Archondia uses email only because her university department requires it. I get postcards from her once or twice a year with spiky old-fashioned writing, updating me on her travels and the intrigues of her life. So when I found a mass email from her in my inbox ten days ago, I knew it wasn’t good. She wrote:

It is with great sadness and shock that I write to you all with news of the murder of my friend, the archaeologist Dr. Khaled el Asaad, by ISIS militants yesterday. It breaks my heart that a man of such integrity, kindness and devotion has come to an end in this way. On a personal note, he will be remembered as a man who was very proud of his country, Syria, and the ancient legacy he was charged to keep and preserve. He loved intelligent inquiry and independent erudition; he loved life, his family and young scholars like myself who visited and worked with him and his colleagues. My prayers are with them all, especially his family.

Dr. Asaad, 83 years old, was beheaded on August 19, 2015, slaughtered in front of dozens in the public square of the ruined ancient city of Palmyra. Pictures posted online show a headless body hanging upside-down from one of the ancient columns. Erudite, cheerful, bespectacled, he was the sort of Arab the Islamic State loves to despise. For the past four decades, he had, by all accounts, been inseparable from Palmyra’s ancient ruins: he played the parts of director of antiquities and eager tour guide, at ease equally with visiting dignitaries and the Bedouins who have lived around Palmyra for centuries.

Captured with his son when Palmyra fell in May, he was tortured by militants eager to find the ancient treasures they were convinced he was hiding. His son tells us that the militants, far from satiated by the thousands of glass objects and minutely carved seals that had already been looted, demanded that Dr. Asaad help them to fill their coffers with ancient gold. When the old archaeologist refused to speak, they murdered him, turning his last minutes into a gruesome online spectacle.

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