NEXT month, the Temple of Baal will come to Times Square. Reproductions of the 50-foot arch that formed the temple’s entrance are to be installed in New York and in London, a tribute to the 2,000-year-old structure that the Islamic State destroyed last year in the Syrian town of Palmyra.
For Salam al-Kuntar, a Syrian archaeologist who works at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the loss of the Temple of Baal was deeply personal. “I have a special love for Palmyra because the Temple of Baal is where my mother was born,” she said.
Ms. Kuntar’s grandfather was a policeman in Palmyra when its Roman-era ruins were inhabited. Well into the 20th century, generations of Palmyrenes made their homes in the shade of millenniums-old columns. The locals taught Ms. Kuntar’s grandmother — who was a young bride when she arrived in Palmyra — how to cook and how to bake bread.
“This is the meaning of heritage,” Ms. Kuntar said. “It’s not only architecture or artifacts that represent history, it’s these memories and the ancestral connection to place.”
We should not think of the destroyed or at-risk heritage sites in the Middle East as history frozen in stone. It is, of course, worthwhile to study their structures, to resurrect them digitally and even raise them in the metropolitan plazas of the West. But those efforts will be hollow if we forget how antiquities have remained present in the lives of Iraqis and Syrians right up to this grim modern era of destruction.
