Palmyra
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- Palmyra's tax law of AD 137, carved in Greek and Palmyrene on a 5 m slab, went to the Russian tsar in 1901 and is now in the Hermitage.
- Palmyra appears in writing around 2000 BC, when a merchant called Puzur-Ishtar 'the Tadmorean' witnessed a contract at an Assyrian trading colony in Anatolia.
- Palmyrenes buried their dead in family tombs with stacked burial niches, each sealed by a carved portrait bust of the person inside.
- Many Palmyrene tombs contained mummies, embalmed by methods similar to those used in ancient Egypt.
- In the agora, some 200 statue bases were grouped by rank: senators on the east side, officials on the north, soldiers on the west and caravan leaders on the south.
- Of the tetrapylon's sixteen columns only one was original; the rest were concrete replicas from 1963 of shafts first brought from Egypt in pink granite.
- Palmyrene merchants kept outposts as far apart as Merv, Bahrain, the Indus delta and Rome, and their ships sailed between the Persian Gulf and India.
- Silk was the most profitable cargo through the city, alongside jade, muslin, spices, ebony, ivory and precious stones.
- The entrance to the Baths of Diocletian was marked by four Egyptian granite columns, each 12.5 m high and weighing about 20 tonnes.
- When Timur's army took the city in 1400, his chronicler recorded that the soldiers drove off 200,000 sheep.
Why it is worth it
Palmyra was a caravan city in an oasis of the Syrian Desert, about 215 km northeast of Damascus, and for three centuries it was one of the richest places in the Roman East. Its merchants ran trade routes between the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia and set up trading colonies along the Silk Road, and their wealth paid for a city whose architecture mixed Greek and Roman forms with local Semitic traditions. The inscriptions were in Palmyrene Aramaic and Greek, and the gods worshipped here were Semitic, Mesopotamian and Arab. The spring of Efqa and the palms of the oasis explain why a city could exist at all in this landscape.
Palmyra's moment in world history came in the 260s and 270s. King Odaenathus defeated the Sasanian Persian emperor Shapur I, and after his death his widow Zenobia, ruling for their young son, broke with Rome and carved out a Palmyrene Empire that briefly reached Egypt and Anatolia. The emperor Aurelian crushed it, and when the city rebelled again in 273 his troops levelled it. Palmyra survived on a smaller scale under Byzantine and Islamic rule, shrank to a village after the Timurid sack of 1400, and in 1932 the French mandate authorities moved its inhabitants into the new town of Tadmur so that the ancient site could be excavated.
What made Palmyra famous in modern times was the scale of what survived: the Great Colonnade, a main street about 1.1 km long lined with columns some 9.5 m high, most of them from the 2nd century; the Temple of Bel, dedicated in AD 32 inside a colonnaded precinct whose outer wall ran for 205 m; the theatre; and the tower tombs of the Valley of the Tombs, multi-storey family sepulchres on the desert edge. Much of this was deliberately destroyed during the Syrian civil war. Islamic State fighters, who held the site in 2015–16 and again in 2016–17, blew up the Temple of Baalshamin and the cella of the Temple of Bel in August 2015, destroyed the monumental arch and several tower tombs including that of Elahbel, and in 2017 toppled twelve of the sixteen columns of the tetrapylon and damaged the theatre façade. The site's retired antiquities chief, Khaled al-Asaad, was killed by the group in August 2015 after refusing to reveal information about the city's treasures.
The outer walls and entrance arch of the Temple of Bel still stand, as does much of the colonnade. After the fall of the Assad government in December 2024, UNESCO began working with the Syrian authorities, ALIPH and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture on restoration, but as of mid-2026 that work had not gone beyond surveys and damage assessment.
Getting there
The ruins are about 2 km from the modern town of Tadmur. The nearest airport by straight line is Aleppo International Airport (ALP), about 204 km away; Damascus International Airport (DAM) lies 30 km southeast of the capital, itself 215 km from Palmyra.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Palmyra is an ancient city in central Syria. It is located in the eastern part of the Levant, and archaeological finds date back to the Neolithic period, and documents first mention the city in the early second millennium BCE. Palmyra changed hands on a number of occasions between different empires before becoming a subject of the Roman Empire in the first century CE.
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