Looters attack Libyan ruins

— -- Once a major city of the ancient world, Cyrene, today rests in ruins in Libya. Now open again to the world, the site is victimized by looters, the bane of archaeologists everywhere.

Governed at different times by Greek colonists, Egyptian lords and Roman emperors, Cyrene's rulers included Alexander the Great, Marc Antony and Cleopatra. In "one of the great catastrophes of history," according to a 1981 International Council on Monuments and Sites report, the city was finally conquered by an earthquake and tidal wave in 365 A.D.

The city was founded around 440 B.C. by Greek colonists from Thera, the island best known for the eruption of the volcano Santorini around 1600 B.C. The eruption is thought to have destroyed the Minoan civilization and perhaps inspired the legend of Atlantis.

Earlier this month, Iason Athanasiadis, an experienced cultural reporter who has covered stories throughout the Middle East, reported on looting at Cyrene for The National, a publication in the United Arab Emirates. A World Heritage Site, the looting of Cyrene and nearby sites "has accelerated since 2003, with an unprecedented gutting of Libya's ancient heritage sites ," he wrote.

For this column, I had hoped to talk to Iason, 30, about his reporting from Libya. However on June 17, he was detained in Tehran, where he had reported on events there, while trying to board a plane out of Iran. So, his reporting will have to speak for him.