Two Ruins, Two Lessons

Two sets of ancient ruins—the graceful temple columns rising against the backdrop of shimmering desert sands in honor of the Mesopotamian god Bel, and a Persian mountain fortress containing a possible Zoroastrian fire altar—these disparate places, one in modern Syria and one in northern Afghanistan, reveal two sides of modern archaeology.

First, we still feel the allure of beautiful and exotic locations that connect us to the past. No less than the artists of the Renaissance or the nineteenth century explorers of Egypt and Greece, we still believe that an essential key to human understanding lies in the grandeur of our ancestors, although we have included a wider range of cultures as sources of our admiration. We have at least partly outgrown our patronizing view of Greece as the source for all great Western ideas. (If we would entirely abandon the “Western” vs. “Eastern” dichotomy in our thinking about the ancient world, we would gain a much more accurate view of the millennia Before the Common Era.)

The Persian fortress claimed a staring roll in the latest issue of Archaeology partly because the French archaeologist Frantz Grenet has interpreted a large free-standing altar enclosed within the remains of one of its buildings as a Zoroastrian fire altar, an idea that undermines the traditional view of the Zoroastrian faith as one celebrated without temples, a notion that dates back to the Greek historian Herodotus.

Much about the Zoroastrian faith remains a mystery, but we do know it left powerful influences on Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam. Unlike earlier centuries, modern explorers of the ancient world are intrigued with the idea that the predominant faiths of the world have some common sources and shared influences. We also love our iconic heroes from the past and seek to know more about them—rather like modern celebrity chasing. This rocky fortress guarding the Silk Route may also have been the location where Alexander the Great married Roxanna—an Afghan princess who bore the short-lived, bigger-than-life general his only son. The ruins themselves may be, as my children once complained to me at a different site, very “ruined ruins,” but they still have a romantic whiff about them, an exotic flavor we yearn to taste more of.

The article in the Wall Street Journal about the Syrian temple of Bel in Palmyra opens with this description:
“Each night at sunset, the ‘bride of the desert,’ as she has been known for centuries, gets dressed for her wedding. In those last moments of daylight, she dons a robe of stunning colors—the buttery yellow of her limestone columns mixing with the blue shadows of her temples and the soft pinks of the desert floor.”
Lovely! and as seductive a description of carved stone as I’ve found. Do we doubt that for the writer, Christian C. Sahner, ancient ruins have a romantic appeal? There is nothing frivolous or inconsequential about such romanticized feelings for the ancient world. If we were not drawn backwards by such sensibilities to study the past, to treasure and preserve it, what a dreary and disastrously foolish world we would be doomed to live in.

But one chapter of Palmyra’s past is illustrative both of our desire to explore a heroic, admirable, intriguing past and, sadly, it also illustrates the second, shorter point I want to make.

Palmyra’s Queen Zenobia decided to shuck off her Roman overlords between 267 and 274 C.E. She created her own empire stretching approximately from modern Turkey to Egypt, until the Romans took notice, crushed her armies, and dragged this “second Cleopatra” to Rome in golden chains. It’s hard not to admire someone who, while clearly foolhardy and dangerously ambitious, nonetheless had a clear sense of the importance of independence and freedom from tyranny. Let’s not forget the Romans definitely had a tyrannical side, for all their virtuous building of roads and aqueducts and their helpful philosophical ideas. So Zenobia appeals to me and to many others.

Interestingly, this notion of off-throwing imperialist tyrants has not escaped the founders of modern Syria and the formulators of Arab nationalism, although their implementation of this idea seems to have gone horrifically askew. Her portrait appears on Syrian money and her role in history is used to support the Syrian state in a variety of popular culture forms. Surely the irony of this has struck you by now.

So what’s my second idea that both these archaeological sites demonstrate? How dangerous archaeology is in parts of the world for reasons that have nothing to do with mosquitoes, bad water, caved in excavations, or whatever logical sources of danger archaeologists used to face.

I read the opening description of the temple of Bel and I immediately daydreamed about going to see it. I glanced through the article, trying to remember where ancient Palmyra was. Syria, darn. Can’t go there. Quite possibly for a long time, although we’ll all hope it will be a short time.

And then I read the description of what the French team digging the Persian fort in Afghanistan go through. “The road to the site from the closest major city, Mazar-i-Sharif, is not always secure, and the archaeologists working there must be gone well before nightfall. The deteriorating security situation in northern Afghanistan is forcing the excavators to fly into Mazar-i-Sharif from Kabul rather than drive the route across the Hindu Kush. On top of that, winter comes early in this region. All these factors limit the amount of actual excavation time.” Geeze! And I thought uncovering mudbrick walls was slow when all you had to worry about was using a tiny brush so as not to destroy any essential traces of history in the process.

So, if you want to explore either of these fascinating ancient places, you will have to do it by reading these two excellent articles:

“Temple of the ‘Bride of the Desert’” by Christian C. Sahner from the Wall Street Journal

“Edge of an Empire: An ancient Afghan fortress offers rare evidence of Persia’s forgotten eastern territories” and “Seeking Zoroastrianism’s Roots” by Andrew Lawler from Archaeology Magazine