ISIS destroys part of Palmyra's Roman Theatre

Militants from the Islamic State group have destroyed part of the Roman Theatre in the ancient city of Palmyra.

Syria's antiquities chief said the tetrapylon - a group of four pillared structures which were mainly modern replicas - has also been ruined.

The jihadists recaptured the Unesco-listed archaeological site in December from government troops.

The head of the UN cultural body said the destruction was "a new war crime".

Its director general, Irina Bokova, said what she described as "cultural cleansing by violent extremists" had resulted in "an immense loss for the Syrian people and for humanity".

IS destroyed other monuments after it first seized Palmyra in May 2015.

The group held the site and nearby city known locally as Tadmur for 10 months.

The militants were forced out by a Russian-backed government offensive in March 2016, but regained control while pro-government forces where focused on battling for the city of Aleppo late last year.

Maamoun Abdulkarim, the head of the Syrian government's Antiquities Department, told the Associated Press that reports of the latest destruction first trickled out of Palmyra late in December, and then satellite images which became available late on Thursday confirmed it.

The US-based American Schools of Oriental Research posted the images on its Facebook page, saying only two of the tetrapylon's columns remain, and the monument appeared to have been intentionally destroyed using explosives.

Only one of the structure's columns is original, as the others were rebuilt in 1963.

On Thursday, a monitoring group said IS militants had beheaded four people and shot eight others dead outside a museum close to the archaeological site.

The militants have previously carried out killings in the Roman Theatre.

When they first held the archaeological site, they blew up temples, burial towers and the Arch of Triumph, believing shrines and statues to be idolatrous.

They also destroyed the Temple of Bel - the great sanctuary of the Palmyrene gods - which had been one of the most important religious buildings of the 1st Century AD in the East.

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ISIS destroys part of Palmyra's Roman Theatre

At a Roman villa buried by Vesuvius, archaeologists are uncovering walls covered with frescoes.

An archaeologist perches on scaffolding in the triclinium. Some of the room’s walls are preserved to their full height of nearly 18 feet, while others were toppled, likely by the force of the eruption of Vesuvius almost 40 miles away.

Once we reach the spot, you won’t believe your eyes,” says archaeologist Luciana Jacobelli of the University of Molise as she opens a small door to the crypt of the church of Santa Maria Assunta in the center of town. It’s very dim inside, and she has to use a flashlight as we make our way. We slowly climb down a series of ladders through a forest of iron scaffolding toward what seems to be the only well-lit area, nearly 30 feet under the church. Jacobelli then leads me into a room and, as promised, frescoes in dazzling green, yellow, red, and blue seem to illuminate the space on their own. We have arrived at the extraordinarily well-preserved remains of a lavish villa marittima, or seaside villa, once a luxurious retreat for the rich of ancient Rome to escape the summer heat and the hustle and bustle of city life in the first centuries B.C. and A.D.

Swiss architect and engineer Karl Weber, the first scholar to supervise excavations of the areas destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, appears to have seen the villa on April 16, 1758, during his explorations. In his field report he writes that he had begun to dig near the “church with bell tower, not far from the beach that is at the base of Mount Santa Maria a Castelli and Mount Sant’Angelo; at a depth of 30 spans we found a famous ancient building whose first mosaic is made of white and fine marble.”

Cupids riding sea monsters and dolphins, rendered in stucco, pull an elegant green drape on the frescoed wall of a newly re-excavated Roman villa in Positano. The use of figural stucco is rare in domestic contexts, appearing more commonly in public spaces such as baths.

It was only during restoration work on the crypt in 2003 that archaeologists had a chance to enter the villa’s stunning triclinium, or dining room, for the first time. But after only three years of digging, they were forced to stop when funding ran out, and it wasn’t until the summer of 2015 that excavations resumed. For the rest of the year, before funding for the project ran out again, Jacobelli led a rescue excavation under the supervision of the local archaeological superintendent, Adele Campanelli, and archaeological supervisor Maria Antonietta Iannelli. A team of archaeologists and conservators worked to remove mud and lapilli (small stones ejected by a volcanic eruption) and to expose and clean the stunning wall paintings emerging from the debris.

A fragment of the Positano villa’s vibrant fresco wall painting

Thanks to an ancient system of artificial terraces cut into the hillside on which Positano sits, the villa may have sprawled across more than 2.25 acres. Some scholars think that it might even have been as large as the town of Positano. Mantha Zarmakoupi of the University of Birmingham, an expert on the ancient Roman luxury villas of the Bay of Naples, disagrees. “I can imagine that the villa was perched on a terraced platform with ramps leading to other terraces below, and may have stretched over two or more levels in the hillside, as houses do today, but I don’t think that it would have occupied the entire village,” she says.What isn’t in doubt, however, is the excellence of the frescoes covering the villa’s walls. “The quality of the wall paintings is very high, and the triclinium’s decorative program seems unique,” says Zarmakoupi. “The combination of frescoes with stucco is rare and remarkable. The rendering of details in stucco, for example in the figures both holding and decorating the drapery, accentuates the feeling that the cloth is actually pliable.”

The villa’s owner commissioned the finest artists to create expertly painted images of fantastical architecture.

In addition to the magnificent paintings, in a hole opened in the layer of volcanic debris under the triclinium’s northern wall, archaeologists unearthed a pile of oxidized jars, cups, and dishes that formed a set of silver intended for a symposium—just the type of conversational gathering that would have taken place between the villa’s owner and his important guests.

In addition to painted walls, archaeologists have also found fragments of painted plaster that once decorated the triclinium’s moldings.

Local administrators hope to open the property to the public and are planning a transparent footbridge over the site. This will allow visitors to get a small taste of the luxe life as it was almost 2,000 years ago.

At a Roman villa buried by Vesuvius, archaeologists are uncovering walls covered with frescoes.

Archaeological Victims of ISIS Rise Again, as Replicas in Rome

A statue of a human-headed winged bull from the Northwest Palace in Nimrud, Iraq, that was bulldozed by the Islamic State last year to great outcry has been faithfully recreated using modern technology and put on exhibit at the Colosseum in Rome to spur discussion of the possible reconstruction of war-torn archaeological sites.

Full-scale reconstructions were also made of two damaged Syrian sites: the archive room of Ebla and a portion of a ceiling from the Temple of Bel in Palmyra, as examples of how conflict can devastate a nation’s fragile heritage.

“Nimrud was the first place to be destroyed,” said Frances Pinnock, the co-director of the Ebla expedition, the most important Italian archaeological expedition to Syria. “It was a palace known as the Versailles of the ancient Near East, and so it was chosen because it was symbolic.”

“We included Ebla because it represents abandonment, what happens to a site when a mission is no longer present to protect it,” said Ms. Pinnock, who is a member of the scientific committee for the exhibit.

“And Palmyra is a wound” and a place of violent murders, not just of Khalid al-Asaad, the retired chief of antiquities for Palmyra, who was killed in August 2015, three months after the Islamic State took the city, “but of more than a dozen employees, killed in brutal ways only because they tried to protect the heritage,” Ms. Pinnock said.

Though the violence in the Middle East continues, archaeologists and officials from various international organizations continue to explore various options for the reconstruction of archaeological sites in Syria and Iraq once the fighting has abated.

“There’s a lot of discussion over how to reconstruct what is lost,” said Stefano De Caro, the director general of the International Center for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, based in Rome, who is also on the scientific committee. “This is one proposal combining technical documentation and manual skill.”

This is not the first attempt to resurrect ancient art from the ashes of war.

Last month, a replica of an ancient arch from Palmyra, destroyed a year ago, was erected in City Hall Park in New York. That model was made using 3-D scanning, but it is smaller than the original, and less finished, some officials here suggested.

The Italian models are one-to-one reconstructions based on extensive documentation of various kinds. After being created using 3-D printing techniques, the reproductions were then covered with a layer of plastic material mixed with stone powder and finished by hand to replicate the original as closely as possible.

Ms. Pinnock noted that the restorer based in Florence who completed the Nimrud statue even included scratches on the surface, “to give the sense of passing time.”

Such minute detail was possible because the restorer worked from high-definition photographs taken by United States military officers and later stored in Mosul, she said. “We have shown that scientifically it is possible to do good work.”

The Ebla reconstruction was accomplished by a company based in Rome that specializes in film sets and props, while the Bel temple ceiling was made by a company in Ferrara that already works in casting copies.

“These aren’t just isolated objects,” but markers of a civilization’s “history, context and value,” brought alive “thanks to Italian know how,” said Francesco Rutelli, a former mayor of Rome and culture minister and the driving force behind the exhibit. “This is also an Italian story that you see here today.”

On display are also two marble busts from the museum in Palmyra that were damaged during the 10-month occupation by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. “We baptized them the war-wounded of Palmyra,” Mr. Rutelli said.

The badly damaged sculptures were brought to Italy so that they could be restored, making an arduous journey from Damascus to Rome via Beirut, Lebanon.

“The only artifacts to leave Syria have been part of the illicit trafficking trade, but these came out with an accord,” Mr. Rutelli said.

Even though it is “very rare during a conflict that a corridor for culture opens,” he said, Damascus cultural officials had allowed the sculptures to travel because they knew the pieces would be in good hands, and on display in a prestigious spot where the plight of Syrian art would reach many.

“The Colosseum is the most visited site in our country,” Francesco Prosperetti, the art official responsible for Rome’s main archaeological area, said in a statement.

It was chosen to give maximum visibility to a “global message on the importance of cultural heritage and its value as part of national identity, on the need to protect it, preserve it, restore it and in some cases rebuild it,” he said.

Archaeological Victims of ISIS Rise Again, as Replicas in Rome