Destroy the tidiness of the city2/3/2024 Ancient Palmyra is, seemingly, turning Ozymandian and being integrated with the surrounding desert as the buildings that made it worthy of being a Unesco heritage site are reduced to rubble. The splendour Prof Bowersock hymned is fast disappearing. “Among the great cities of antiquity, Palmyra is comparable only to Petra in Jordan, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and the Athenian Acropolis in Greece,” argues GW Bowersock, professor emeritus of ancient history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.īut, since Monday, the view Bell savoured no longer exists. Later scholars have gone further than Bell in praising the city. Photograph: Alamyīell was admiring what has become known as the Venice of the Sands, the ruins of an ancient city that, between the first and third centuries AD, rose in splendour as an oasis of date palms and gardens in the Syrian desert, sometimes independent and at other times under the control of Rome, and which, for 1,500 years, remained one of the best preserved sites from antiquity. The Temple of Baal Shamin was one of the wonders of Palmyra. As she rode on a camel into town, she passed the “famous Palmyrene tombs”, “great stone towers, 4 stories high, some more ruined and some less, standing together in groups or bordering the road … Except Petra, Palmyra is the loveliest thing I have seen in this country.” She wrote that “the stone used here is a beautiful white limestone that looks like marble and weathers a golden yellow like the Acropolis”. It looks like the white skeleton of a town, standing knee deep in the blown sand.”īell, the so-called Queen of the Desert – whom Nicole Kidman plays in a new film directed by Werner Herzog – was entranced by what she saw. And beyond, all is the desert, sand and white stretches of salt and sand again, with the dust clouds whirling over it and the Euphrates 5 days away. Beyond them is the immense Temple of Baal the modern town is built inside it and its rows of columns rise out of a mass of mud roofs. It is a mass of columns, ranged into long avenues, grouped into temples, lying broken on the sand or pointing one long solitary finger to Heaven. “I wonder if the wide world presents a more singular landscape. A t length we stood on the end of the col and looked over Palmyra,” wrote the British traveller, archaeologist and poet Gertrude Bell on.
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