History shattered

I tried to be phlegmatic about Islamic State's razing of Nimrud because like a child craving attention they do this to scandalise world opinion and to take the long view miminise the hurt they can do to you.  But the rolling tide of destruction they have brought is simply disturbing.  Relics from antiquity that had survived for hundreds or thousands of years in one of the world's most volatile regions, are being denied to humanity forever.  Now the ancient desert city of Palmyra has fallen into the maw of the fanatics and being abandoned before the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire may face the same fate as Nimrud.  Another archaelogical treasure lost on the watch of Obama but from reverberations created by the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
As Rome was temporarily brought to its knees in the mid-second century AD, Palmyra, hitherto a powerful client state of the Caesars, defeated first the revived Persians under the Sassanid dynasty and then conquered the entire Levant and Asia Minor from Rome.  Under the brilliant soldier-emperor Aurelian, the empire was reunified with Gallic separatists defeated and the Palmyran gains reversed, with its queen captured (it had been the assassination of her husband that had unleashed this desert fury).  In a stance of unusual leniency, Aurelian spared the city (while looting it of its treasures) and stationed a garrison of 300 archers as overseers.  Before long though the garrison was wiped out as Palmyra re-proclaimed its independence.  But there were to be no second chances and Aurelian, in implacable Roman tradition, destroyed the city pour encourager les autres to demonstrate fealty to Rome.
So it was the Romans who first visited annihilation on Palmyra and what is left is ruins created by them rather than time.  Yet what is left will be sold into private collections in the most optimistic scenario.  It was under the control of the Assad regime, which seems to prefer dropping barrel bombs on civilians than combatting Islamic State (augmenting its mendacious argument that it is fighting terrorists, which was not how it all started).  Assad could be sacrificing Palmyra to unify world opinion behind him.  The regime forces did no put up a fight - once the population of 70,000 had been evacuated the troops just pulled out.
After World War Two, several ravaged cities rebuilt themselves with original plans - Warsaw, Leningrad, Dresden and it is to be hoped in the distant future that some such reconstruction of Palmyra and Nimrud will occur in the future.  They won't be of the original stones carved by unknown craftsmen countless moons ago but they will reaffirm the past that others tried to erase.  After all, the timbers of HMS Victory have been replaced three times over but the ship itself remains a symbol for the history it helped forge.