Hotel Zenobia, Palmyra, Syria
With a history that extends back nearly four thousand years, Palmyra has risen and fallen many times. Its original name was Tadmor, which probably meant “palm tree,” an indication of the site’s renowned fertility. Both the Bible and local legend credit the city’s foundation to King Solomon in the tenth century BCE, but in fact it is already mentioned in Mesopotamian texts a millennium earlier. A spring and a wadi, or dry river bed, provided the settlement with water, making it a welcome stop for travelers and traders on the road between Central Asia and the Mediterranean Sea.
The population, almost from the outset, was a mixture of Semitic peoples from surrounding areas: Amorites, Aramaeans, Arabs, and Jews, who developed a distinctive Palmyrene language and a distinctive script expressive of their distinctive cosmopolitan culture, which drew from Persia, Greece, and Rome as well as local tradition. The city expanded greatly in the Hellenistic period, in the wake of Alexander the Great (fourth century BCE), and again during the Roman Empire. Its most impressive archaeological remains date from the first and second centuries CE, when the expansion of the Roman Empire streamlined the trading networks that gave Palmyra life. Some 200,000 people may have made their home in the oasis, which was granted a political independence unusual under Roman rule; Emperor Hadrian, who visited in 129 CE, declared it an independent city-state.
The weakening of Rome and the rise of Sasanian Persia in the third century CE cut into Palmyra’s share of trade between Asia and the Levant. For a brief moment, from 271 to 273, the local queen Zenobia managed to hold off both the Persians and Rome to claim an empire of her own, but in 273 the Roman emperor Aurelian conquered the city, looted its temples to decorate his own Temple of the Sun in Rome, and razed its residential quarters. In 303, Emperor Diocletian supplied Palmyra with its own Roman fortress, a walled camp to house a permanent garrison of soldiers. Just two centuries later, in 527, the Byzantine emperor Justinian further reinforced the city walls.
Christianity became the dominant religion in Palmyra after Aurelian’s conquest; Islam arrived in 634, when the city had been reduced to a village within the walls of Diocletian’s camp. Under the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, the city, now renamed Tadmur, grew and prospered despite its tendency to rebel against any form of centralized authority and the animosity of nature: earthquakes caused widespread destruction in 1068 and 1089. In 1230, with the Crusades menacing from abroad and the death of Saladin creating turmoil locally, Al-Mujahid Shirkuh II built a castle on the summit of the mountain overlooking Palmyra, but in 1400 the city fell to the Central Asian warlord Timur—Tamerlane—who not only destroyed it yet again, but also shifted the caravans to other routes. Palmyra’s few remaining residents huddled within the walls of the precinct surrounding the ruined ancient Temple of Bel.
Palmyra expanded again in the early twentieth century as the Great Game began to play out on Mesopotamian soil, now an emporium that welcomed motor traffic as well as camel caravans. By 1932, Syria’s general director of antiquities, the Frenchman Henri Arnold Seyrig, had convinced the residents of old Tadmur to move out of their homes among the ancient ruins and into a new village especially constructed for them by French builders. Archaeological investigation of the site began immediately afterwards, and Palmyra adapted to the tourist trade with additions like the Hotel Zenobia, built in 1900.
The Lebanese war that raged between 1975 and 1990 and the Syrian civil war of the past four years have damaged or destroyed many of the monuments that Vignes records in his photographs. The worst destruction, certainly, was inflicted between June and September of 2015 by the militants of the Islamic State, who first tortured and killed the eighty-one-year-old site director Khaled el-Assad before beheading him and hanging his body from a column. Then they set to work obliterating the ancient buildings amid accusations of paganism and idolatry.
These acts of destruction, like those of Aurelian and Timur, were deeds of pure brutality, a distressingly recurrent theme in the story of humankind. Yet Palmyra has also suffered destruction in the lofty name of knowledge: it was twentieth-century archaeologists, not Islamic fanatics, who obliterated old Tadmur Village, and many other structures, like fortification walls, that dated from post-classical times. These places and these structures had their own tales to tell; in them, sometimes for centuries, people lived out their lives, built their families, gathered their memories.
And thus a sensitive soul (identified only as Stenhouse 1) on Palmyra’s Trip Advisor website found time recently to mourn not only the ruined temples of Bel and Baal Shamin, UNESCO Heritage buildings exploded by the fanatics of the Islamic State, but also a more recent piece of Palmyrene history, the once grand old Hotel Zenobia, turning his thoughts all the while to the people who had once worked there. In six brief sentences, Stenhouse 1 says it all:
"There is nothing left of this hotel now. I hope that the lovely staff who welcomed us there are safe and well. Once peace returns, Palmyra will rise again. It’s a fascinating place and this hotel will be rebuilt. It had the most incredible location. You could literally breakfast in the ruins." April 1, 2016.
Hotel Zenobia, Palmyra, Syria
With a history that extends back nearly four thousand years, Palmyra has risen and fallen many times. Its original name was Tadmor, which probably meant “palm tree,” an indication of the site’s renowned fertility. Both the Bible and local legend credit the city’s foundation to King Solomon in the tenth century BCE, but in fact it is already mentioned in Mesopotamian texts a millennium earlier. A spring and a wadi, or dry river bed, provided the settlement with water, making it a welcome stop for travelers and traders on the road between Central Asia and the Mediterranean Sea.
The population, almost from the outset, was a mixture of Semitic peoples from surrounding areas: Amorites, Aramaeans, Arabs, and Jews, who developed a distinctive Palmyrene language and a distinctive script expressive of their distinctive cosmopolitan culture, which drew from Persia, Greece, and Rome as well as local tradition. The city expanded greatly in the Hellenistic period, in the wake of Alexander the Great (fourth century BCE), and again during the Roman Empire. Its most impressive archaeological remains date from the first and second centuries CE, when the expansion of the Roman Empire streamlined the trading networks that gave Palmyra life. Some 200,000 people may have made their home in the oasis, which was granted a political independence unusual under Roman rule; Emperor Hadrian, who visited in 129 CE, declared it an independent city-state.
The weakening of Rome and the rise of Sasanian Persia in the third century CE cut into Palmyra’s share of trade between Asia and the Levant. For a brief moment, from 271 to 273, the local queen Zenobia managed to hold off both the Persians and Rome to claim an empire of her own, but in 273 the Roman emperor Aurelian conquered the city, looted its temples to decorate his own Temple of the Sun in Rome, and razed its residential quarters. In 303, Emperor Diocletian supplied Palmyra with its own Roman fortress, a walled camp to house a permanent garrison of soldiers. Just two centuries later, in 527, the Byzantine emperor Justinian further reinforced the city walls.
Christianity became the dominant religion in Palmyra after Aurelian’s conquest; Islam arrived in 634, when the city had been reduced to a village within the walls of Diocletian’s camp. Under the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, the city, now renamed Tadmur, grew and prospered despite its tendency to rebel against any form of centralized authority and the animosity of nature: earthquakes caused widespread destruction in 1068 and 1089. In 1230, with the Crusades menacing from abroad and the death of Saladin creating turmoil locally, Al-Mujahid Shirkuh II built a castle on the summit of the mountain overlooking Palmyra, but in 1400 the city fell to the Central Asian warlord Timur—Tamerlane—who not only destroyed it yet again, but also shifted the caravans to other routes. Palmyra’s few remaining residents huddled within the walls of the precinct surrounding the ruined ancient Temple of Bel.
Palmyra expanded again in the early twentieth century as the Great Game began to play out on Mesopotamian soil, now an emporium that welcomed motor traffic as well as camel caravans. By 1932, Syria’s general director of antiquities, the Frenchman Henri Arnold Seyrig, had convinced the residents of old Tadmur to move out of their homes among the ancient ruins and into a new village especially constructed for them by French builders. Archaeological investigation of the site began immediately afterwards, and Palmyra adapted to the tourist trade with additions like the Hotel Zenobia, built in 1900.
The Lebanese war that raged between 1975 and 1990 and the Syrian civil war of the past four years have damaged or destroyed many of the monuments that Vignes records in his photographs. The worst destruction, certainly, was inflicted between June and September of 2015 by the militants of the Islamic State, who first tortured and killed the eighty-one-year-old site director Khaled el-Assad before beheading him and hanging his body from a column. Then they set to work obliterating the ancient buildings amid accusations of paganism and idolatry.
These acts of destruction, like those of Aurelian and Timur, were deeds of pure brutality, a distressingly recurrent theme in the story of humankind. Yet Palmyra has also suffered destruction in the lofty name of knowledge: it was twentieth-century archaeologists, not Islamic fanatics, who obliterated old Tadmur Village, and many other structures, like fortification walls, that dated from post-classical times. These places and these structures had their own tales to tell; in them, sometimes for centuries, people lived out their lives, built their families, gathered their memories.
And thus a sensitive soul (identified only as Stenhouse 1) on Palmyra’s Trip Advisor website found time recently to mourn not only the ruined temples of Bel and Baal Shamin, UNESCO Heritage buildings exploded by the fanatics of the Islamic State, but also a more recent piece of Palmyrene history, the once grand old Hotel Zenobia, turning his thoughts all the while to the people who had once worked there. In six brief sentences, Stenhouse 1 says it all:
"There is nothing left of this hotel now. I hope that the lovely staff who welcomed us there are safe and well. Once peace returns, Palmyra will rise again. It’s a fascinating place and this hotel will be rebuilt. It had the most incredible location. You could literally breakfast in the ruins." April 1, 2016.