, and even dispensing with the Saudi green for its presentation of the Shahada.

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Mapping ISIS Territory The propaganda video presents a map of ISIS territory as of the fall of 2015. The yellow spills across the image, incorporating major cities such as Raqqa and Mosul. It’s also a dynamic and unfinished map, with gaping maws ready to ingest Aleppo, Damascus, and Tikrit. Western media at this time largely refused to grant ISIS territory, but instead portrayed it as a membrane extending across desert roads. Somehow ISIS wasn’t granted a claim on empty desert in the same way as an actual nation state.

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The Globe in a Gold Dinar ISIS tried to institute a system of gold and silver coinage. Above is the five dinar gold coin. On its front is an image of the globe, along with the numeral 5 (looking like an elongated ‘o’) and the Islamic calendar year. ISIS isn’t a group that wants to control a slice of real estate and then hopes everyone will leave them alone. They thrive through the presentation of a global order that appeals to the imagination of some. Much of their violence should be understood as symbolic attacks on global norms, especially those championed by the United Nations, such as human rights, universal human heritage, and the web of secular economic institutions.

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Cultural Diversity in ISIS In the midst of rolling out gold dinars, ISIS showed its fighters marveling at the purity of the coins. Weapons are always present, but the video makers are at pains to portray a peaceful society. The ethnic composition of the ISIS fighters in the video are varied as expertly as in any college catalog or corporate website. Above is an image of Southeast Asian recruits, but other scenes of fighters include Arabs, South Asians, a black man who appears to represent Africa, and some young white men. ISIS might be hostile to global norms, but they clearly embrace the ideal of cultural diversity and strive to present themselves as builders of a diverse society.

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Making Things Awesome ISIS’s destruction of Palmyra is a signal example of barbarity, eclipsing even the Taliban’s 2001 demolition of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Putting aside the stated rationale of “making God’s word the greatest,” perhaps we can find discern deeper motives. Modernity has brought massive destruction wherever it arrived. In Europe this was the slow-burning destruction of the Reformation and Industrialism. China went through its brutal but quick Cultural Revolution. In the Middle East the destruction is being achieved by the Wahhabi-aligned erasure of medieval Islamic cultures, an erasure which at times is pushed to a manic pace by extremist groups like ISIS. - 22 -

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Identity in Palmyra This sculpture was once on display in the Palmyra museum. Under the occupation by ISIS it was largely destroyed, likely by sledge hammer blows.

It’s now pocked by craters. The sculpture was from a sarcophagus, and portrays the deceased taking part in a symposium. It’s a classic GrecoRoman motif, only made strange by the fact that the dress of this man is decidedly Eastern, with his flowing and flowery robes and elaborate boots.

It makes us wonder what was more important: the Roman funerary form or the fact that Palmyrenes maintained Eastern styles. We don’t need to choose: Palmyra represents the rich possibilities of a hybrid identity.

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Profaning the Theater This Roman stage in Palmyra was the site for public executions by ISIS. On one occasion 25 men were forced to kneel. An equal number of ISIS recruits stood behind them, and after some speechifying to the crowd in the stands, they executed the captives with a gunshot. A black ISIS banner hung in the center and flags waved from the proscenium. In the 2nd century BC, when Antiochus Epiphanes wanted to defile the Jewish Temple, he ordered that pigs be sacrificed on the altar. How could a secular UNESCO World Heritage site be similarly defiled? This slaughter served that purpose because it spits on the sacred value of human rights.

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Bach and Prokofiev At great expense and some risk the Russians performed a concert of classical music in the Roman era theater at Palmyra. This was in mid 2016, less than a year after the executions by ISIS had profaned this UNESCO space. How could anyone heal space where a gross act of violence like that had occurred? No one is going to walk around saying prayers or sprinkling holy water. It turns out we can play music by Bach and Prokofiev, thus restoring the command of universal culture over this space. ISIS didn’t like this, and when they took control of Palmyra at the end of 2016 they demolished the proscenium (the central section of which is shown above).

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Towers and Silk The central section of ancient Palmyra was dominated by Roman-style structures, but to the southwest of the city was the non-Roman Valley of Tombs. The oldest of these funerary towers dates to 9 BC, while most others are from the ďŹ rst two centuries AD. Palmyra was the last major stop for trade goods coming across Asia on the Silk Road. The Palmyrene families buried in these towers made their fortunes in that long distance trade. This necropolis preserved our earliest evidence for silk cloth from China arriving to the Roman Mediterranean. About 100 fragments of Chinese silk were recovered from the funeral towers outside the city.

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Funerary Towers The tower of Elahbel (destroyed in 2015) was larger than it looks. Those lower courses of ashlar blocks were each about ďŹ ve feet high, so the tower was several storeys tall. These towers were goldmines for sculpted images of the deceased. The images were snatched up by museums around the world, where they continue to exist as testimony to the vibrancy of this hybrid culture. The towers too participated in this hybridity, with classical motifs and construction, but a decidedly ancient and Semitic form of burial.

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Displaying the Deceased The Archaeological Museum in Istanbul has a number of sculpted busts from Palmyra, as well as a wall that gives a sense of how they were displayed inside the funerary towers. This burial style turned out to be a gift to the museums of the world. These busts were grouped together as extended families, but individual images weren’t part of larger conceptual groups, nor did they tell a story. This honeycomb-style format allowed them to be easily displaced and displayed in a stand-alone fashion.

Whatever the convenience for curators, these images weren’t meant for the gaze of the public, and would only have been experienced as a wall.

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Family Beauty and Wealth These sculpted busts were displayed in a wall, but they were completed with enough technical skill that they often reward close inspection. In this example (from the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul) we see a woman who conforms to a Roman ideal of beauty. Studies have shown that these busts didn’t strive for a true likeness of the deceased, but were idealized portraits, completed with more or less technical skill. This is a ďŹ ne technical example, and as striking as the face is the headdress and jewelry with which she is adorned. The artist cared about communicating clearly the sumptuous dress (and thus the wealth) of this woman and her family.

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Pulling Back the Veil The limestone funerary busts of Palmyrene women are similar to one another. The women are dressed in fine clothes, their eyes look staight ahead as if meeting someone’s gaze, and one arm is raised to pull back a veil. I take this movement to pull back a veil as evidence that women wore a covering over their face in public. In the intimacy of an enclosed funerary setting meant for members of the family, the women pull back the veil to reveal their face. It’s a gesture of modesty and intimacy. It’s a gesture that had everything to do with the presumed privacy of the funerary setting, though now they are on display around the world public museum settings.

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Watching the Procession Once a year, at the spring equinox, Bel was carried by camel through the city. In a surviving image of this procession a group of women cover themselves and bow their heads as the god passes by. A handful of images like this give us a snapshot of the experience of ancient Palmyra. The sacred day had come, and the god-bearing camel was led from the temple out to the crowds waiting in the enclosure. The procession followed the colonnade but then left the city to reach an outside shrine. The three covered women stand in for the crowds, from all over the region, who arrived for the great procession and waited reverently along the path.

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Photographic Reflection I didn’t know these people, but they were all looking out at the same landscape as me. We were standing on the top of the medieval castle overlooking Palmyra, happy to be there at golden hour as shadows lengthened and the desert colors grew vibrant. I took plenty of photos from here, though not as many as I would’ve a few years later with a digital camera. I was conscious that we were all taking pretty much the same photos. Photos like mine (taken on this day and others) exist in personal collections around the world. Photography for me was never about getting the unique shot, but was a tool for reflection on the world.

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The Tourist Imaginary French artist Louis-François Cassas visited Palmyra in 1785. He was fascinated by the presence of Bedouin in the midst of the Classical ruins. In the above image Cassas left the actual world behind and portrayed instead a ghost world in which a noisy caravan is arriving at a landscape filled with buried ruins. This image stands as a symbol for the way our experience of ruins is connected to the work of the imagination to summon the past.

It would be a rare (probably nonexistent) tourist who could wander a ruin field like the one at Palmyra and not attempt to map it over with an imagined past drawn from a few details supplied by signs or guides.

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Pleasure in Ruins Walking around Palmyra I’d sometimes stop to look at beautiful ruins, which from a certain angle could frame other landscape elements. In the case of these columns, there was no important historic association to uncover (nor have I found any since). I just took pleasure in the worn and weathered look of the columns, with the castle in the background. Part of our resistance to ISIS is acknowledgment of aesthetic pleasure.

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Looking Back The touts were out at Palmyra. We didn’t think we needed the cold sodas at first, but after walking around the ruin field for a while we changed our minds. Now when we approached the same touts we discovered that the price for soda had suddenly spiked. We no longer had leverage. I took out my camera to photograph the purchase so that we could remember that time we way overpaid for cans of soda. It was a humorous moment for all, since we knew we’d been had, and the touts knew they were making a killing... but such is life. Now I look at even a light-hearted photo and find myself wondering if these touts had fled in time the coming horror.

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Only A Clock Tower Bab al-Faraj was one of the gates to the medieval city, but as Aleppo expanded it became simply the name for a square. The main monument for this square was a clock tower, finished in 1899. It’s fair to say that the Ottomans were on a clock tower building tear throughout the 19th century. It was a century of modernizing, and these monumental time keepers symbolized that effort.

The tower appears to still be standing, so perhaps a refurbished version will become a symbol for the possibility of restoration.

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