Middle East & Africa | Islamic State and antiquities

Nothing is sacred

Jihadists murder the man who tended Palmyra’s art for decades

Threatening only to iconoclasts
|CAIRO

KHALED ASAAD saw the continuity between Syrian Arab culture and that of the many peoples who had previously inhabited Palmyra, the 2,000-year-old archaeological site he had tended for almost half a century. A month before Islamic State (IS) rolled into the oasis town in May, the archaeologist described on a Facebook page the spring rituals that would have taken place in the colonnaded city during Greco-Roman times. Those rituals “fit perfectly” with pre-Islamic Arab ones, he wrote.

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline “Nothing is sacred”

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