ISIS’s destruction of archeological treasures is horrifying but reflects a too-human history of obliterating the past of “enemy” cultures. Moreover, all is not really “lost.”
Ancient artefacts in the Archaeological Museum in Mosul in northern Iraq have been destroyed by ISIS.
Screen shot via YouTube.
Ancient artefacts in the Archaeological Museum in Mosul in northern Iraq have been destroyed by ISIS in recent days, behaviour that forms part of a pattern. The question is why.
In this January 2015 photograph, a man walks through the ruins of Old Aleppo, a designated World Heritage site.
Hosam Katan/Reuters
Recently in Aleppo, Syria, the Jabha Shamiya militia has started carrying out a new urban warfare strategy: tunnel bombing. Aside from the human damage wrought by this tactic, it is also extremely damaging…
This Assyrian winged bull is safe in Chicago, if far from home. How much else is safe?
Trjames
Iraq has a long and rich heritage, home for thousands of years to mighty empires – Assyria and Babylon, the Abbasid caliphate – that ruled the region once known as Mesopotamia, widely held as the cradle…
Sections of the Parthenon (Elgin) Marbles in London’s British Museum.
Matthew Fearn/PA
Several members of the cast of the film The Monuments Men made headlines for expressing the view that the British Museum should return the Elgin Marbles to Athens after their “very nice stay” of 200 years…
Vietnam’s shoreline hosts thousands of shipwrecks, but most their treasures are being lost to the Vietnamese.
Gavin White
Vietnam has thousands of kilometres of coastline, and may have thousands of shipwrecks. Many of these wrecks would be loaded with archaeologically fascinating and significant items. But the country has…
The Crusader fortress of Krak De Chevalier has been damaged by shelling after rebels used it as a defensive position.
AAP image
The looting of the Baghdad Museum in 2003 during the invasion of Iraq is an example the consequences of war on national heritage. Almost a decade on, the civil war in Syria has seen history repeating itself…
Submerged mysteries: only 14 of Australia’s almost 2,800 shipwrecks have been properly surveyed and excavated.
Flickr/miamism
The study and preservation of Australia’s neglected and decaying historic shipwrecks stands to leap in sophistication through a new multi-disciplinary project. Bringing in expertise from behavioural archaeology…