Palmyra

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Palmyra City of Palms, Ancient city of Syria, in an oasis on the northern edge of the Syrian Desert.

About 240 km (about 150 mi) northeast of Damascus, according to tradition, Solomon, king of Israel, founded it, In the Bible it is called Tadmur (see 1 Kings 9:18).

A prosperous caravan station in the 1st century BC, Palmyra became a Roman outpost and a major city-state within the Roman Empire in the 1st century AD. Palmyra reached its apogee under Odenathus.
A Roman ally, Odenathus regained Roman Possessions lost to Shapur I (reigned 241-72) of Persia.

Upon the assassination of Odenathus his widow, Zenobia, succeeded him. Her ambition to further expand Palmyra's influence in Asia Minor and Egypt was ended by the Roman emperor Aurelian, who in 272 captured her and razed the city.
Subsequently, Palmyra was taken by the Arabs and sacked by Tamerlane

The old city was a site to behold with columns and arches everywhere. Except for the buildings in the way and the angle of the sun.

Palmyra Sites:
The Museum: History & folklore, The Archaeological Museum which has been installed in a building specially built for it, will answer most of the questions the visitor has been asking him-self as he walked around the ancient city. The items on display have been carefully chosen in order to cover every aspect of Palmyrene civilization throughout the ages; they are many but there is little repetition or duplication. There are informative labels in Arabic and French. Points of particular interest ate illustrated by large charts. There is thus little point in going into detail about the collections in this guide. A few landmarks will be sufficient.

The entrance hall is devoted to prehistory - depicted in a series of highly realistic dioramas. The room to the right of the entrance shows the evolutions of the Palmyrene script. In the next room there are religious sculptures. One of the most beautiful is a carved lintel on which the god Baalshamin, "God of the Heavens", is depicted as an eagle with outstretched wings and smaller eagles by its side, each with an olive branch in its beak; also beside it are figures of the gods of the sun and moon with light beaming from their heads

There is also a great model of the Temple of Baal as it was when it was built. In the third room there are sculptures mostly from public buildings. They depict everyday life, commerce, and honors. In them people are dressed either in local costumes: a long down under a wide cloak worn round the shoulders, or in Parthian dress: a tunic worn over trousers tucked into boots. The pack or army dromedaries wear harness very similar to that used today.
The gallery that leads back to the entrance contains many representations of the various gods of Palmyra notably of Yarhibol, the sun god, dressed in Palmyrene costume. The three rooms and gallery on the left of the entrance hall are occupied mainly by splendid funerary sculptures. The actual tomb chests in the hypogeia were sealed by limestone slabs on which the deceased was depicted, as if alive, in high relief, in an attitude of serenity.

The Great Temple of Ba'al:

A great blank wall surrounds the temple, 200 meters on each side, and the walls of the fortress that replaced its ancient Propylaea during the 12th century. This bleak exterior gives no hint of the magnificence of the buildings internal layout. There is an immense courtyard surfaced with smooth rock, which rises gently towards a majestic edifice at its highest point; this is the cella, the holy of holies, towards which the faithful used to crow, where the sacrificial mysteries were celebrated.

The wall surrounding it lined with porticos whose columns are still standing for the most part, allows one to appreciate the vast proportions of the whole building, but at the same time emphasize the enclosed nature of this shrine to the chief god of the city. The layout of the temple corresponds to the arrangement of Semitic sanctuaries -Thus here there is, in front of the cella, the great sacrificial altar and a ritual basin in which the priests performed their ablutions and in which ritual vessels were washed. A colonnade surrounded the cella. Its capitals were made of bronze; only the stone cores remain.

The limestone beams joining the colonnade to the wall behind show by their sculptures with what refinement and abundance the building was decorated. Their themes are floral, representations of the god and of processions. One particularly remarkable scene shows a camel carrying a statue of the god Bel passing in front of people dressed in the local costume, a cloth draped and tied around its middle, and followed by a group of veiled women, their heads bowed in reverence. The altar is shown loaded with gifts: pomegranates, pinecones, grapes and a kid. The two worshippers are in Parthian dress. The interior of the cella consists of two open chapels facing each other with ceilings made from single slabs of stone, and richly decorated; the one on the left (as you enter) with signs of the zodiac, the one on the right with very fine geometric designs. The Palmyrene trinity (Bel, Yarhibol, and AglibUl) is also depicted. The arrangement of these two chapels, like two opposed niches, is enough to show original this Palmyrene architecture is, typically Arab and Syrian. Other details noted by specialist have shown that, far from having been influenced by the Greeks and Romans, the civilization of Palmyra, earlier than that of Rome itself inspired both the architecture and the decoration practiced by her invaders

The Valley of Tombs:

There are enormous cemeteries all around the city, but it is above all on the slopes of the hills to the east that the ancient tombs have been furnished new evidence about Palmyrene civilization. There are four types of burial place to be found here: the tomb-tower (a square structure with narrow windows), the house - tomb (the one that stands in the perspective from the Great Colonnade for example), the hypogeum-tower (a stairway linking a network of underground chambers inside a tomb-tower, and finally the hypogeum tomb, built to receive the bodies of one family over a period of two centuries, a real underground house decorated with frescoes, each cell of which is sealed with a sculpture representing with deceased.

Beyond the ramparts, the so-called Marona house-tomb, behind Diocletianis Camp the Jamblique tomb-tower, built in 83 A.D., and 500 meters further on, up the hill, the tomb-tower of the Elhabel family, 103 A.D. Near the latter, on the edge of the sandy road, is a hypogeum tower, from the terrace of which, in the evening, there is a fine view over Palmyra. Near the top of the hillside there is an entrance at ground level, to the hypogeum of Atenatan, which was dug in 98. But the most impressive of all the underground tombs is that known as the Tomb of the Three Brothers (at the beginning of the Valley of the Tombs), which contains some four hundred niches and whose walls are covered with frescoes in a remarkable state of preservation. If you climb the hill crowned by a 17th century fort you wit be rewarded by a magnificent general view of Palmyra the ruins, the market.

Colonnaded Street and Public Buildings:

The colonnaded street, or the decumanus, which is the main axis of the city runs from northwest to southeast for 1.6 Km (1 mi) long, originally of some 1500 Corinthian columns, still stand. In modern times, the town, Tadmur, has been built nearby.

Starting from the Temple of Bel, which is on the southe ast side towards the Arab castle on the northwest side. Nearly at the beginning of the colonnade is the monumental arch, which has been very well preserved and is almost always the vestige with which Palmyra is associated.

Further on, is the Temple of Nebo, which is much smaller than the Temple of Baal Nebo is the Mesopotamian god of Wisdom and oracles, and often identified as the Greek God Apollo. This temple was built in the 1st century AD, and some work was later added in the 3rd century.

At a further point down the decumanus where there are four columns made out of Egyptian red granite on the right, are the Baths of Diocletian. On the left is the theater, It was first built in the 2nd century AD and work continued into the 3rd century.

Behind the theatre is the Senate which is a small peristyled court around which are rows of seating for the senators. South of the senate is the Tariff Court where a stone inscribed with the Palmyrene tariffs of 137 AD, and the Agora.

Also remaining around the colonnaded area are the tetrapylon (reconstructed in 1963), and the funerary temple (2nd century).

Diocletians Camp:
This area was originally constructed in the 2nd century, and was built by Sosianus Hierocles, the Governor of Syria under the great emperor Diocletian. The main vestiges of interest are the tetapylon of which little remains, and the principia or the Temple of Standards.

Fakhreddin Al Maany Castle:

This intimidating castle, which stands on top of a mountain to the west of Palmyra's vestiges, was built in the 16th century. It was surrounded by a moat, leaving no access to it except by a narrow bridge.

The Script of the Oldest Song Found on Earth

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