Daesh has taken it. They’ll smash or sell everything.
Hundreds of Palmyra’s statues have been moved to safety but large monuments from the ancient parts of the city could not be moved.
“This is the entire world’s battle,” said Syria’s head of antiquities Maamoun Abdul Karim. He called on the US-led military coalition against IS to prevent the group destroying the ancient site.
Rising out of the desert, Palmyra contains the monumental ruins of a great city that was one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world, according to Unesco, the UN’s cultural agency.
Palmyra is the last place anyone would expect to find a forest of stone columns and arches. But for anyone visiting, the key reason for the site’s prosperity becomes immediately apparent: ancient Palmyra sits at the edge of an oasis of date palms and gardens.
For such a remote city, Palmyra occupies a prominent place in Middle Eastern history. From modest beginnings in the 1st Century BC, the city gradually rose to prominence under the aegis of Rome until, during the 3rd Century AD, the city’s rulers challenged Roman power and created an empire of their own that stretched from Turkey to Egypt.
Palmyra was a great Middle Eastern achievement, and was unlike any other city of the Roman Empire. Like Venice, the city formed the hub of a vast trade network, only with the desert as its sea and camels as its ships.
Well, kiss it goodbye. All that is haram, so into the fire with it.
Now it’s “Goodbye Palmyra”, soon, perhaps, goodbye Leptis Magna, Timgad, Petra….and any other relics of Kufar Greco-Roman civilisation that remain in the ME or North Africa.
Yup.
Why do the followers of The Prophet (PBUH) feel so threatened by ancient monuments from before the time of The Aforesaid Prophet (PBUH)?
I reluctantly conclude that for some reason they feel vulnerable and inferior; which is not what The Prophet (PBUH) exhorted them to feel at all.
Omar @3:
Why do you imagine they are?
(… and why do you call Daesh “the followers of The Prophet (PBUH)”?)
@3 Omar Puhleez
Because to there’s no history prior to Islam, it’s the ‘year zero’ mentality and also part of the Arabisation process which is an integral part of Islamisation.
It’s not exclusively Muslim of course, some of the loonier French Revolutionaries attempted to reset history and there are the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge.
I’m very strongly reminded of the Protestant iconoclasts for whom ANY representation was idolatrous and therefore had to be destroyed. Nearly all of the medieval stained glass in England, Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia was shattered by fanatics. So much history and beauty, lost forever because of religion.
… until, during the 3rd Century AD, the city’s rulers challenged Roman power …
And, by “the city’s rulers”, BBC means to say, “Queen Zenobia”, but perhaps they fear mentioning a woman’s name when a euphemism will do might get them a complaint from a Haredi rabbi or somebody.
John Morales:
Daesh is ISIL, which is Islamic. If you are Islamic, you follow The Prophet (PBUH – Peace Be Upon Him.) That part is easy.
Religious iconoclasm, where the followers of one god/prophet/desert warlord/quack/charlatan tear down the icons, graven images and shrines set up by another goes back to ancient Egypt, and is probably at least as old as civilization, and conceivably as old as religion. But to practice it, they must feel more than a bit insecure about the strength and appeal of their own beliefs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant
Omar:
Well, if you follow The Prophet (PBUH – Peace Be Upon Him), you are Islamic. That part is easy.
But ‘If you are Islamic, you support Daesh which is ISIL’… That part would be wrong.
(A Venn diagram would illustrate the false generalisation)
Didn’t the US send special forces to dislodge them from the oil wells they took? Priorities…
A bunch of theosociopaths consider the crusades of a thousand years to be current events, but anything before that is “heresy”.
How unsurprisingly hypocritical that they have long memories that suddenly stop.