The carved basalt lions and winged sphinxes of an Iron Age temple in Syrian have been devastated by a Turkish air strike. Forces fighting Kurdish separatists groups in the north-west of country bombed an area that included the Ain Dara archeological site. The damaged statues were nearly 3,000 years old. Jonathan Tubb, the British Museum’s keeper of the Middle East told The Art Newspaper, ‘the loss is as great as that suffered at Palmyra, a site of comparable importance.’ The bomb landed near the entrance to the site, where two giant one-metre-long footprints carved into the stone lie. Their fate is not know.
31 January 2018
