Goodbye, Palmyra

On my first visit to Palmyra, in 2009, like countless visitors through the centuries, I retraced the ancient route established by trading caravans between the Mediterranean ports and points east: Persia, India, China. Palmyra, a major oasis rich in olive trees and date palms, lies midway between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates and saw a continual flow of merchants transporting goods in either direction. In the drive eastward from Damascus, the scenery becomes progressively bleaker and less fertile; as Veyne describes the experience in this lovely book, “at the end of those four hours traveling through a desert of dry and rocky land where sparse, short, and shriveled grass grows, the appearance of the green palm grove and the white colonnade, an immense vestige of a vanished world, is a surprise of which one never grows tired.” The wide valley, “scattered with a great number of ostentatious monuments,” gleaming with cubes and columns of white limestone (for there is no marble in Syria) and presided over by a starkly dramatic medieval citadel looming on a mountaintop over the city, is a sight I will never forget.

Why had no one ever advised me to visit this matchless place? I’d had people telling me to go to Baalbek and Petra, but never Palmyra. At that time, travel was easy and cheap throughout Syria, and the local people were extremely friendly, hospitable, and accommodating. Yet I only encountered one other American during my travels in Syria (a total of seven weeks) and very few Europeans. Why weren’t the Palmyrene ruins flooded with international visitors?

It is too late now, of course; it will probably be many years before Palmyra again becomes a place of cultural pilgrimage, and much of the destruction that has taken place in the last couple of years will never be repaired. Paul Veyne’s slim volume, written in the idiosyncratic, personal style for which he has long been famous in France, is in effect a love letter to the besieged, enchanted city. At the time Veyne finished his book, Palmyra had been retaken from ISIS and the damage seemed to have been stopped; since then, however, the Islamic State seized the city again and wreaked even more devastation during four additional months—December 2016 to March 2017—of misrule.

During their first occupation of the city, ISIS had targeted only religious structures, such as the Temple of Baalshamin and the great Temple dedicated to Bel, Palmyra’s principal deity. This time, they went after secular sites, like the spectacular Tetrapylon—a sort of third-century traffic circle—and the lovely, well-preserved Roman theater. They held off on dynamiting the theater, however, until they had made effective use of it as a venue for show trials and public executions. The archaeological museum has recently served as a tribunal and prison; the medieval citadel, where I enjoyed a glass of champagne with some French travelers one idyllic evening, has returned to its original military function and has sustained considerable damage from gunfire and explosives. And as all the world knows, the venerable Khaled al-Asaad, for 40 years Palmyra’s head of antiquities, was publicly beheaded.

What is the motivation behind such nihilism and ruin? The conventional explanation—given by the Islamic State itself, as by the Taliban before them—is formulated in the New York Times: The group “intends to impose its will by destroying monuments or artifacts that it says do not conform to its strict interpretation of Islam.” Veyne, however, sees it slightly differently.

Khaled al-Asaad, after all, was an archaeologist rather than a priest. And of course, even Palmyrene religious structures were not exactly dedicated to cults that threaten Islam: No one has worshipped Bel for a very long time. The priests of imperial Rome, which took control of the city during the reign of Tiberius, did not feel threatened; they allowed the local cults freedom of worship. Palmyra’s Christian overlords during the Byzantine period did not feel threatened; the emperors had four churches erected and installed a bishop, but gave instructions that pagan shrines, here as elsewhere in the empire, should be preserved as ornaments of their conquered cities. The seventh-century Muslim conquerors of Syria did not feel threatened, either. Early Islam, the fastest-spreading religion in human history, was tolerant not only of Jews and Christians, the other “people of the book,” but of adherents of pagan sects. Far from tearing down the Temple of Bel (which had already been rebuilt over Bronze Age and, then, Hellenistic sites), Muslim leaders restored it, both under the Arabs and the Ottomans.

It is probably Palmyra’s status as a monument to multicultural tolerance, then, that has made it a target for the so-called Islamic State. “Palmyra,” Veyne writes, “holds the record for the number of rich cultures that could be found in one place .  .  . ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Aramean Syria, Phoenicia, some of Persia, more of Arabia, and covering it all was Greek culture and the Roman political framework.” As in other cultural centers of the Roman Empire, there was a live-and-let-live attitude to alien faiths and ways. “When Palmyrenes wrote in Greek,” Veyne points out (and all educated Palmyrenes spoke and wrote Greek in addition to the Aramaic spoken by the population at large), “they rendered the name of their God Bel as ‘Zeus.’ This proves two things: that they saw themselves from the exterior with Greco-Roman eyes, and wanted to be understood by the rest of the empire; and that they admitted, along with all of non-Christian antiquity, that the gods of other people existed.”

Such easygoing syncretism, both religious and cultural, is anathema to 21st-century bigots, who can hardly conceive of such a worldview. Palmyrene civilization was distinctly hybrid; monuments carried inscriptions both in Greek and in Palmyrene, a local variant of Aramaic with a distinctive, curly script. Palmyrene dignitaries under the Roman Empire “proudly included their titles of duumvir, aedile, or advisor” along with their Aramaic names, and the decision by such men whether to wear Persian or Greek clothing “was a matter of personal choice, of wealth, or of whim, not of origin or profession.” Ross Burns, the eminent archaeologist and historian of Syria, remarks that we are dealing not simply

This kind of stylization is very evident in Palmyrene art: a sharp upward sweep in sculpted draperies, for instance, or a “systematic frontality” in the subject’s gaze. Palmyrene funerary busts are instantly recognizable in museums all over the world. Glimpsing one out of the corner of my eye at the Smith College Museum of Art recently, I felt as if I had spotted a long-lost friend.

There is a lesson in all this, Veyne indicates, not only for religious zealots like members of the Islamic State but also for misguided modern leftists who complain about “cultural appropriation.” Cultures live and grow, after all, only by learning from neighbors, conquerors, subjects, and competitors, and no rich civilization has, or could ever, develop in isolation. “Since there is a lot of talk today about cultural imperialism and national identity,” Veyne writes, “we forget that throughout history, modernization through the adaptation of foreign customs played a role far more important than nationalism; the culture of the other was adopted, not as something foreign, but as something considered to be the true way of living.” Imitation, as ever, is flattery and should be recognized as such. ISIS and other such organizations have ignored the clearest lesson of history, which is (as Veyne concludes), “[C]‌ivilizations do not have a ‘fatherland’ and have always been without political, religious, or cultural borders to separate the human herds.”

Brooke Allen is the author of, most recently, Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers.