Cultural Treasures Destroyed By ISIS
March 2, 2015
Colossal statue of a winged lion (lamassu) from the palace at Nimrud of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II. He reigned from 883 B.C. to 859 B.C. The photo was taken in around 1860. (Credit: © Shutterstock)
Last week, the terrorist organization Islamic State (ISIS) posted a video to YouTube showing members from the group destroying ancient art works at a museum in Mosul, Iraq. ISIS has held the town of Mosul since June 2014. Some of the artifacts destroyed by ISIS were plaster-cast reproductions of art works in the British Museum in London. Other pieces destroyed on the February 26 video, however, were original and many thousands of years old.
Some of the pieces destroyed were statues from Hatra, a walled city established in the 200′s B.C. It was under the influence of the Parthian Empire and is today a UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Other pieces were from the the Assyrian Empire, including huge winged bulls with human heads that guarded the entrance to Nineveh, the last capital of the Assyrians. The 9-ton statues were from the 600′s B.C. Examples of such statues, which are called lamassu, and are meant to protect against evil. The figures may be either winged bulls or winged lions. Such statues can be seen at the British Museum, the Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the Oriental Institute in Chicago.
ISIS’s destruction of ancient artifacts that its members believe to be “idols” (images of false gods) is not a unique event. Other groups have done the same. In 2001, the Taliban destroyed a pair of enormous Buddhas carved into a cliff at Bamiyan, near Kabul in Afghanistan.
It is not always the case that people destroy the art of religions other than their own. In the 700′s, the Eastern Christian Church was divided concerning the reverence, or veneration, given to religious art. At that time, a group known as the Iconoclasts covered or destroyed Christian religious art—especially icons—within the Byzantine Empire.
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