Palmyra

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A sulfurous spring rises in the limestone south of a dry wadi, halfway across the waterless belt that separates the Mediterranean coast from the river-lands of the Euphrates. Around that spring, the Efqa, the gardens and palm groves of an oasis hold their ground against the gravel desert on every side. This is Tadmor, and the people who lived there built one of the strangest cities of antiquity: a metropolis of colonnaded avenues, Corinthian capitals, and Latin honors, inhabited by Aramaic-speaking tribesmen who buried their dead in tower-tombs and worshipped a god they had renamed after the lord of Babylon. The Greeks and Romans called it Palmyra, a name evoking the palms of its oasis. For three centuries it grew rich by guaranteeing the one thing the desert could not — that a loaded caravan would cross it and arrive.

The oasis and its name

The settlement is old. A clay tablet from the Assyrian merchant colony at Kanesh in central Anatolia names Tadmor already in the nineteenth century BCE; the place reappears in the archives of Mari in the eighteenth century, at Emar on the Euphrates bend in the fourteenth, and in the royal annals of the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I, who in the eleventh century BCE records subduing Aramaeans at Tadmar in the land of Amurru. The native name — Tadmor, Tudmur — is Semitic, plausibly carrying the sense of a guarded or watch-place; the Aramaic and Arabic forms survive to the present in the modern town beside the ruins. The Greco-Latin “Palmyra” is younger, an interpretation rather than a translation, and the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder is among the first to set it down in the first century CE.

What made the oasis matter was geography. Tadmor sits at the center of the Syrian steppe, the only reliable water for a long day’s march in any direction, equidistant in commercial terms between the Roman province of Syria and the lower Mesopotamian world of Babylon and the Persian Gulf. A merchant crossing the steppe could either skirt it through the Fertile Crescent — slow, but safe — or cut straight across the desert, saving weeks, if someone could see him through. Palmyra made itself that someone.

A caravan city

By the early Roman Principate the oasis had become an emporium of the long-distance overland trade. The surviving inscriptions describe one principal artery in detail: goods landed at Spasinou Charax at the head of the Persian Gulf were carried up the Euphrates to Vologesias, the Parthian commercial town near Babylon, and then struck west across the steppe to Palmyra, whence they moved on to Antioch, Damascus, and the Mediterranean ports. Down that line came the luxuries of the Indian Ocean and beyond — spices, pearls, fine cottons and silks, dyes, glass, ivory, gemstones, perfumes — and Palmyrene capital reached out to grip both ends of it. Palmyrene merchants kept resident communities at Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, at Babylon, at Vologesias, and at the Gulf ports of Spasinou Charax and Phorath; one honorific text praises a citizen whose ships came up from Scythia, meaning the estuary of the Indus in northwest India. They were not middlemen waiting at a market. They financed the voyages, fitted out the caravans, and went themselves.

The desert crossing was the dangerous stretch, and it was here that Palmyra’s distinctive institution appears: the synodiarch, the caravan-leader who organized, financed, and above all protected a convoy across the steppe, negotiating with the nomadic tribes and maintaining armed escorts and water-stations along the way. The richest honorific inscriptions of the city are not for magistrates or generals but for these men — for bringing the caravan up safely, for paying its costs from his own purse, for piety and love of his city. Palmyrene archers were prized soldiers, attested in the Roman garrison of Dura-Europos on the Euphrates from as early as the first century BCE, and the city’s wealth rested ultimately on its ability to put armed men into the desert and keep the road open. The trade peaked in the second century CE, when most of the great public buildings rose.

The fiscal machinery of all this is preserved in one extraordinary document. In 137 CE the council set up a long bilingual stele in the agora, the Palmyrene Tax Tariff, written in Greek and in the local Aramaic dialect, regularizing the duties levied on goods entering and leaving the city — distinguishing what was borne by camel, by donkey, by cart, taxing slaves, salt, dried goods, prostitution, the use of the springs. Its sections rehearse a “new law” and an “old law” and cite the earlier ruling of the Roman governor Mucianus, so that the stone is at once a tax schedule and a small constitutional history of how a desert town reconciled its own custom with Roman provincial administration. The stele was carried to Russia in the nineteenth century and stands today in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

Aramaic city under Greco-Roman dress

Palmyra was, formally, a Roman city. Pompey’s settlement of the East brought it within Rome’s orbit in the mid-first century BCE; by the second century it possessed a council and magistrates on the Greek civic model, took the honorific Hadriana after a visit from the emperor Hadrian, and under the Severan dynasty in the early third century was raised to the rank of a Roman colony, its leading men bearing the Latin name Septimius. The Great Colonnade marched for more than a kilometer through the center of the city; theaters, baths, an agora, and a monumental arch gave it the full repertoire of the Greco-Roman urban world.

Yet beneath the Corinthian order the city remained itself. Its people bore Aramaic names — Wahballat, Zabdibol, Bathzabbai — and spoke and wrote a distinctive Aramaic, the Palmyrene dialect, in an elegant cursive script of its own, set everywhere alongside Greek and occasionally Latin in the bilingual inscriptions that cover the ruins. Society was organized by tribe and clan as much as by civic office. And the dead were honored in a manner with no Greco-Roman parallel: in the towers that ring the western valley, multi-storey funerary monuments of dressed limestone, each holding the stacked burial-niches of a great family and sealed with carved limestone slabs bearing the half-length portrait of the deceased — frontal, large-eyed, richly jeweled, often reclining at the funerary banquet. These banqueting portraits are among the most recognizable images of the Roman Near East, and they show a population that wore Parthian trousers and Greek mantles indifferently, that fused the artistic conventions of the Hellenistic world, Parthian Iran, and Rome into something local and unmistakable. Like Alexandria, Palmyra was a hinge between worlds; unlike Alexandria, it faced inland, toward the deserts and the rivers rather than the sea.

The temple of Bel and the gods of Tadmor

At the heart of the city, on a raised precinct, stood the temple of Bel — the religious center of Palmyra and the largest sanctuary of the Roman Near East. Its great cult-building was formally dedicated in 32 CE, though the surrounding court, colonnade, and monumental gate were completed only over the following century. The architecture is itself a parable of Palmyra: a Greek peripteral temple in plan, with echoes of the Hellenistic Artemision at Magnesia, but turned inside out to native use — entered from the side, its cella holding not one but two opposed shrines, or adyta, and crowned with stepped merlons in the Mesopotamian manner, the whole roofline carrying reliefs of a planetary and astral character.

The god of that temple carries the long memory of Mesopotamia in his very name. He had begun as Bol, the West Semitic title meaning “lord,” cognate with the storm-god Baal of the Ugaritic and wider Northwest Semitic world. But as the prestige of Babylonian religion spread westward, Bol was assimilated to Bel — the Akkadian “Lord,” the title borne above all by Marduk, city-god of Babylon and king of the Mesopotamian pantheon — and renamed accordingly, the change fixed in the local cult by the late third century BCE. What the Palmyrenes inherited along with the name was the astral kingship of Marduk: the conviction, set down in the Babylonian creation epic, that the supreme god ordered the heavens and fixed the stations of the stars. Palmyrene Bel governs the movements of the stars in just this sense, and at his sanctuary he was worshipped not alone but as the head of a triad — flanked by Yarhibol, a solar deity of the spring, and Aglibol, a lunar god whose crescent rises behind his shoulders in the reliefs. The same triadic astral logic that ran through the cult of Shamash the sun and the moon-god of Mesopotamian religion was here recast for a desert sky.

Around Bel turned a crowded and frankly syncretic pantheon. Baalshamin, “lord of the heavens,” held his own great sanctuary and his own triad with Aglibol and the sun-god Malakbel. The anonymous god, to whom hundreds of altars were raised under a dedicatory formula blessing his name forever, received the gratitude of merchants returned safely from the road. From Arabia came the warrior-goddess Allat, identified with Athena; from Mesopotamia and the fertile north the great Syrian goddess Atargatis, and the writing-god Nabu, son of Marduk, who kept his own temple in the city. The Babylonian Venus-goddess Ishtar stood behind the local manifestations of the great goddess, and the tutelary Fortunes of the city and its tribes — the Gad of Palmyra, kin to the Roman Fortuna and the Greek Tyche — guarded the community’s luck. This was the wider Syrian and Mesopotamian religious world, in which solar and astral worship ran strong: the same milieu that, a little to the west at Emesa, produced the black conical sun-stone of Elagabal, briefly enthroned at the head of Roman state religion. The technical lore that read fortune in the planets — the astrological inheritance that the Greco-Roman world traced to the “Chaldeans” of Babylon — belonged to the same Mesopotamian sky over which Palmyrene Bel ruled.

From oasis to empire: Odaenathus and Zenobia

In the middle of the third century the Roman East collapsed. The Sasanian king Shapur I overran Syria, sacked Antioch, and in 260 CE took the emperor Valerian prisoner in battle — a humiliation without precedent. Into that vacuum stepped a Palmyrene noble, Septimius Odaenathus, lord of the caravan city and its tribal levies. He drove the Persians back across the Euphrates, recovered Roman territory, and was loaded by a grateful and impotent imperial court with extraordinary titles, ruling the East in Rome’s name as much as his own. In 267 CE Odaenathus was assassinated together with his elder son. Power passed to his widow, who held it as regent for their young son Vaballathus, and under whom the caravan city briefly became something no oasis had ever been.

She was Septimia Zenobia — Bathzabbai in her own Aramaic. Cultured, ambitious, and commanding the seasoned Palmyrene military machine, she did not long content herself with guarding the eastern frontier. In 270 CE Palmyrene armies seized Egypt, the granary of the empire, and pushed north and west until they controlled much of Asia Minor as far as the approaches to the Bosphorus. For a few years a breakaway Palmyrene Empire stretched from the Nile to Anatolia; Vaballathus took imperial titulature on the coins, and Zenobia herself the rank of Augusta. A desert market-town that lived by escorting other people’s goods now governed the richest provinces of the Roman East.

It could not last against a recovered Rome. The emperor Aurelian, having stabilized the West, turned east in 272 CE. He broke the Palmyrene field army at Immae near Antioch, broke it again at Emesa, and drove its remnant back to the oasis, which he besieged. Zenobia and her son slipped out to seek Persian help and were caught near the Euphrates; the city surrendered. Aurelian spared it and withdrew — and Palmyra rose again the following year, 273 CE, massacring the garrison he had left. This time there was no clemency. Aurelian returned, retook the city, and gave it over to sack. Zenobia, by the surviving accounts, was carried to Rome to walk in his triumph, bound in gold chains.

A city that became, briefly, an empire

The sack of 273 ended Palmyra as a great power, though the place did not vanish: a Roman legionary camp was installed among the ruins, Diocletian fortified it as a frontier post, churches rose in late antiquity, and a town has clung to the oasis ever since. The colonnades and the temple of Bel stood, weathering, for the better part of two thousand years — until 2015, when the forces of the Islamic State, holding the site, dynamited the temple of Baalshamin and then the great cella of Bel in August of that year, and the monumental arch that October, and beheaded Khaled al-Asaad, the eighty-three-year-old scholar who had spent his life as the keeper of Palmyra’s antiquities and refused to leave them. Satellite imagery confirmed the temple’s destruction; portions of the arch survived for a proposed re-erection.

What the desert had built was a paradox held in equilibrium. Palmyra possessed no land worth conquering, no harbor, no mine, no river — only a spring, a position, and the nerve to sell safe passage across the emptiness around it. From that it raised Corinthian avenues over Aramaic tribesmen, dressed the lord of Babylon in a Greek temple and set him to rule the stars, and turned the profits of other men’s commerce into armed men who could, when Rome faltered, march those caravans’ guards all the way to Egypt and crown a queen. The city’s power was never in its ground. It was in the road — and for a single generation the toll-keepers of the desert held the empire’s east in their hand.

Scholarship and sources

The decipherment of the Palmyrene Aramaic script in the eighteenth century — accomplished independently by the Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and by John Swinton in 1754 — opened the city’s own voice, and the bilingual inscriptions remain the primary documents of its life. The fiscal world of the oasis is fixed by the Palmyrene Tax Tariff of 137 CE, now in the State Hermitage Museum; the standard critical edition and translation is Ilya Shifman’s The Palmyrene Tax Tariff, revised in English by John F. Healey (Oxford University Press / Journal of Semitic Studies, 2014).

The economic argument — that Palmyra was above all an organism of the long-distance caravan trade — was set out classically by Michael Rostovtzeff in Caravan Cities (Clarendon Press, 1932) and has been refined by the Polish excavator Michel Gawlikowski, whose synthesis Palmyra and its Caravan Trade (1996) and decades of fieldwork remain foundational; the Gulf terminus of the route is treated in Stefan R. Hauser’s study of Charax Spasinou. The religious life of the city was given its enduring treatment by Henri Seyrig in the long series Antiquités syriennes (1934 onward) and by Javier Teixidor in The Pantheon of Palmyra (Brill, 1979). Recent scholarship — Andrew M. Smith II’s Roman Palmyra (Oxford, 2013), Michael Sommer’s Palmyra: A History (Routledge, 2018), and the collaborative volume Palmyra: Mirage in the Desert — situates the oasis within Roman provincial and Near Eastern history, while the UNESCO Silk Roads Programme and the French Ministry of Culture’s Palmyra portal gather the archaeological record of a World Heritage site now partly destroyed. The Babylonian astral theology that Palmyrene Bel inherited is documented in the cuneiform record treated under Mesopotamian religion and the cult of Marduk at Babylon.

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