Heraqla, between the dream of Harun Al Rashid and the nightmare of the looters

The archaeological site of Heraqla in Raqqa represents a particular example of the Abbasid architecture; the Caliph Harun Al Rashid started reconstructing it as a commemorative monument but after his death it was never completed. The Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums DGAM excavated in the site, constructed furnace to produce bricks similar to the ancient material for restorations and, most importantly, built storehouses to deposit the archaeological items revealed during many decades of local, international and joint excavations. These storehouses were inventoried once in 2003 by the author as a preliminary inventory to integrate them in a sophisticated database later. Regretfully, in 2013, some 100, armed looters robbed the storehouses. The present paper is the only documentation ever completed on Heraclea’s storehouses and aims to raise awareness about their importance, to encourage researchers to create a database of the looted objects to identify them, facilitate their recovering and restitution if they appear on the black market of antiquities, or at least prevent their circulation freely through sharing the database with INTERPOL and other authorities involved in fighting against illicit trafficking.