PALMYRA WATCH: Russia's Hermitage Museum offers help to restore Palmyra (AFP). The Hermitage Museum has a large collection of artifacts from Palmyra, including sculptures and some stone inscriptions in Aramaic ("Palmyrene") and Greek.
It is still very early days and it will take a while just to get a clear idea of what needs to be done. To illustrate the current flux, note that the director of the Hermitage Museum, Mikhail Piotrovsky, said that up to 70% of the site may have been damaged or destroyed. But according to another article posted yesterday by Bel Trew for the London Times, unnamed (in the part of the article that is public) "top archaeologists" have said that 80% of the site is still standing. Of course, both statements could be true, depending on the actual details.
Watch this space.
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