In 2015, ISIS captured Palmyra and demanded its head of antiquities reveal where the treasures were hidden.
He was 81 years old. He refused.
Khaled al-Asaad had spent over 50 years excavating and protecting Palmyra, the caravan city that once rivalled Rome in the Syrian desert.
He learned Aramaic to read its inscriptions. He raised his children among its ruins and named his daughter Zenobia, after its rebel queen.
Before the city fell, he helped evacuate hundreds of artefacts to safety. ISIS interrogated him for weeks to find them. But he gave them nothing.
They executed him in the square and left his body among the columns he had spent his life defending.
Archaeology is not a soft profession. Sometimes the people who guard the past die for it.