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I Worshipped Palmyra -- Before Isis Got to It

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I worshipped Palmyra  -- as it was, intact, for 2000 years, before those brigands from ISIS arrived (and took Ramadi as well).  It is my unhappy role to be one of the comparatively few Western tourists with memories of experiencing and attempting to imagine the ancient Palmyra.  The number is "comparatively few" because, until now not every visitor, even in Syria, headed for the Palmyra ruins in the baking middle of the Syrian Desert -- and from now on, once ISIS finishes, there will be so much less to experience.

The Palmyra shown to me consisted of an astonishingly huge set of astonishingly well-preserved Roman-era enormous buildings, colonnades, temples, baths, and so forth.  One is even the Palmyrene Senate!  It was a huge set of buidlings because at a particular point around 200 A.D., Palmyra had grown into a great city.

Palmyra then lay astride the highly prosperous caravan routes between East (from East Asia through India and Persia) and West (from the Roman world through the Mediterranean and Syria).  The Romans to the West, the Sassanids to the East, were great powers that fought many a war.  They were like the U.S. and the Soviet Union of their time. Palmyra was strong enough to stay largely independent of both.

I went as a tourist with my wife, a guide, and a driver, in 1997.  We visited monuments and ruins all through the Syrian desert.  To describe the place as "hell" is not a moral comment but a weather report.  But, above all, there was Palmyra, a time machine that took you back two thousand years.

Besides their enormous scale, the ruins of Palmyra had something else going for them: their wonderful state of preservation.  The Syrian desert is a bone dry on a scale that hardly registers rain even over an interval two millennia long.  No rain falls on these ruins to wear them down or even soften them.  (We had a private joke describing a Syrian Desert weather report: "the morning will be burning hot, heating up to an oven-like middle of the day and finally scorching in the afternoon before cooling off to to an evening of mere roasting.")

And it is so remote from where people live, that during the periods when different regimes might nominally say they owned it, no one could make the effort, as in so many other places, to loot the building materials to build structures of their own.  It looks sort of like a used car set down in the desert yesterday -- it is that well preserved.

Take one building, the amphitheatre.  The theatre is in great shape.  It has well-preserved levels of stone benches as seats.  At the front, it has a stage.  Behind the stage you see impressive structures held up by pillars. With a little imagination, you can see how Greek and Roman tragedies and comedies, some still known, played out here.  The Great Colonnade is over a kilometer long, with monumental arches.  You can imagine the scale of the city around this.

Palmyra has a very important political story to accompany the ruins and to further inflame the imagination.

Odaenathus,  the ruler of state of the Palmyra and a client of Rome, had by 266 recovered the Roman East from the Sassanids.  When he was assassinated, his Queen Zenobia became regent of their minor son -- and one of ancient history's infrequent  yet towering women rulers.  She made a sustained effort to take over the Roman East and essentially make herself Empress of the Empire.  She did well for awhile, seizing Egypt and much of Asia Minor, before being defeated.  She belongs in the exalted company of Hatshepsut of Egypt, Katherine of Russia and Elizabeth of England.

I say here that it was a matter of experiencing and attempting to imagine Palmyra.  No photos, no small objects, can outdo the overwhelming magic of experiencing the scale and relatively intact condition whole place.  To help the rational imagination, there are questions about the Roman Empire that Palmyra inspires.   (1)  Maybe we have overestimated the Roman West and underestimated the Roman East.  Does Palmyra tell us that Rome was more out here, than where we think of it centered as, say, in France and Italy?  (2)  Is this purely Roman?  Yes, the era was Roman.  But the Greco-Roman politics and culture influence the Syrian region for a thousand years, from Alexander the Great until the Arab Conquest.  And from the 300s on, the Eastern empire became increasingly Greek as Constantinople did.  Looking at that thousand years, through the prism of Palmyra, seeing mostly Greek architectural ideas (copied by Romans) in the ruins, are we looking at a merely superficial Roman layer over a deeper Greek foundation ?

Alas, after two thousand years, the window here into time, space and history is being closed by the barbarians.  Our understanding of our heritage will be the poorer.