The Museum of Lost Objects: Bombed and Bulldozed in Syria

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2016

⏱️ 54 minutes

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Summary

"Archaeology is supposed to be fun and interesting and apolitical and those are the reasons I love it, but none of this is now."

Archaeologists like Jesse Casana have lived and worked on sites throughout Syria for years. He describes his feelings about the fate of friends and colleagues left behind. The excavation at Tell Qarqur that he oversaw before the war has now been bulldozed, but he says, "It seems like a fairly small concern compared to the human tragedy unfolding before our eyes."

Tell Qarqur is not the only monument of archaeological interest that has been destroyed. The statue of an 11th Century Arabic poet, atheist and vegetarian, al-Ma'arri, was decapitated Islamic militants in 2013. And Aleppo, thought to be the oldest city in the world, is now in ruins. Its sights are remembered fondly by the people who lived there including the elegant, 1000 year old mineret of the Great Mosque destroyed in April 2013.

Picture: A Syrian rebel fighter points to destruction in the Great Mosque complex, Aleppo, Credit: AFP/Getty Images

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the Museum of Lost Objects on the BBC World Service.
0:07.0	I'm Kanish Thauroor. In today's omnibus edition,
0:10.0	our path through the museum takes us mostly across northwest Syria.
0:14.4	We're exploring cultural destruction in areas fiercely fought over by regime and
0:18.9	rebels right from the early days of the conflict.
0:21.6	In this series you've heard and are going to hear
0:25.0	about many beautiful and unique antiquities, sculptures, tombs and temples,
0:29.5	monasteries and minarets that have been lost to the wards of the present.
0:34.4	But the objects of the past are not always so glamorous.
0:37.7	The villagers always believed that our goal was to find gold and I would always try to
0:41.8	convince them I was like like guys we've been
0:43.1	digging here for 20 years and we have never found any gold. Like I must not be very good at
0:48.3	my job if that's what I'm trying to do. If you were trying to find a
0:55.0	find a pretty object, telkarkor would be a terrible choice of a site.
0:59.0	You're not going to find a lot of gold chalises and statues and stuff.
1:04.0	Jesse Kassana is an archaeologist at Dartmouth College in the US.
1:08.0	He ran an excavation at a site called Tel-Karkur in Western Syria.
1:12.0	Today we're looking at archaeology's less spectacular
1:15.3	side, the bread and butter of the discipline. Our object is a hill.
1:19.7	It forms what's called a tell which is a large mound of collapsed cultural debris about 30 meters high and about 10 hectares in size.
1:29.6	So it's a very prominent tall steepsided, flat-topped thing, you know, to the un-initiated.
1:36.0	It looks a lot like a hill.
	...

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