History

The temple of Ain Dara was built by the rulers of a Syro-Hittite city-state around 1300 BC, during the early Iron Age. Syro-Hittite culture emerged in northern Syria and southeastern Turkey after the collapse of the Hittite Empire around 1200 BC — a fusion of Hittite artistic and religious traditions with local Aramaic-speaking populations. The temple form — a rectangular sanctuary with a columned portico and an inner holy of holies (the debir) — is architecturally similar to the Temple of Solomon described in 1 Kings, and several scholars have used Ain Dara as a physical analogue for understanding biblical temple architecture, though the parallels are typological rather than direct.

The temple was dedicated to a goddess (most likely Ishtar, the Semitic goddess of love and war) and was in continuous use for approximately 550 years, with multiple rebuilding phases visible in the stratigraphy. During this period it accumulated its extraordinary sculptural programme: stone lions and sphinxes guarding the entrances, carved basalt orthostats lining the outer walls with images of gods, monsters, and divine attendants, and — most distinctively — the pair of metre-long footprints carved into the courtyard basalt.

The footprints narrate a divine arrival. The left foot appears first, near the entrance to the outer courtyard. Twenty metres later, as you approach the inner porch, the right foot appears. The story told by the threshold is that a divine being descends from the sky, lands in the outer courtyard, and walks into the inner sanctuary. No other ancient temple anywhere in the world has anything comparable. The feet are barefoot, anatomically realistically carved, and the toes are clearly delineated.

The Assyrians sacked and burned the temple around 740 BC during the campaigns of Tiglath-Pileser III, and the site was never reoccupied as a religious centre. It passed into agricultural use and then silence. Excavations began in the 1980s under Syrian archaeologist Ali Abu Assaf and continued into the 2000s.

On 20 January 2018, during the Turkish military Operation Olive Branch against Kurdish YPG forces in Afrin, a Turkish airstrike hit the temple mound. Analysis of before-and-after satellite imagery by ASOR Cultural Heritage Initiatives (published April 2018) showed approximately 40% of the site destroyed — the entire northwestern section obliterated, including structural elements, some orthostats, and the northern retaining wall. The giant carved lions at the entrance and the divine footprints in the southern threshold courtyard appear to have survived. International condemnation followed, but no accountability process was initiated. The site remains inaccessible.