Hope for Palmyra’s Future

Palmyra was built with stone and mortar. It will be rebuilt with computers and drones.

Now that the Syrian regime has recaptured the ancient city from Islamic State, archaeologists face the enormous challenges of reconstructing ruins—some of them 2,000 years old—that were destroyed during the extremist group’s 10-month occupation. They will rely on new technology to reconstruct some of the Middle East’s most venerated monuments.

Palmyra is a Unesco World Heritage Site, and the organization will employ small drones to assess damage and provide a bird’s-eye view of major areas in need of repair. Three-dimensional reconstructions will aid precise repairs. Radar scanning will be used to view and assess any damage to underground structures such as the city’s Roman-era catacombs. After its assessment, Unesco will prepare a priority list for Syrian officials, who will spearhead the repairs.

“A machine in one or two hours gives you a perfect reconstruction of an object, [whereas] before it would take weeks and weeks,” said Francesco Bandarin, assistant director-general for culture at Unesco.

Unesco plans to send a first-response team to assess Palmyra’s damage as soon as it’s safe to travel there, he said. Officials will work in a ghost city largely emptied of its residents during the militants’ control.
Where Silk Road traders once gathered, Palmyra’s antiquities chief, Khaled Asaad, was murdered by the militants, who hung his body from one of the columns he helped restore. Islamic State says sites Mr. Asaad oversaw, like the Temple of Bel, promote idolatry and are at odds with its strict interpretation of Islam.
Islamic State destroyed the 2,000-year-old Temple of Baalshamin and parts of the neighboring Roman edifice, the Temple of Bel. The temples were two of the best-preserved sites in Palmyra, heralded by archaeologists world-wide as an example of preservation technique and a testament to Syrians’ dedication to their history.

The Institute for Digital Archaeology hopes 3-D models of Palmyra’s sites will result in their detailed reconstruction led by Syrians. The Unesco partner uses photos from its Million Image Database at Harvard University to provide a 360-degree view of the object and create a computer model, said technology director Alexy Karenowska. Stone can also be carved using the 3-D model, as in the replica of Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph the organization will display in London’s Trafalgar Square this month; an installation is also planned for New York’s Times Square this fall.

“The hope is that colleagues in Syria with equipment and scanners can go to Palmyra,” said Stefan Simon, director of the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage at Yale University.

After the militants retreated late last month, Syrian antiquities director Maamoun Abdulkarim said that 80% of its ancient sites were intact and that Palmyra would be fully restored in just five years. But other experts and academics were much more skeptical, believing that the task will take many years and resources, that some sites are beyond repair, and that others might never be restored to their former glory.

“Don’t expect Palmyra will be rebuilt in a day. This will be years and years of painful work,” Mr. Bandarin said. He noted that the continuing reconstruction at Cambodia’s Angkor, similar to some of Palmyra’s sites in scope, has taken decades after war and nature took their toll.

Strict views on conservation could impair Palmyra’s reconstruction efforts, said Nasser Rabbat, director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And technological improvements aren’t a substitute for knowledge held by the generations of Syrian historians who lovingly restored the city’s columns and stones. “It is not that we have lost things that have stood as they were for 2,000 years,” he said. “What we have lost is the effort, the intellectual and labor effort, of generations of restorers who worked on this city.”

It is too early to know how much the reconstruction of Palmyra’s sites will cost, though Unesco expects it will run into tens of millions of dollars. “We ​will ​present a vision for reconstruction and rebuilding of Palmyra to Unesco and from there they will help us in funding our vision,” ​Mr. ​Abdulkarim said.

​Unesco said its initial​assessment mission will be paid for by​its emergency fund. The organization will then lead a fundraising campaign for the city’s reconstruction, soliciting​governments, foundations​and private donors.

Some Syria-watchers say limited government resources shouldn’t be poured into restoring ruins while about half of Syria’s population remains displaced, including thousands from Palmyra, and others are killed in daily fighting and airstrikes that are hallmarks of its five-year-old conflict.

Archaeologists paint a picture of ancient Palmyra as a diverse cosmopolitan city and prominent Silk Road caravan stop. Its architecture is revered globally for fusing Roman and regional influences, including Syrian and Persian.

“There are images of Palmyra on the Syrian currency,” said Michael Danti, an archaeologist at Boston University who has advised the U.S. State Department on how to tackle the problem of artifact looting in Syria. “It was a commercial center that transcended differences and represents Syrian prosperity.”

“The Roman era was one of brilliance, wealth, and prosperity which left us with these ruins,” Mr. Abdulkarim said. Even in its darkest hours, “life never stopped in Palmyra.”

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