Experts to take 3D photos of artefacts at risk from Isil

OXFORD and Harvard experts plan to take 3D photographs of every artefact under threat from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in an attempt to prevent thousands of years of history being lost.

The initiative, which has been compared to the work of the “Monuments Men” in the Second World War, comes against a backdrop of widespread destruction by jihadists.

Some artefacts from the looting have turned up on the black market and experts have also developed sophisticated computer programs to hunt them down.

Archeologists plan to flock to the area and take 3D images of every artefact under threat. Should the artefacts be destroyed, the images would be used to make a replica. The latest piece of wanton destruction saw the obliteration of the 2,000-year-old temple of Baal Shamin in Palmyra, Syria, by Isil.

Saving the antiquities, or at least reconstructing them, will cost around £2 million. Thousands of cheap 3D cameras will be sent to the areas most under threat, The Times reported. As many as 20 million images by 2017 could be compiled by the Oxford-based Institute for Digital Archaeology (IDA), which is working with Unesco.

Roger Michel, the institute’s director, said: “If Isil 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.”