When a minaret dating from the twelfth century was toppled in the
fighting between rebels and government forces in Aleppo, Syria, earlier
this spring, we recognized that more than a building had been lost. The
destruction of irreplaceable artifacts—like the massive Buddha statues
dynamited in the Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan in 2001 and the ancient
texts burned and looted in Iraq in 2003—leaves us less equipped to
understand ourselves and where we came from, less able to enlarge
ourselves with the awe and pleasure that these creations once evoked.
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