A team of Polish archaeologists under Dr. Michał Gawlikowski unearthed a unique limestone statute of a lion in the ancient city of Palmyra in 1977. Placed for years outside the Palmyra museum, the three-meter high 15-tonne sculpture was destroyed by IS forces in May 2015.

At the time, the Director General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, firmly condemned this action as it “reflect the brutality and ignorance of extremist groups and their disregard of local communities and of the Syrian people.”

Paying tribute to these lost objects, BBC Radio 4 has created a series presenting 10 different objects destroyed by the fundamentalists and their value to humanity. One of these objects is the Lion of al-Lat.

Unlike most lions that are associated with male power, this 1900 years old statute was a lioness. She represented the goddess al-Lat, a pre-Islamic deity of a religion spread across Mesopotamia and the Arab peninsula, also associated with Ishtar. She was the goddess of war, but also of sex and love outside marriage.

Al-Lat was one of the three chief goddesses of Mecca along with Manat and al-Uzza, before the coming of Islam.  Originally, the lioness stood outside Palmyra’s famous Temple of Bel, which was built six centuries before the coming of Islam.  The Temple of Bel, as a whole, was also demolished by IS forces.

Apparently, there are approximately 30 different names to refer to the lion in Arabic, a culture in which the lion is revered as a symbol.

Osama, for example, is one of the 30 Arabic names for lion. And although it is not a symbol associated with Islam, Arabic names of men are often allusions to a lion: Al-Assad and al Wahhish – names and nicknames associated with the Syrian regime – mean “the lion” and “the beast.” Apparently, Saddam Hussein also depicted himself as an Assyrian king in a lion hunt, shooting down American missiles.

What remains of al-Lat the lioness is a mould, created in Germany, when the sculpture had been taken to Germany for an exhibition in the early 1990s.

Gradually, the world is reclaiming a part of the global heritage destroyed by IS in 2015, with the help of modern technology.

London and New York City will unveil replicas of the Temple of Bel arch that was destroyed by Islamic State (ISIS) in the ancient city of Palmyra, in Syria in London’s Trafalgar Square and New York’s Time Square. The 2,000 year old Temple of Bal temple (Baalshamin) made part of the Greco-Roman city of Palmyra, a UNESCO world heritage site, once referred to as “the Pearl of the Desert.”

Harvard University, the University of Oxford and Dubai’s Museum of the Future, are cooperating to reproduce the arch from various photographs, using 3D-prinnting technology.

By NEOnline | IR