A team of digital-age “monuments men” are to launch an unprecedented fightback against the destruction of ancient sites in the Middle East by Islamic State.
Archaeologists at Oxford and Harvard will flood the region with 3D cameras in a plan to create a full digital record of every threatened artefact.
If the treasures they photograph are destroyed by Isis, the academics will harness 3D printing technology to reconstruct them in the same style as the original antiquities.
The plan was revealed to The Times after the obliteration by Isis of the 2,000-year-old temple of Baal Shamin in Palmyra in Syria this week — the latest action in the worst spate of archaeological destruction since the Second World War.
In a letter from the Oxford-based Institute for Digital Archaeology, which conceived the £2 million project, the group said it aimed to “flood the Middle East with thousands of low-cost 3D cameras and enlist local partners to photograph as many items of historical significance as possible”.
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The institute, working with the heritage body Unesco, aims to gather five million images of antiquities, from sprawling Mesopotamian palaces to handfuls of coins and pottery, by the end of the year. In a race against the bulldozers and sledgehammers of Isis, it plans to compile 20 million pictures of objects before 2017.
“Palmyra is rapidly becoming the symbol of Isis’s cultural iconoclasm,” Roger Michel, the institute’s director, said. “If Isis is permitted to wipe the slate clean and rewrite the history of a region that defined global aesthetic and political sensibilities, we will collectively suffer a costly and irreversible defeat.
“But there is hope. By placing the record of our past in the digital realm, it will lie for ever beyond the reach of vandals and terrorists.”
The institute was founded with the aim of compiling a record of classical inscriptions in the Middle East. However, it has turned into an archaeological emergency service, trying to save artefacts from Isis, which is set on destroying anything it considers heretical.
The Islamists justify the destruction of ancient religious sites by claiming that they are eradicating sorcery, apostasy or idolatry.
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Recent attacks on holy sites began in March 2001 when Taliban fighters in Afghanistan destroyed two statues of Buddha carved into the hills of Bamiyan.
From the end of next month the Institute for Digital Archaeology will distribute hundreds of internet-enabled 3D cameras through archaeo- logy networks in Iraq. It plans to expand into Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan and eastern Turkey.
To provide a complete record, each object will need to be photographed from several angles. The information can then be uploaded to an open-source database online.
Mr Michel said that the objects would be displayed on a website that could provide a resource for academics and the public, as well as a database for police forces seeking to track stolen antiquities. The data will be held at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.
“It will include GPS data and dates,” Mr Michel said. “If someone is selling an object and says it was obtained in Syria in the 1930s we will know that was not the case because in 2015 it was at longitude X and latitude Y.”
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Alexy Karenowska, a physicist at Magdalen College, Oxford, helped to design the cameras, costing as little as £20 each. “We want to do a sweep, as fast and as much as we can, using simple technology for images at multiple angles in a single shot,” she said.
Robert Bewley, an expert in the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa unit at Oxford University, said: “The fundamental concept that we should be cataloguing what we can is a good concept.”