Our speaker on March 14 was Ray Aspden on the Bronze Age Temples of Syria, a country in the news for all the wrong reasons.

He started by explaining how the country was a crossroads for a clash of cultures and was never an empire itself in the Bronze Age, merely separate kingdoms.

He visited various temples in happier times and showed us how many of them had been turned into tourist attractions.

Without attention by archaeologists mud walls and structures collapse but most of the damage has been caused by wanton destruction, for no other reason than hatred of other cultures, however historic.

Seeing the wholesale devastation was depressing and a sad reflection on man’s intolerance of other ideas, even though some of these structures were built over 3,000 years ago. Barbaric does not begin to describe it.

We meet at 10am every Thursday at The Boathouse, Evesham Rowing Club. Our speaker on March 21 will be our member Mike Ansell on “Bomb Sites, Bootnecks and Blazes” and on March 28 the title of Di Alexander’s talk will be “Pen and Polisher”.

Full details can be found on our website, eveshamprobus.co.uk

Alan Smith