Palmyra

A History

Michael Sommer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351347150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Palmyra: A History examines Palmyra, the city in the Syrian oasis of Tadmur, from its beginnings in the Bronze Age, through the classical period and its discovery and excavation, to the present day. It aims at reconstructing Palmyra's past from literary accounts – classical and post-classical – as well as material evidence of all kinds: inscriptions, coins, art and of course the remains of Palmyra's monumental architecture.

After exploring the earliest inhabitation of Tadmur, the volume moves through the Persian and Hellenistic periods, to the city's zenith. Under the Romans, Palmyra was unique among the cities of the empire because it became a political factor in its own right in the third century AD, when the Roman military was overpowered by Sassanian invaders and Palmyrene troops stepped in. Sommer's assessment of Palmyra under Rome therefore considers how Palmyra achieved such an exceptional role in the Roman Near East, before its demise under the Umayyad Empire. The volume also examines the century-long history of archaeological and historical research at Palmyra, from its beginnings under Ottoman rule and the French mandate in the 1920s to the recent satellite based prospection carried out by German archaeologists. A closing chapter examines the occupation of the site by ISIS during the Syrian conflict, and the implications of the destruction there on the ruins, the archaeological finds and future investigations, and heritage in Syria more broadly.

Palmyra offers academics, students and the interested reader alike the first full treatment in English of this fascinating site, providing a comprehensive account of the city's origins, rise and fall.

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1 Avenues to Palmyra

Euphrates’ cities and

Palmyra’s streets and you

Forests of columns in the level desert

What are you now?

Your crowns, because

You crossed the boundary

Of breath,

Were taken off

In Heaven’s smoke and flame;

But I sit under clouds (each one

Of which has peace) among

The ordered oaks, upon

The deer’s heath, and strange

And dead the ghosts of the blessed ones

Appear to me.¹

Friedrich Hölderlin

Thus wrote, more than 200 years ago, Friedrich Hölderlin. In his poem “Ages of Life,” he sang of the hubris of a great civilization that had “crossed the boundaries” of man (“of breath”). “Euphrates’ cities” hint at the Babylon of the Hebrew Bible and the Whore of Babylon from the New Testament. “Smoke and flame” is a biblical reminiscence, too: “And I will give miraculous signs in heaven and on earth: blood, fire and smoke,” as Martin Luther translated the prophet Joel.² Palmyra has been visited by Western travellers ever since the seventeenth century. With its “pillared forests,” to Hölderlin it stands symbolically for the ruined civilization of antiquity, to which he contrasts the idyll of pure nature, unaffected by human activity. Everything, including the “crowns” of historical greatness, will perish, not a single “age of life” has survived so far.

Rediscovery

Hölderlin was inspired by the French philosopher Constantin François Comte de Volney (1757–1820), who published his thoughts on the decline of great empires in an essay entitled Les Ruines Ou Méditations Sur Les Révolutions des Empires. The essay is actually a poem in prose: a spirit takes Volney’s poetic self by the hand and explains to him, facing the ruinous landscape in the middle of the Syrian Desert the meaning of Palmyra and its destruction. Civilizations come and go, explains the spirit, but ultimately progress prevails over backwardness. In the face of the French Revolution and its devastation, the treatise pleads for cautious optimism, and with this optimism the poetic self is inspired through the relics of a great past. Despite all sadness, he accepts that the old must fall to make room for the new.

p.2

Volney himself had visited Palmyra on an extensive journey through the Ottoman Near East, recording his impressions in a travel report.³ By no means did the French aristocrat, when he left for Constantinople, walk off the beaten track. As early as 1160, till 1173, the Spanish Jew Benjamin of Tudela visited Syria, the Holy Land and Mesopotamia. He claims to have visited “Tarmod” on this trip, the city “in solitude” built by Solomon. He claimed to have seen buildings made of “huge stones” there, similar to those in Baalbek. “Tarmod,” which is undoubtedly Tadmor – as Palmyra is called in Hebrew – was also home to a Jewish community of 2,000 souls. According to Benjamin, they were experienced warriors and “sided sometimes with the Christians, sometimes with the Arabs.”⁴

Benjamin may have indeed been in Palmyra. But his report may also be a fake, though a well-crafted one. After all, the number of 2,000 Jews seems vastly exaggerated. The first European travellers of the modern era to reach the Near East, the Italian Pietro della Valle and the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, both sidestepped the oasis of Tadmur, to get straight to Mesopotamia and Persia. Apparently, the journey through the Syrian Desert entailed great dangers, originating mainly from the Bedouins. The Portuguese Jesuit Manuel Godinho claimed that, on his visit to Syria in 1663, he had come sufficiently close to Palmyra to spot columns, towers, aqueducts and a large marble building similar to Solomon’s Temple, undoubtedly the Temple of Bēl.⁵ A few years after Godinho’s trip to the Syrian Desert, in the summer of 1678, 16 merchants working for the British Levant Company at Aleppo undertook an expedition to the oasis city, but were captured by the tribal warriors of the emir Melkam, to be released only after a high ransom had been paid. Yet, they returned in 1691. This time they were accompanied by William Halifax, an Oxford don and clergyman, who had served as chaplain of the British merchant colony at Aleppo since 1688. On 4 October, after a six-day journey, the expedition reached Palmyra, where the travellers stayed for four days. On 16 October, they returned safe and sound to Aleppo.

p.3

Figure 1.1 A View of the Ruines of Palmyra alias Tadmor taken on the Southern Side, anonymous copperplate engraving, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 218 (1695), 125.

Halifax gave the Royal Society in London a detailed account of the journey, to be published in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1695, culminating in the assertion that no city in the world could rival the splendour of Palmyra.⁶ Halifax described the Temple of Bēl and the “Arabick Inscriptions” to be found there. He continued with descriptions of the Tripylon, the Great Colonnade, the mosque at the city centre and the “Little Temple,” later to be called the Temple of Baʿal-Šamen. The report concludes with an impression from the Valley of the Tombs, whose buildings he believed to have been church towers. Halifax copied inscriptions, and an anonymous member of the expedition drew a view from the south-east, which was later published as a copper engraving (Figure 1.1.) in the Philosophical Transactions.⁷ During the same expedition, a sketch was drawn for a painting, which was painted in 1693 by the Dutch artist Gerard Hofstede van Essen, displaying a large panorama of the ruins.⁸

News of the expedition spread quickly across Europe, triggering, together with the publication of its observations in the Philosophical Transactions, a real Palmyra hype in science and arts. Researchers began to systematically collect the inscriptions of the ancient city and to analyse its epigraphic legacy. Travellers such as the Frenchmen Giraud and Sautet (1706), or their fellow countryman Claude Granger (1735), were drawn into the desert in ever-increasing numbers. Here, they marvelled at the ruins. Palmyra stimulated the imagination of painters and writers; Zenobia conquered the opera stages of Europe.⁹ Another breakthrough is marked by the trip to the Near East of British antiquarians Robert Wood and James Dawkins. The two academics, who were accompanied by the Italian architect, civil engineer and draftsman Giovanni Battista Borra, reached Palmyra in March 1751. Unlike previous travellers, who had mainly reported their impressions of the oasis city, Wood, Dawkins and Borra’s approach was decidedly scientific. They took it upon themselves to precisely measure the architectural remains and to draw them professionally. The substantial volume produced by Wood in 1753, which was published simultaneously in England and France, together with its counterpart on Baalbek, set the standards in the documentation of ancient architecture. Like the meticulous studies of the Italian architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi, it greatly influenced Europe’s neoclassical architecture of the period as well.¹⁰

Only one year after this work had been published, Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy succeeded in deciphering the Palmyrene alphabet, making it possible for the inscriptions – of which, by then, large numbers had been collected – to be read.¹¹ In 1785, the French landscape painter and draftsman Louis François Cassas visited Syria, spending a whole month in Palmyra. During these weeks, he produced numerous architectural drawings, including one of the Temple of Bēl. He later published his impressions in an imaginative Voyage pittoresque, in which, true to the spirit of the period, he uses the “Orient” as a screen for romantic constructions of otherness.¹² The first European woman to set foot in Palmyra was Lady Hester Stanhope, the niece of British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger and self-proclaimed lady of the village of Joun. In 1813, escorted by the leaders of assorted tribes and leading a caravan of 22 camels, she entered Palmyra, where she was celebrated as a “new Zenobia.” Hundreds of girls stood on the consoles, which had adorned the columns since ancient times, waving palm-fronds as she rode along Palmyra’s main axis, the Great Colonnade.¹³

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The German archaeologists Theodor Wiegand and Daniel Krencker were neither received by girls, nor by palm-fronds, when they first opened the fieldwork campaign in Palmyra in 1902, starting with it the area’s archaeological research in the proper sense. The mission of Wiegand, who had been in charge of the excavations at Priene since 1896, and Krencker, from Alsace, who had joined him as an architect, was not purely archaeological, but had a political component too. The German Empire pursued vital political and economic interests in its Ottoman counterpart, which had become even more important for the Wilhelmstrasse, Germany’s Foreign Office, since emperor Wilhelm II visited Palestine in 1898. In 1903, the construction of the Baghdad Railway began, which was financed by the Deutsche Bank, whose then director was Georg von Siemens, Wiegand’s father-in-law. Krencker and Wiegand, who returned to the oasis in 1917, along with other participants in the expedition, published their results in 1932 in a two-volume work, which can still be considered the benchmark for any research on the architecture of Palmyra. Not only does it provide photos and drawings of many of the city’s most important monuments – the Camp of Diocletian, the theatre, the temples of Baʿal-Šamen, Nebu and Bēl, as well as the medieval citadel – but also the first plan of the ruins.¹⁴

Following the end of the First World War, 1918 saw the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In 1920, the Treaty of Sanremo divided the Fertile Crescent among the victorious powers, Britain and France. Palmyra, along with the rest of Syria, came under French mandate. Starting from the 1920s, French archaeologists were therefore at the forefront of research and exploration in ancient Palmyra. In 1929, Henri Seyrig was appointed director general of the administration of antiquities for Syria and Lebanon; he was joined in his work by Daniel Schlumberger, like Krencker a native of Alsace. Assisted by the architects René Amy and René Duru, they took on the demolition of the dwellings, which had transformed the Temple of Bēl into a residential neighbourhood in post-classical times; they also reconstructed the sanctuary to the state in which it could be visited until 2015. As early as 1924, the Danish archaeologist Harald Ingholt had started to systematically explore the gigantic corpus of Palmyrene tomb sculptures.¹⁵ From 1925, Antoine Poidebard, one of the pioneers of aerial archeology, had been extensively searching the Syrian Desert focusing mainly on Palmyra’s hinterland for settlement traces of all periods. Poidebard’s aerial photographs are invaluable documents bringing to life a world of the past which has been transformed beyond recognition by human activity over the last few decades. Epigraphers worked along with the archaeologists, first and foremost Jean Cantineau, who published the first volume of his Inventaire des Inscriptions de Palmyre in 1930. It contained a collection of inscriptions from the Temple of Baʿal-Šamen.

p.5

After the Second World War, responsibility for the administration of antiquities passed to the now independent Republic of Syria. On the Syrian side, the prehistorian Adnan Bounni, director of excavations for the Syrian Directorate of Antiquities from 1955 to 2005, and Ḫālid al-Asʿad, director of the local museum from 1963 to 2003, deserve credit for their unremitting dedication to the site. Al-Asʿad, who was murdered in 2015 by terrorists of the Islamic State, coordinated fieldwork at Palmyra for many decades. The Syrian researchers were joined by a closely knit international academic community who, with their diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds, reflected the cosmopolitan spirit of ancient Palmyra: French archaeologists continued their work using the Institut Français d’Archéologie du...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Palmyra
• Cities of the Ancient World
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Avenues to Palmyra
• 2 Palmyra Before the Palmyrenes
• 3 From Akkad to Antioch: Syria, the Great Powers and the Rise of a World-System
• 4 Privata Sorte Inter Duo Imperia: Palmyra Between Rome and Parthia
• 5 In the wake of the Empire
• 6 Palmyra’s war and peace
• 7 Claiming the Empire
• 8 Palmyra: Aspects – perspectives
• 9 Palmyra After the Palmyrenes
• 10 The End of Civilization: Palmyra’s Second Downfall in the Syrian Civil War
• References
• Index