With jihadis at the door, Syrians rush to rescue history

In a week of furious work in summer heat, tired and dehydrated from the Ramadan fast, the head of antiquities in Deir el-Zour province and his staff packed up most of the contents of the museum in the provincial capital.

Thousands of fragile clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform writing, including administrative records, letters and business deals that provide a glimpse at life nearly 4,000 years ago in the Semitic kingdom of Mari.

Over the weekend, Syrian government forces recaptured Palmyra from the militants and discovered they had trashed the city museum, smashing statues and looting relics — though fortunately about 400 pieces had been hidden away by antiquities officials before the IS takeover.

[...] the 2,500 archaeologists, specialists, curators and engineers with Syria's antiquities department, including some who defected to join the opposition, have often risked death to protect what they can.

Guards at archaeological digs and other sites in areas now under IS control secretly keep tabs on the ruins and feed Abdulkarim photo updates on WhatsApp.

There the danger was from government airstrikes, so they erected a sandbag barrier with financial and logistical support from former antiquities directorate chief Amr al-Azm, who sided with the opposition.

In 2014, with EU funding, the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO began training Syrian staff in storing artifacts and helped establish a nationwide system to document their inventory.

A vital crossroads throughout history, Syria holds a legacy from multiple civilizations that traded, invaded and built cities across its territory — the Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians of ancient Mesopotamia, various Semitic kingdoms, the Romans and Byzantines, and then centuries of Islamic dynasties.

Upriver is Dura Europos, a city that grew under Roman rule in the early centuries A.D. — and its ruins revealed evidence of perhaps the earliest use of chemical warfare, when Parthian invaders apparently used sulfuric smoke to smother Roman defenders during a siege.