In 2011, after three decades of working in Syria, the archaeologist Glenn M. Schwartz was unable to return to his dig at the Bronze Age city of Umm el-Marra. The growing civil war had made work in the country impossible.
Like many archaeologists of the Middle East, Mr. Schwartz, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University, is watching the news from the region with deep concern and, he says, a feeling of impotence. “It’s heartbreaking to see what’s happened in Syria in terms of cultural heritage and more so for the country at large,” he says.
The upheavals and conflicts sweeping the Middle East in recent years have caused untold human suffering; they’ve also resulted in deep losses to the heritage of a region known as the cradle of civilization.
Scholars can do little to stop the fighting and looting, but they are not powerless. They have created blogs, websites, Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts to monitor the destruction and raise awareness about it. What’s more, scholars outside the Middle East have helped their counterparts in the Arab world compile online lists of missing or stolen objects by sharing excavation records.
Spylike Devices
Cheikhmous Ali, an archaeologist at the University of Strasbourg, in France, founded the Association for the Protection of Syrian Archaeology, which relies on an underground network of activists and journalists to document damage to historical sites in the war-torn nation. Syrian authorities are often suspicious of people taking photos, so the association’s volunteer informants sometimes use spylike devices, such as mini digital cameras inserted into pens, to accomplish their goals.
After photos have been taken and other data sent back to the association, scholars abroad verify the reports and provide historical details. The goal is to create an up-to-date record of Syria’s loss and, Mr. Ali says, to “sensitize the international community” to it. The project is “based entirely on the Internet, social media, YouTube,” he notes. “It would not be possible to provide visual documentation without these means.”
In Egypt, Monica Hanna, an archaeologist, began tweeting about threats to her country’s heritage more than three years ago, when the Egyptian Museum was broken into as the uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak began. With Egypt continuing to experience political upheaval and violence, Ms. Hanna’s work expanded. She has become a well-known social-media activist with nearly 35,000 followers on Twitter.
Protecting heritage “is not on the agenda, and it’s not getting the attention it deserves, and we’re pushing till that stops,” says Ms. Hanna, an independent scholar who has taught at the American University in Cairo.
Volunteers via Facebook
A Facebook group Ms. Hanna founded, Egypt’s Heritage Task Force, counts 50 volunteers and hundreds of supporters and informers, she says. They send in photos and reports of remote archaeological sites that are being damaged by looters or squatters. Ms. Hanna herself travels to these sites as often as she can. She has had warning shots fired at her twice by gangs of looters. Last summer she traveled to the town of Mallawi, about four hours south of Cairo, where in the midst of protests against the ousting of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, a museum of Pharaonic antiquities was broken into and looted. Ms. Hanna was able to save a few of the museums’ remaining objects, carrying them to safety with the help of locals and police officers while rioting and gunfire continued nearby.
Carol Redmount, an associate professor of Egyptian archaeology at the University of California at Berkeley, is one of Ms. Hanna’s supporters. Ms. Redmount says it’s frustrating not to be able to do more to help but that scholars outside the region can “keep shining the light of publicity on the problem, then can provide expertise ... and support grassroots efforts as much as possible.”
The Middle East lost many of its ancient treasures in colonial times, when priceless artifacts were carried off to European collections and museum. It is now witnessing “a new wave of loss” associated with wars and conflicts, says Tamar Teneishveli, program specialist for culture at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s regional bureau in Cairo. Many archaeologists are experiencing flashbacks to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, when Baghdad’s national museum was looted and sites across the country ransacked. “We looked on in horror,” says Mr. Schwartz.
Today, Iraqi heritage faces new threats from the Islamist extremists who have taken over the much of Northern Iraq, including the city of Mosul, where they have already destroyed ancient shrines.
The situation in Syria is equally dire. Omar Abdulaziz Hallaj is a Syrian architect who in the 1990s worked on the restoration and redevelopment of the Old City of Aleppo—an area that was devastated when it ended up “on the dividing line between rebels and regime forces,” he says. Mr. Hallaj adds that the Islamist extremists who have emerged as the fighting has dragged on have “absolutely no reverence” for the country’s antiquities and view them as a source of cash. “On the regime side it hasn’t been much better,” he says.
‘Collective Depression’
Among archaeologists, “there is a collective depression at the moment regarding the whole situation in the Middle East, not only regarding antiquities—it’s an area where many of us have lived and worked for years, and it’s terrible to see the suffering that’s going on,” says Ms. Redmount.
Scholars have adapted as best they can. After being forced to leave Syria, Mr. Schwartz didn’t want to give up field work and was able to find a site in Iraqi Kurdistan, which he has visited twice. Ms. Redmount hopes to return to Egypt next year to continue work on the ancient buried city of El Hibeh, which she describes as a “poster child for looting.” Her team will “switch to a different kind of archaeology,” she says. “We’ll be dealing with what’s left, mitigating the damage.”
In the spring, thanks in part to her social-media presence, Ms. Hanna testified before a committee of the U.S. Congress in favor of a request by the Egyptian government to impose restrictions on the import of Egyptian artifacts to the United States, a move many American archaeologists support. Ms. Hanna hopes more support from Egyptian authorities and foreign governments will mean she can scale back her activism, which has become a distracting “full-time job.”
“I haven’t been able to keep up with academic publications,” she says. “I don’t have the time to do proper research as before. It’s having a negative effect on my academic career. But this is more important.”
By raising their voices online and off, Ms. Hanna and other scholars of the Middle East’s past hope to save as many relics as they can for a less turbulent future.
