ISIS militants routed Syrian government forces from the ancient city of Palmyra last week and now historians fear they will destroy a 2,000-year-old Hebrew script to obliterate the last remaining evidence of the area’s Jewish past.
“No harm has really happened to the ruins of Palmyra, until now,” Norwegian archaeologist Jergen Christian Meyer, who excavated the site, told The Times of Israel.
“What will happen now is quite another thing. What I fear now is that ISIS will also use the ruins in Palmyra in their psychological warfare, and that means the destruction of the place.”
Meyer was part of an excavation team at the UNESCO World Heritage site that includes a doorway with the first four lines of the “Shema,” a Jewish prayer from the book of Deuteronomy.
The Times says the ancient writing is “the longest biblical Hebrew inscription from antiquity.”
“They’re part of the limited, but clear, evidence of Jews at Palmyra,” Pennsylvania State University Prof. Tawny Holm told the newspaper.
She dated the work to before the sixth century.
Jewish lore attributes the city’s construction to King Solomon, a legend that’s disputed by experts. But as late as the 12th century, 2,000 Jews lived in Palmyra, or Tadmor in Hebrew, and
Miriam of Palmyra is mentioned in the Talmud.
In Israel, two tombs outside Haifa dating from the third century identify the occupants as the interred sons of Palmyra residents.
Palmyra was one of the Roman Empire’s most important trading posts, located at the nexus between the East and West. It was a wealthy desert outpost fed by underground springs. Other ruins
include the Temple of Bel and a colonnaded thoroughfare.
Perhaps the only thing saving the artifact from marauding ISIS terrorists is the belief among some scholars that it may already have been destroyed or sold on the black market.
An Israeli scholar last documented its existence in the 1930s.
“What may have happened to it since is anyone’s guess,” said Professor David Noy, author of a book about Jewish inscriptions in the Near East.
ISIS has wiped out other historical treasures in places like Hatra and Mosul in Iraq as part of its campaign to grab international headlines while practicing a version of Islam that advocates the smashing of false idols.
