We have the tools to prevent further destruction of ancient Assyrian history and we need to use them now

(Image: Steven Vidler/Corbis)

YOU don’t have to be a historian or an archaeologist to feel anger and despair at the destruction of Nimrud, ancient capital of Assyria, by the self-styled Islamic State. UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova has described it as a “war crime”. It feels like a crime against humanity.

As so often with ISIS, it is an act seemingly designed to show that the militants are unconstrained by the bounds most of humanity observes. Who would not respect such a unique location, or the irreplaceable artefacts destroyed at the Mosul Museum in Iraq?

But in fact ISIS, for all its ostentatious extremism, is just the latest in a long line of vandals. Egregious examples in the past century include the Nazi book burnings of the 1930s and the Taliban’s shelling of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in 2001 – spared even by Genghis Khan.


Destroying stores of knowledge is a tactic favoured by those who seek to press home a fundamentalist message. “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it,” said the 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke. For those who want to create their own fundamentalist pastiche of the past, obliterating the lessons of history is an attractive idea.

What can be done? It is too late for Nimrud (see “Can we save history from ISIS vandals?“). But we can do more to protect antiquities in future. There is a strong suspicion that ISIS, which like so many despotic regimes is not as ideologically pure as it pretends, is profiting from the sale of looted art and artefacts. Last month, the UN Security Council passed a resolution obliging all member states to improve their capacity to seize looted antiquities from ISIS-controlled territory. The UK, for its part, could finally ratify the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict – more than a decade after it agreed to do so.

Technology can help, too. It’s no substitute for physically securing a site, but remote sensing technologies can at least record sites at risk of destruction. For example, drone-mounted rigs makes 3D scanning of sites relatively cheap and easy.

Such scans might even make rebuilding easier. Attempts to reconstruct the Bamiyan Buddhas have stalled partly because no one can agree on how to go about it. Today, more than ever before, we have the tools to ensure history cannot be effaced altogether or forever. We should vow to use them, before Nimrud’s destruction itself passes into forgotten history.

This article appeared in print under the headline “The war on history”