The World Heritage Committee, an apparatus of the United Nations (UN), has moved to protect ancient or unique sites in countries including Iran, China, Ethiopia, Azerbaijan and the Palestinian territory of the West Bank.
The committee, which is made up of representatives from 21 member states and is part of the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), is currently meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for its 45th session. Representatives agreed on Sunday 17 September to inscribe 13 new sites on the list and approve the extension of two existing ones. The session has been underway since 10 September.
The Tell es-Sultan archaeological site, situated near the Palestinian city of Jericho, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, was the most politicised site to be included on the list. The site contains evidence of prehistoric communities dating back to the ninth millennium BC.
Tell es-Sultan joins three other Unesco-protected sites in the region; the Church of the Nativity and the pilgrimage route in Bethlehem, the cultural landscape of southern Jerusalem and Battir, and the Old City in Hebron. Unesco accepted Palestine as a member state in 2011.
Also on the list is the cultural landscape of the Old Tea Forests of Jingmai Mountain near Pu’er city in China’s Yunnan Province, close to China’s border with Myanmar. It is the Unesco site to be protected that relates to tea culture, with local indigenous groups thought to have harvested wild tea trees as far back as the Han Dynasty (206BC-AD220).
The committee also included 54 historical Iranian caravanserais, located in 24 provinces across the country, which lies across the Persian Gulf from Saudi Arabia. Caravanserais are a form of historical hotel—a roadside places of shelter for travelling pilgrims or tradespeople—and line the network of trade routes linking Asia with Africa and Europe, most notably the Silk Road.
In Europe, a group of medieval Jewish sites in the eastern German city of Erfurt were listed World Heritage Site. Erfurt’s Old Synagogue, a 13th-century stone building that illustrates Jewish family life in the medieval era, was one of the buildings listed by the committee.
Last week, the committee also moved to recognise Ukranian sites as being in danger. The Saint Sophia Cathedral and the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery complex in Kyiv, as well as the entire historic centre of the city of Lviv are the latest Ukrainian additions to Unesco’s list of endangered World Heritage sites. The decision to include the Ukrainian structures was made “due to the threat of destruction the Russian offensive poses,” according to a statement from UNESCO.
