Six years after he was murdered by Islamic State (IS), Khaled al-Asaad’s human remains were finally recovered on 7th February. The final days of the Syrian Director of Antiquities in Palmyra have an element of heroic mythology befitting the ancient city in which he worked. According to reports, IS tortured him to reveal where its famous funerary busts and rumoured gold treasure had been hidden. When he refused to say, he was beheaded in the city’s Roman theatre and a sign hung round his neck reading: “director of idolatry.”
Simon Schama, in the opening to the 2018 BBC reboot of Civilisations, described Palmyra’s capture by IS and Asaad’s death with customary rhetorical brio: “We can spend a lot of time debating what civilisation is or isn’t but when its opposite shows up, in all its brutality and cruelty and intolerance and lust for destruction, we know what civilisation is.”
But that wasn’t the whole story. Asaad’s son Mohammed told journalist Jeremy Bowen that the curator wasn’t killed for protecting precious artefacts, but for refusing to pledge allegiance to IS. Asaad is a hero for his defiance as a contemporary Syrian. He did in fact also defend Palmyra’s antiquities- along with Mohammed, he sent items to Damascus for safekeeping. But the Syrian government who employed him, which presents itself as a defender of the nation’s cultural heritage, cared little for what it received. Long before the IS takeover, Palmyrene objets d’art had been smuggled to Europe and ended up in London shop fronts.