Civilizations

(explosive boom) -

Narrator

In 2015, the great Syrian trading city of Palmyra was attacked by ISIS, the world feared its treasures would be destroyed, as ISIS had already done in the ancient Iraqi city of Mosul. (light sinister music) Much of Palmyra's legacy of centuries, of Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs and Jews was reduced to rubble in a matter of hours. Some precious artifacts escaped the destruction, even before the Syrian Civil War and the appearance of ISIS, because of looters. This bust was impounded by Swiss customs and sent to a museum in Geneva for safe keeping. But in Palmyra itself, those who devoted their lives to preserving these objects were not all so fortunate, Khaled al-Asaad, the retired local director of the museum was 81, when ISIS seized the city. (light haunting music) He refused to say where he had hidden the city's treasures, for that crime, ISIS beheaded him in the Roman Theater. (light haunting music) His mutilated body was suspended from a traffic light, his head was placed between his feet and above his body hung a sign identifying him as Director of Idolatry, the title he deserved was Protector of Civilization. A lot of us spend our days talking about art, I doubt if very many of us are prepared to lay down our life for it, but for Khaled al-Asaad, the stones and statues and columns of Palmyra were more than simply an ensemble of antiquity, they were the expression of what the creative imagination could do to make a city home. (light haunting music) We can spend a lot of time debating what civilization is or it isn't, but when it's opposite shows up in all its brutality and cruelty and intolerance and lust for destruction, we know what civilization is, we know it from the shock of its imminent loss as a mutilation on the body of our humanity.