Museum of Lost Objects: The Lion of al-Lat
- March 4, 2016
Two thousand years ago a statue of a lion watched over a temple in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra. More recently, after being excavated in the 1970s, it became an emblem of the city and a favourite with tourists. But it was one of the first things IS militants destroyed when they moved in last year.
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| Michal Gawlikowski and the late Khaled al-Asaad, Palmyra's director of antiquities |
It's said that there are more than 300 words for lion in Arabic. That's a measure of the importance of the lion in the history of the Middle East. For Bedouin tribes, the lion represented the biggest danger in the wild - until the last one in the region died, some time in the 19th Century.
The animal was feared and admired and this must explain why a statue of a lion twice as high as a human being, weighing 15 tonnes, was fashioned by artists in ancient Palmyra.With spiralling, somewhat loopy eyes, and thick whiskers swept back angrily along its cheek bones, the lion was clearly a fighter, but it was also a lover. In between its legs, it held a horned antelope. The antelope stretched a delicate hoof over the lion's monstrous paws, and perhaps it was safe. The lion was a symbol of protection - it was both marking and protecting the entrance to the temple.
But no-one could protect the lion when IS arrived and wrecked it in May 2015.
"It was a real shock, because you know, in a way, it was our lion," says Polish archaeologist Michal Gawlikowski, whose team unearthed it in 1977.
