THE RUIN FIELDS OF P

THE RUIN FIELDS OF PALMYRA

The first day of Eid al-Adha dawned around 4a.m. - not with the usual call to prayer but with a special service being transmitted over the loudspeakers from the various mosques to celebrate the day on which Abraham, in obedience to the call of the Lord, took his son Isaac up to a high place to sacrifice him but, when God saw that Abraham was prepared to sacrifice even his own son for Him, He told him to untie Isaac and sacrifice a sheep instead.  Robert took Simon out for his morning walk just as the faithful were leaving the mosque and a sad queue of sheep and goats was forming outside in preparation for ritual slaughter, the meat to be distributed among the poor.

We were glad to be leaving Damascus and set out early taking the road through the desert to Palmyra.  The Syrian desert, or at least the few hundred kilometres of it that we crossed, in marked contrast to the golden, beige or white  emptiness - but always emptiness - of the Atacama desert in Chile, is remarkably green at this time of year.  It is also well populated with bedouin camps dotted all over the landscape.  No fear of being lost and languishing for days here.  The bedouin are nearly all motorized these days, and this makes life easier for them as they can drive to the nearest water point and fill up tanks with water (some of them even have a tanker trailer) which they then bring back to the place where their flocks are grazing to provide them with water.   Most shepherds also have at least one tiny donkey which provides them with transport and carries their supplies for the day.  Another difference is that the landscape of the Syrian desert speaks of its antiquity - the hills are low and rounded - and has a familiar feel whereas the Chilean desert reaches the shores of the Pacific Ocean on the western side and is flanked to the east by the towering abruptness of the Andes, a geological formation whose youth in geological terms is apparent in the lack of rounded forms.

If the desert was lacking in drama, the sudden appearance of the ruin fields of Palmyra was nothing if not dramatic.  A bend in the road and there, suddenly, are the columns and porticos marching across the desert plain with the backdrop of the green oasis of palm, olive and pomegranate trees.

Palmyra, which lies about two hundred kilometres from Damascus and more or less half way between Damascus and the Euphrates River which is the border between Syria and Iraq, was one of the great caravan cities of antiquity and its greatness, for the ruins speak eloquently of its greatness, was based on trade and the possession of the one indispensable commodity in the desert, water.  The desert caravans had to come through Palmyra or perish.  The site was settled from earliest times and there is evidence that already by the third millennium BC a settled community existed at Palmyra with a Temple to the Palmyrene god, Bel, already in existence on the same spot where the ruins of the Temple of Bel still stand today.  The place is mentioned in the ancient tablets of Mari and Assyria under its Semitic name, Tadmor, which is the name of the modern town which stands alongside the ruins.  The bible also mentions “Tadmor in the wilderness”, or the city of dates, as having been built by Solomon, but this is now regarded as a mistake arising from confusion over the Semitic root of the word Tadmor (tamar which means date) and the reference is probably to Tamar in the Judean desert.

However, Palmyra does not lie on the natural trading route between the coast and the Euphrates and for centuries was nothing more than a desert chiefdom and watering-hole for desert nomads.  The main routes followed either the curve of the Fertile Crescent to the north or through Petra in modern Jordan to the south.  In the first century B.C. the northern route was affected by the instability which came with the fall of the Seleucid Kingdom and the fall of Petra forced trade routes to move further north.  Tadmor and Homs made a coalition which secured a new desert short-cut which was an instant success, aided and abetted by the security brought by the Pax Romana.  The insatiable appetite of Rome’s upper and provincial classes for exotic goods meant that trade through Palmyra was brisk, and much of the gold sent out from Rome to pay for the merchandise went no further than Palmyra.  Rome and Parthia were enemies but each wanted or needed things the other had, so Palmyra, in the timeless tradition of trading people, maintained a neutral stance serving as the point of exchange where the goods from the east could be traded with the west.

Palmyra reached its greatest prosperity around the second century A.D. when it probably rivalled Antioch as an economic centre.  The people of Palmyra were only interested in trade and they clearly had a sense of civic pride, spending a great deal of money on embellishing their city.  Most of the public works were endowed by private merchants as a way of broadcasting their financial strength and, in return for the works undertaken, they were allowed to erect statues of themselves and members of their families on the columns lining the main streets of the town and in public buildings.


This happy state of affairs came to an end when a new, more aggressive dynasty came to power in Parthia and seized the territory at the mouth of the Euphrates River which had previously been the point from which Palmyra controlled the traffic arriving from the Indian Ocean and, consequently, the cross-desert caravan trade at source.  The breakdown of centralized power in Rome also affected Palmyra in the sense that the local ruler was encouraged by Rome as a buffer against Parthia.  

The murder of the Palmyra ruler gave rise to a romantic incident. His widow, Zenobia, decided that she was going to build up her own commercial empire and power base, conquering westwards and southwards as far as Egypt, and had designs on  taking Antioch, the plan being that she should share the Roman Empire with Rome, she ruling in the east and Aurelian ruling in the west. Rome decided that enough was enough and took to the field against her.  According to legend, Zenobia, the “desert queen” was brought to Rome in chains of gold.  The fact that a woman had been treated in such an iniquitous fashion was brought up in the senate at the time and Aurelian was given a dressing down for such unworthy behaviour.  Although Palmyra hung on until the 6th century, after that point its fortunes waned, with trade virtually strangled, and it languished more as a strategic asset than a trading centre. It was taken by the Islamic forces in 634 and played a minor defensive role around the 12th century.  By the time the Ottoman period dawned the city lay in ruins which were being reclaimed by the desert.

Appropriately enough, we stayed at the Zenobia Hotel, a small hotel standing virtually on the edge of the ruin fields overlooking the Temple of Baal-Shamin, the Canaanite god of rain.  There is another large hotel belonging to  the most important Syrian hotel chain at the other side of the ruins and next to the sulphur springs which flow there.  However, this is a rather unfortunate edifice and we were glad that we were staying at the Zenobia which is low and painted ochre, thus blending harmoniously with the golden stone of the ruins. Having checked in, we sat down at a table under an olive tree in the outside patio and drank in the amazing spectacle standing before our eyes as well as quenching our thirst after the long drive.  The tables are capitals of columns simply taken from the ruins lying all around whereas the chairs, typical of the lack of coherence apparent everywhere, were white and purple and blue plastic!

As usual, we began our visit the opposite way round from everyone else.  We turned our backs on the Roman ruins and set off across the desert to climb a nearby hill topped by the ruins of an Arab fortress.  It was hot and I had forgotten my scarf, so halfway across I had to stop and take off my underskirt which I used to cover my head as a temporary measure.  Fortunately for us, when we reached the top, we came upon Ali, the “guardian” of the citadel who invited us to sit down and rest on his bedouin mats. He also produced a black plastic bag full of keffiyeh for both men and women so Robert was provided with a black and white Palestinian keffiyeh, complete with the rings to keep it on, which were originally a rope ring used to hobble the camels by night and by day were “stored” in the most convenient place which was on the bedouin’s head, at the same time serving the useful purpose of keeping his keffiyeh in place.  I acquired a white keffiyeh of fine cotton lawn embroidered with white flowers. Both proved worth their weight in gold as we wandered round the ruins.  Ali told us he had eleven children, two of whom were doing their military service and two of whom were blind.  Asked how this came to be, he replied, “It is the will of Allah”.

The fortress was used by a 17th. century Lebanese Emir who wanted to test the Ottomans, hoping that he would be able to extend his control further to the east, but his calculations went badly wrong. He was captured and arrested and taken to Constantinople where he was held captive until his execution a year later.  However, the history of the fortress probably dates back to the 12th century.  Certainly the 360º view is spectacular and affords a perspective of the Roman ruins below which is useful for exploring them later.


On our return journey we entered the ruins from the north-western side where the largest ruin is a funerary temple.  I was glad we did, because that end has not been excavated or restored and the colonnaded street of the decamanus running east-west is littered with remains of columns and lintels and carvings of every kind.  The row upon row of tall golden columns is impressive by any standard and it is not hard to imagine the frantic commercial activity which would once have been the daily life of Palmyra.  The columns at Palmyra are distinctive because each column has a kind of shelf bracket about two thirds of the way up where the statues of the merchants who had paid for the public works or statues of gods would have been displayed.  In some cases the shelf was carved as a part of the column itself and in others the column was made up of several sections and the shelf was part of one of these inserts which fitted together perfectly with the sections of the column above and below.  A statute of Zenobia once stood on one of the columns and there is an inscription to her there, but her name was effaced by the Romans after her unacceptable conduct made her persona non grata.

All along the decamanus and in the transverse streets are low rounded stone sections which, on further examination, turned out to be a piping system, the stones having been perforated to form a pipeline about six inches in diameter.  Through the holes in certain parts of the road or under ruins, particularly the baths,  we could see the remains of the water system made of ceramic pipes.  

The decamanus reaches a tetrapylon, or four-way arch, which is formed of columns of red Egyptian granite brought all the way from Aswan! How did they transport these gigantic columns all that way?  From this point onward the ruins have been excavated and cleared so the roadway is much as it must have been almost 2,000 years ago. As most people start their visit at the opposite end, the tetrapylon was full of young people running about and making a great deal of noise, so we decided to retire to the Zenobia and wait till the sun went down a little.

Later we continued our visit from where we had left off earlier.  The tetrapylon has been restored but not too obtrusively.  The main street continues eastwards passing the theatre and temple of Nebu on the right and the baths of Diocletian on the left.  The theatre has been restored on the outside but inside it looks much as it must have done but the outline, marked by the columns, is just about all that is to be seen  of the Temple of Nebu, a Mesopotamian god of wisdom who was equated with Apollo.  The Arch of Triumph which marks the eastern end of the decamanus is classical in style with a tall, wide central entrance for wheeled traffic and smaller lower arches either side for pedestrians.  

Perhaps the buildings, as opposed to the colonnades, which I found most evocative were the forum or market-place and the caravanserai, the middle eastern equivalent of medieval toll-booths where taxes were paid on the goods entering the city.  The forum is huge and is surrounded on all four sides by columned porticos, the space between each of which would have been filled by a stall, and there are windows in the walls with richly decorated surrounds.  The usual Palmyrene brackets are to be seen  where the moguls of trans-desert trade would have displayed their effigies to let the world know just who was who. It seems only appropriate that the forum should have been such a grand place in a city which made its fortune from trading activities.  At one end of the forum are the remains of a banqueting hall with benches for reclining guests all around the walls.  Next door to the forum is the large caravanserai or Tariff Court where the caravans would have paid their taxes before unloading their goods for sale in Palmyra or continuing their journey towards Damascus and the coast.  Just outside the forum can be seen the remains of Zenobia’s defensive wall.

Our last call was to the immense Temple of Bel which stands opposite the Arch of Triumph on the other side of the modern road through Palmyra to Tadmor and eastwards through the desert to Deir az-Zor on the Euphrates. Bel is a Semitic god who was often associated with Zeus in the Roman pantheon and the Canaanite god of rain and fertility Baal-Shamin whose temple stands just in front of the Zenobia hotel.  It is no surprise that so many gods should have been worshipped at Palmyra where there was probably a great mix of people of different origins, each group bringing its own religious beliefs along, just as people do today.  However, the magnitude of the Temple of Bel demonstrates clearly enough that this was the most significant god in Palmyra.

The temple is regarded as the most important religious building of the first century A.D. in the Middle East and the proportions are truly imperial in scale. The temple itself follows the tradition of Middle Eastern religious compounds.  The monumental entrance opens on to a huge courtyard where worshippers would have gathered in the open air, much as the faithful do today when they go to Mecca.  In the middle of the courtyard stands the building, surrounded by columns, where the gods were housed.  Here Bel was accompanied by the Palmyrene gods of the sun and the moon and he is represented as controlling the movements of the heavens.  To the left of the monumental entrance is another smaller entrance which comes up through a kind of tunnel just to the left of the altar.  This entrance was probably used to bring in the sacrificial animals. To the right of the altar is a basin for ritual washing.

There was a kind of quiet about the temple precinct, so we sat down in the shade there for a while.  Suddenly a man’s voice said, “That’s Lord Byron!”  Then a lady came into the inner sanctuary were we were sitting and said, “Absolutely.  Lord Byron”.  It was an elderly American couple who had once had a dog, called Lord Byron, who looked just like Simon, so conversation then ensued about the virtues of such a dog.  The lady was based at Aleppo in northern Syria where, I think from the conversation with other people who were with them, she must be teaching at an American school.


The hotel was full in the evening, the guests visiting the ruins being joined by groups of young people from Damascus on a day out.  It was almost full moon so, once we had had something to eat, we had a last moonlit walk through the ruins before going to bed.
The stone now took on a pale, spectral quality, and it was satisfying to wander among the ruins in the silence of the night.

The following day we got up just after dawn and walked out to the ruin fields once more where the stone, whitish pale in the moonlight, was now glowing bathed in a halo of golden light as the rays of the rising sun struck the ruins. It was like wandering in a golden world of light.  The call of a flock of bee-eaters was to be heard as they flew overhead. Despite the sharp cold wind of the desert, where temperatures fall dramatically at night, we were glad that we had stayed overnight to experience this vision of the columns and ruins of Palmyra.

As we wandered around looking at the columns and lintels, the cornices particularly attracted my attention. Remote as it may seem, the cornices of Palmyra influenced architecture in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries.  Two English travellers, Wood and Dawkins by name, visited Palmyra in the mid-18th century.  On their return, they published a book where the details of the cornices and art of Palmyra were richly depicted and the book had an enormous influence on the neo-classical architecture of Britain, with Palmyrene cornices and ceilings becoming tremendously popular in the stately homes of the day.  Palmyra cornices are to be found at Blair Castle and Dumfries House.  But, the more I looked, the more familiar  the lower part of the cornices seemed to become. I realised that these same motifs were  common in the cornices of houses in Garnethill  before that once beautiful area of Glasgow began its slow slide into decrepitude.  The lower part of the cornices in my aunt’s house, circular shapes interspersed with a vertical division, were a direct copy of the lower cornices and lintels of Palmyra!

Having checked out of the hotel, we drove past the sulphur springs and parked the car by the roadside to walk up to the Valley of the Tombs.  The necropolis of Palmyra is interesting in that over time various methods of burying the dead were used.  The most ancient was to bury the dead in Tower Tombs which could be anything up to four stories high, so each family would build up the tower to accomodate its dead.  The ceilings of the various storeys were carved. Later, underground burials became the norm with a transitional phase when both tower tombs and underground burials coexisted.  A late fashion was for House or Temple Tombs, the most intact example of which we had seen on our way up to the citadel.  The countryside all around the ruins of Palmyra is dotted with Tower Tombs which stand up like sentinels.  

As we walked up the hill, a young bedouin shepherd got up from his vantage point under a rock and approached in a state of agitation.  Did we have a lighter - or matches?  His lighter was broken and he  was desperate to smoke a cigarette.  His disappointment knew no bounds when he discovered that, of all the people he had to come across, it had to be these two with no source of fire of any kind.  Fortunately, we later remembered that there was a lighter in the car which we used to relieve his misery and off he went with his flock of sheep behind him, being joined later by another goatherd.

As we wandered among the tombs, a curious thing happened.  We were approaching the door of one of the tower tombs when suddenly, about a metre away from the entrance, Simon spooked.  He stopped  and stood motionless, his head and tail stretched out in “pointing” position.  He sniffed and sniffed and no amount of coaxing could entice him to approach the entrance to the tomb.  The same thing happened at another tomb further into the valley, so we decided to respect his intuition and did not enter any of the tombs.  Could the spirits of the dead still be present there?

We were sorry indeed to be leaving Palmyra.  The sight of the golden columns marching quietly across the desert is impressive and dramatic and the desert itself bores into the soul creating a kind of peace and tranquility which can only be found in expansive places like the desert and the sea.  It is no surprise that visionairies and mystics have nearly always and everywhere found inspiration in the desert which forces one to come down to basics and file away all frills and unnecessary trappings.  

Driving back - more slowly than we had come - we saw red kite and buzzards and booted eagles, crested larks and even a hoopoe and, strangely, the desert looked more desert-like than it had on the outward journey.  Palmyra is indeed an experience to be remembered and it is worth making a trip to Syria just to experience Palmyra!

April 8th. 1998