A legacy destroyed
In a long view of Palmyra, Syria — the once-great trading waypoint between East and West — its recent vandalization by Islamic State fighters is the work of malignant punks. Despicable? Yes. They reduced monuments of staggering beauty and transport to rubble: the temples of Bel and Baalshamin, a triumphal arch, a number of spooky tomb towers. Damnable? Yes. They publicly beheaded Syrian archaeologist Khaled al-Assad, 81 years old and site antiquities director, who refused to divulge the hidden whereabouts of Palmyrene artifacts.
But Palmyra has seen far worse than anything today’s militants have dished out, which, in essence, was a sad sacking of ruins. Roman Emperor Aurelian conquered Palmyra in 273, and after meticulous looting, razed the place. Those were years that Palmyra was a unique and gloried trading cosmopolis. It was the meeting ground of caravans from Rome and Greece and those from far Cathay and India, explains Paul Veyne in “Palmyra,” where he brightly “sketches a portrait of the past splendor of Palmyra,” in a story tightly bound with affection.
Palmyra can archivally trace its origins back 7,000 years, and Veyne, a French archaeologist and historian, artfully covers
that serious slice of historical ground. Why Palmyra? Because, writes Veyne, “it is located on the shortest path between the Mediterranean and the blue waters of the Euphrates,” and “Palmyrenes were technicians of the desert.” Diplomats, too, evidently; these were dangerous borderlands between empires.
A rare place, then: a merchant republic, a city-state even, where Greeks, Romans, Persians, Egyptians, Jews and many another mingled while it remained a distinctively Palmyrene well of culture, a place granted unusual political latitude during the long Roman occupation — we’ll give Aurelian a pass — for its atmosphere of accord and creation of wealth.
Veyne surveys the city’s art and architecture, its class composition, the fire and folly of Queen Zenobia, its entire evolution. Despite its distilled scholarship,
“Palmyra” is not dry; Veyne’s little jokes are a hoot: “Palmyra wanted to be modern, and, at the time, Greek civilization was de rigueur. Palmyra was foreign to that civilization only by dint of its past, its Aramaic language, its society, its caravan activity, its religion, and many different customs.”
A final tribute to Palmyra’s sui generis brilliance: “Palmyra resembled no other city in the empire ... we sense that a wind of freedom blew over Palmyra, one of no conformity, of ‘multiculturalism.’ ” Accordingly, “far from ending in universal uniformity, every patchwork culture, with its diversity, opens the way to inventiveness,” and a thorn in the side of all meanminded asininity.