From the study of two archaeological sites in Syria and the thousands of objects they had delivered, specialists have attempted to assess the market value of these remains, to better understand the economic effects of looting in recent conflicts. in the Middle East.
Stigmas of the large-scale looting carried out by IS at the archaeological site of Doura Europos, Syria.
DAMAGES. “We are only just beginning to understand the toll of archaeological looting carried out by the Islamic State (IS*) “, declare the authors of an analysis published in February 2019 in the International Journal of Cultural Property (International Journal of Cultural Heritage), picked up by The Conversation , May 15, 2019. And for the first time, plausible amounts of damages suffered have been proposed from the study of two sites in Syria.
For several years, during the worst hours of this terrorist group's presence in the Middle East after it declared the caliphate in June 2014, its members looted on a large scale many archaeological sites in the region. And this in order to resell their loot and thus constitute a “war chest”. Unverifiable amounts of revenue generated by the looting of sites regularly made headlines in the press. “Isis [Anglo-Saxon name for ISIS]makes up to $100 million a year smuggling ancient remains from Iraq to Syria to sell them on the black market” , could we read in the magazine Newsweek , July 8, 2017; the figure of 36 million dollars had already been circulating since 2014, repeated at will, following an article published in the British daily The Guardian , based on misinterpreted information found on USB keys belonging to ISIS. Until the major international bodies which also struggled to establish amounts in the absence of real data.
An estimate of the market value using a database
To assess the plausible ranges that these sales could reach, it was still necessary to have precise information on what could have been looted. Four American academics, including two archaeologists, then had an innovative idea:to collect on databases the details of the known objects collected on the sites during archaeological excavations carried out in the XX e century in order to establish its market value.
Aerial view of the Doura Europos archaeological site in the 1930s. © Yale University Collection
To do this, they first selected two famous deposits looted during the Syrian conflict:Doura Europos , a Greco-Roman site of the III th century of our era, located on the Euphrates, in the south-east of Syria, as well as Tell Bi’a (Tuttul), dated 2 th millennium before our era, located in the north of the country. Since the 1920s, and excavations sponsored by Yale University (USA) and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, in Paris, archaeologists have been able to study almost 40% of the total area of the first where 12,398 objects were extracted and listed. As for the second, the surfaces explored had reached 10%, with 2,594 objects collected. The authors of the article are also interested in the art market. Using a machine learning algorithm, they analyzed the data generated by the sales of more than 41,587 objects offered in various international auction houses or art dealers, with a simple idea:to compare these antiquities with similar ones documented in the field by archaeologists. “Thus, based on our model, the total estimated value of all the remains excavated from Doura Europos, reaches the sum of 18 million dollars” , say the specialists. A figure that amounts to 4 million dollars for Tell Bi’a . Recalling that, in both cases, these estimates corresponded only to what had been found in the surfaces studied by the archaeologists. Comparing these results to the 3,000 looted deposits duly identified in Syria between 2011 and 2015 by archaeologist Jesse Casana, from the Department of Anthropology at Darmouth College (Great Britain), the co-signatories of the study concluded that “ even if all these sites did not have the potential of the two cases studied”, the model they had created was a significant step forward in establishing the amounts that could be reached through these abuses.
ISIS services dedicated to the looting and resale of objects
The authors recall that looting – carried out on a large scale by IS – is an ancient practice. “The Islamic State just escalated it ”, they specify. Internal IS documents discovered during a May 2015 raid by US special forces near Deir-ez Zor, Syria, show that the group had a “natural resources department” (Diwan al-Rikaz) responsible for this business. The terrorist group “classified antiquities as a natural resource alongside oil or minerals, a material to be extracted from the ground, to be exploited ”. Services were thus dedicated to “research” and the exploitation of sites using a permit system. During the American raid, a receipt book detailing the taxes levied was also found.
Archaeological looting, a global problem, increases tenfold during armed conflicts. It constitutes an irremediable loss of the memory of the world.
*EI for Islamic State, also known as ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Sham ), ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ) or Daesh
Doura Europos
Dura-Europos (or Dura Europos), in the south-east of Syria, was founded at the end of the IV
e
century BC by the Greek Seleucids. Taken over by the Parthians, at the end of the II
th
century before our era, before being conquered by the Romans, the city was conquered by the Sassanid Persians, in the III
th
century of our era. Important discoveries were made there in the 1920s and 1930s, during excavations sponsored by Yale University (USA) and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres in Paris. These included a sanctuary of the god Mithras, a synagogue whose walls were covered with painted biblical scenes, or one of the oldest known Christian churches. From 1986 to 2011, work was still carried out there by a Franco-Syrian team led by Pierre Leriche, research director at the CNRS. The city came under the control of the Islamic State terrorist group in Iraq and Syria in September 2014. The looting, which began in mid-2013, then became systematic and on a large scale.
Tell Bi'a Tell Bi'a (the old Tuttul), dates from the Bronze Age (late 2nd millennium BC) Near Raqqa, in northern Syria - headquarters of the terrorist group Islamic State until October 17, 2017 -, the site was excavated between 1980 and 1995 by a German team. A palace that had not yet had time to be studied as well as royal tombs from the early Bronze Age had been reported there. As early as October 2012, satellite images showed intense looting of the site.