Khaled al-Asaad, Palmyra’s antiquities custodian, 1932-2015
So highly did Khaled al-Asaad value the site he called home that he protected it above his own life.
Palmyra, the Roman city in the middle of Syria’s Tadmorean desert, was both his birthplace and his unwavering passion. In a 40-year scholarly career as director of antiquities, he oversaw its majestic ruins and the museum that holds many ancient artefacts from the area.
His working days were spent in collaborative research programmes with European archaeologists, to aid the understanding and public presentation of the site. Known as “Mr Palmyra”, he continued these endeavours after his formal retirement in 2003.
Singled out by the jihadis from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant who have occupied Palmyra since May, after a month of interrogation the 83-year-old academic was beheaded on Tuesday. The Isis killers hung his body in public, his severed head placed at his feet, while an attempt to justify the atrocity was scrawled on a placard tied to his waist. Asaad was a “director of idolatry” who visited Syrian generals and Iran and attended “infidel conferences”, it said.
Those are the conferences at which historians improve the understanding of the course of humankind. Our myriad beliefs are manifested in ancient buildings, applied arts and material culture; Asaad presented papers as a scholar of the inscriptions left by many of the diverse peoples who have shared Palmyra over four millennia.
As a pre-Islamic city, its builders were incapable of having defied a fundamentalist interpretation of a religious text that was yet to be written. But such antiquities hold a financial value and, rather than destroying portable works of art, Isis increasingly prefers to sell them to hunters of illicit trophies — irrespective of whether this itself constitutes idol worship.
According to Samir Abdulac, vice-president of Icomos France, part of the global grouping that seeks to preserve historic sites, “When the troops came to Palmyra, Daesh [another name for Isis] threatened to kill antiquities employees if they did not reveal the location of its hidden ‘treasures’.”
Palmyra is among the greatest surviving sites of Roman civilisation. Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World calls Palmyra “the Venice of the Sands”, once a hub for the caravans of traders who journeyed between Europe and Asia. The grand desert city was sacked in 1400 by the army of Timur, “Sword of Islam”, who destroyed many of the Roman buildings. A village continued amid the ruins through the Ottoman era.
Its importance was galvanised in 1753 when the fine engravings of views and surveys by Giovanni Battista Borra were published in Robert Wood’s The Ruins of Palmyra . This pioneering volume of “the greatest quantity of ruins we had ever seen” came at the dawn of neoclassicism in Europe, when a closer understanding of ancient architecture informed a more disciplined response to the past.
Wood’s study advanced empathy for varied cultures, and in 1769 he wrote “An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer”, which argued that true knowledge comes through evaluating one’s own society in relation to others. As Mr Frankopan says of Asaad’s fate in Palmyra at the hands of Isis: “The murder of its benign guardian is a barbaric insult to our common identity as human beings.”
Although Asaad was a member of Syria’s ruling Ba’ath party, this was an affiliation that had been nigh obligatory as a state employee. His own identity was bound up not with the regime in Damascus (which built a notorious prison on Palmyra’s doorstep) but with his home town’s history.
Khaled al-Asaad was born in 1932 during the French mandate that followed the fall of the Ottoman Empire and ran from 1923-46. As the modern city of Tadmur rose alongside, archaeologists began to uncover the historic fabric. He took up his post aged 31.
As Asaad became a father to a daughter and two sons — one of whom, Walid, succeeded him in his job — he oversaw much of the excavation and restoration work that resulted in what can be seen, were it not for the current occupation by Isis, by all who visit the Unesco world heritage site.
Maamoun Abdulkarim, head of Syria’s directorate general of antiquities and museums, adds: “The continued presence of these criminals in this city is a curse and bad omen [on Palmyra] and every column and every archaeological piece in it.”