Why Violent Islamists Assault Antiquity

Townhall.com ^ | April 13, 2016 | Austin Bay

[Verginius Rufus]

Ctesiphon (also spelled Ktesiphon) was a city on the left bank of the Tigris River opposite Seleucia. It is first mentioned in the sources in 221 B.C. The geographer Strabo (1st century BC) mentions it as a large village which served as the winter residence of the kings of Parthia. Tacitus in the Annals calls it sedes imperii (seat of empire).

It was captured by Trajan in A.D. 116 (during the brief Roman conquest of Mesopotamia), destroyed in 165 during Lucius Verus' Parthian War (he was co-emperor with Marcus Aurelius), destroyed more thoroughly by Septimius Severus in 197, then more strongly fortified. In the 220s the Sassanid Persian Empire replaced the Parthian Empire. In 283 the Roman emperor Carus briefly captured Ctesiphon, but in 363 Julian the Apostate had to break off his siege. It remained the capital of the Sassanid Empire until the Arab conquest in 637. It lost importance after that and especially after Baghdad was founded in 762.

This is all from the article "Ktesiphon" by Konrat Ziegler in Der Kleine Pauly. There are ruins of the Sassanid palace still standing.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Thank you for that historic roundup. Although murder, torture and rape are the worst crimes of ISIS, I think the destruction of history/culture is right up there because it eradicates something essentially human: a rooted sense of identity.

Without our personal, family, regional, religious and national histories, we are easily turned into android robots, which is what ISIS (and the Wahhabis in general) do to their captives/devotees.

We should learn this from the Jews: your history is your identity. Lose it, and you lose who you are.

[Texan5]

You are both entitled to your opinions-as am I-and I disagree with any destruction of historical places/monuments/writings, etc, etc such as you advocate-not only it a waste of places to study for insight to the past, it is making revisionist history, too-and isn’t that what we know ISIS terrorists-and socialists and communists-do? We bitch about it on threads here all the time, so why promote a version of that same insanity?

As for Hitler-from what I’ve read, not only did he devastate Poland’s landmarks, he made one hell of an attempt to obliterate a lot of the landmarks of importance to Britain’s history as well by dropping bombs. My Brit neighbor said her dad told her about having worked on one of the crews doing restoration/repair of those sites in and around London when he was 18 or so. Fortunately, most were restored to their original state.

Just because Hitler only tried-but didn’t succeed in totally destroying historical structures does not mean he wasn’t a madman or a monster, and no different from ISIS.

According to history, it appears that whoever was ruling what is now Germany during the last few centuries has made their first statement of conquest/power by marching on Poland-no wonder there were so many immigrants from that part of Europe-whether you were one of those ordered off your fields to march, or one those whose fields were marched upon, it wasn’t a healthy place to be...