Oscar Espinosa/Demotix. All rights reserved. 

There
is so much loss and sorrow, writes Nicci Gerrard, author of The Twilight Hour, in a July piece
for The Guardian about her advocacy work
on behalf of dementia patients and their caregivers. Gerrard describes this
suffering—the loss of an identity that’s rooted in mutual cognition, the
erasure of history, the insidious, irreversible attack on knowing and being—as
a “blasted landscape” that makes us ache. “Who are we when we no
longer have our memories?” she asks.

Many of
us know that familial ache, without ever thinking about archaeology and war.
This existential erasure, though, is akin to the collective loss that
Syrians—like Iraqis, Afghans and others before them—experience in the aftermath
of Islamic State’s most recent attack on the Temple of Bel, or the week before at
the UNESCO world heritage site at Baal Shamin. That “blasted landscape” in
Palmyra is the latest hole in the Syrian narrative, and in our shared
understanding of human history and civilisation.

In late
August, as the world mourned the death of Khaled Assad, the Syrian antiquities
scholar beheaded by Islamic State, the United States FBI issued a warning to art and
antiquities dealers. It said items from this “industrial-level looting” are
making their way from Mosul to the market; from Nimrod and Hatra, stolen from the Baal
Shamin site in Palmyra or the Mar Elian monastery near Homs, which
fell on 6 August. ISIS leaders also have threatened the pyramids and the Sphinx in Egypt.

Cultural
cleansing

It is
understandable that FBI news about a key funding source for the Islamic State
might be overlooked. The world’s attention is rightly riveted on the priority
of finding a unified EU solution, as more refugees die at the hands of human
traffickers in Austria and on the Mediterranean. Confronted with the suffering
of Syrian refugees who risk their lives to leave behind the ones they’ve lost,
mourning the damage to world heritage seems academic at best.

But if
Islamic State’s immediate goal is to fund a revolution, the basis for that
revolution is the erasure of memory and identity until even history—in a sense,
time—are under Islamic State control. Countless experts and officials,
including Irina Bokova of UNESCO, have
decried the pillaging as cultural cleansing. University of Cambridge
professor Tim Whitmarsh, describing the Palmyra
treasures and their significance for non-specialist readers, called it
“antiquity’s best counterexample to ISIS’s fascistic monoculturalism.” Sturt Manning of Cornell
University, chair of the classics department, calls on the west to remember as Islamic State seeks
to destroy the evidence of a tolerant, diverse past. “What it fears is memory
and knowledge, which it cannot destroy,” Manning writes.

Memory
and knowledge are the defining elements of human agency that we recognize as
integral to the autonomous self, and the executive functions of human agency
that govern and express that identity. They may fail as a result of dementia,
writes author David Keck in his own
philosophic exploration of the disease. But culture is memory too, and often
subject to collective manipulation and political distortion.

“Items
from the past represent the attempts of those in power to legitimate their
power and dominate the memories of the future,” Keck says, citing Foucault and
other examples. “Freedom and memory are inseparable. There is a powerful
political potential for the manipulation of memories. The first task of a revolution is to rewrite the past.” Islamic State is arrogating that past on
the basis of warped theology, insisting that to establish its caliphate renders
obsolete any previous
narrative of the human enterprise.  

“It’s
never about artefacts”

This
Islamic State’s “war on history,” as evidenced to date, is meant to erase
identity. Others in the modern era include the Taliban
destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001, and the 2012 Timbuktu attacks in
which Islamic radicals in Mali destroyed a 15th century mosque and 4,000
ancient manuscripts on law, philosophy, astronomy and history. The discipline
of archaeology itself can be co-opted, as in the Israeli-Palestinian debate to prove
land rights. In modern-day China, Mexico, and India, our antiquities inform an
understanding of ancient conquerors whose nihilism has no place in our world.

Though scholars
and intellectuals—the cultural forces whose dissent Islamic State also seeks to erase—mourn the destruction of
Mosul and Palmyra, the cities are inseparable from the destroyed lives of
people seeking shelter from that “fascistic monoculturalism.” Their
capacity for memory, for preserving a cultural identity in all its complexity,
for sharing a history and protecting its narrative, continues as a sacred trust
vouchsafed to those who are witnesses. The world’s heritage remains within that
witness. Islamic State ultimately will be silenced by the power of preservation
in both the personal and political.

“It’s
never about artefacts,” said Columbia University archaeologist Zainab Bahrani
in a March Boston Globe interview. Rather,
it’s about the right of a people to exist—and for the aggressive protection of
their history and cultural contributions to continue, across that “blasted
landscape” of memory.