Palmyra

Palmyra was already a ruin when ISIL arrived. The city that Queen Zenobia ruled, the oasis metropolis that carved its own cultural identity out of the meeting point of Rome, Parthia, and the Semitic Near East, had been empty and silent for seventeen centuries. Its columns stood, its theatre was largely intact, its funerary towers rose from the desert as they had since the first and second centuries of the common era, preserved by the extraordinary desiccation of the Syrian desert and the distance from major population centres that had kept the site from being used as a quarry.

What ISIL demolished over several months in 2015 was not merely stone. It was the accumulated survivorship of 1,700 years — the fact that these specific objects had made it through all of the intervening centuries of war, occupation, earthquake, and neglect. That survivorship is irreplaceable in the most exact sense of the word.

Palmyra now exists in two states simultaneously: what was documented before 2015, and what survives after it. Understanding the relationship between those two states — what can be stabilised, what can be reconstructed, what can only be commemorated — is the central challenge of every serious conservation conversation about the site.

Ancient Origins — Tadmor in the Desert

The name Tadmor appears in Assyrian records of the second millennium BCE, indicating that a settlement existed at this desert oasis long before the Hellenistic period that gave it the name Palmyra. The logic of its location is simple: in a desert landscape without reliable water, the oasis at Tadmor was an inevitable stopping point on any route between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean, and whoever controlled it controlled the passage of goods and people across one of the most significant trade corridors of the ancient Near East. The city that grew up around this geographical advantage was never merely a resting point: it was a political entity that learned to leverage its position into wealth, influence, and eventually brief imperial ambition.

1st Century BCE to 1st Century CE — The Trading Empire

As Rome consolidates control over the Mediterranean and the Parthian Empire dominates Mesopotamia and Iran, Palmyra positions itself in the space between them. Palmyrene merchants travel the Silk Road eastward to Mesopotamia, Persia, and India, and westward to Rome's Syrian provinces and beyond. The city taxes the caravans that pass through, provides storage facilities, money-changing services, and the security infrastructure that makes long-distance desert trade viable. The wealth this generates is invested in monuments — the Temple of Bel, begun in 32 CE and incorporating older sacred structures on the same site; the Great Colonnade, a kilometre-long street of columns connecting the major public buildings; the distinctive funerary towers in which wealthy Palmyrene families interred their dead in stacked niches.

2nd Century CE — The Art of the Crossroads

The art that Palmyra produces in this period is unlike anything produced at any other point in the ancient world, and that distinctiveness is a direct expression of its cultural position. The funerary portrait busts — the faces that look out from the niches of the tomb towers, carved to seal the openings after the body was interred — combine Graeco-Roman portraiture in their facial modelling with Parthian frontal composition in their rigid, symmetrical presentation and with Semitic symbolic vocabulary in their jewellery, hairstyles, and ceremonial attributes. Each individual face is Graeco-Roman in technique; the convention of presenting it frontally, staring directly at the viewer, is Parthian; the specific objects held and worn carry meanings from a Semitic religious tradition. The synthesis is not a compromise or a confusion. It is a new thing.

270 to 273 CE — Zenobia's Empire

Following the assassination of her husband, the Palmyrene king Odaenathus, Queen Septimia Zenobia rules as regent for her young son Vaballathus and within two years has done something that strikes the Roman Empire as essentially inconceivable: she has conquered Egypt. Her general Zabdas leads Palmyrene forces down through the Levant and into Egypt, seizing the province that was Rome's primary grain supply, and then northward through Asia Minor to the shores of the Bosphorus. For a period of roughly three years, a desert city rules an empire stretching from the Euphrates to western Turkey.

The Emperor Aurelian's response is immediate and decisive. He leads his army eastward in 272 CE, defeats Zenobia's forces at Immae and then at Emesa, pursues her to Palmyra, and takes the city. Zenobia attempts to flee toward Persia but is captured at the Euphrates. What happened to her afterward — whether she was executed, died in Rome, or lived out her life in comfortable exile near Tivoli — is a matter the ancient sources disagree about. The city of Palmyra was initially spared, then sacked the following year after a revolt. Its significance as a trading centre never fully recovered.

1st to 20th Century CE — Desert Preservation

The seventeen centuries between Palmyra's sack and its inscription on the World Heritage List are in many respects a story of preservation by neglect. The desert location that had made the city wealthy was also the factor that protected it afterward — too remote for sustained occupation, too dry for the agricultural development that would have required its monuments to be quarried for building material. Explorers and scholars who visited from the seventeenth century onward found a site in extraordinary condition: standing columns, intact theatre, funerary towers rising from the sand, temples whose walls and roofs had partially collapsed but whose carved surfaces retained detail that would be remarkable in a building a fraction of the age. The site was photographed, drawn, surveyed, and excavated over the following century and a half, producing a detailed scholarly record that is now the primary documentation of what existed before 2015.

2015 — ISIL and the Demolitions

ISIL forces take control of Palmyra in May 2015. The site's antiquities director, Khaled al-Asaad — an 82-year-old scholar who had devoted his career to documenting and protecting Palmyra — refuses to reveal the location of antiquities that had been moved for safety. He is publicly executed in August 2015. Over the following months, ISIL systematically demolishes the Temple of Baalshamin, the main cella of the Temple of Bel, the Arch of Triumph, three funerary towers including the Tower of Elahbel, and additional structures. The demolitions are filmed and broadcast as propaganda, framed as the destruction of idolatry. They are also — the evidence is substantial — accompanied by the looting and sale of portable antiquities through networks that route through Turkey and into the international art market.

Syrian and Russian forces retake the site in March 2016. ISIL recaptures it briefly in December 2016, causing additional damage, before being driven out again in March 2017.

Today — Assessment, Debate, and Incomplete Recovery

The damage assessment work conducted since 2017 has established both the scale of what was lost and the condition of what remains. The Temple of Bel, the most significant surviving structure on the site, lost its main cella but retains substantial surrounding walls and elements. The Great Colonnade remains largely standing. The theatre survived without major structural demolition. Many of the funerary towers in the Valley of the Tombs were damaged but not entirely destroyed. The site is not a wasteland. It is a fractured version of what it was — containing more surviving fabric than early reports suggested, but containing it in conditions of structural instability, ongoing conflict-zone insecurity, and institutional absence that make systematic conservation work extremely difficult.

Palmyra carries a Critically Threatened classification — the most severe available — reflecting the combination of conflict damage, ongoing regional instability, institutional absence, and the structural vulnerability of partially demolished historic structures.

ISIL Demolitions and Their Structural Legacy — the immediate destruction of 2015–2016 is complete, but its consequences are ongoing. Structures that were partially demolished are now in states of structural instability that time and weathering will worsen without intervention. Exposed newly fractured stone surfaces — surfaces that had been protected by joint mortar and surrounding fabric for nineteen centuries — are now vulnerable to weathering at rates far exceeding the original exposed surfaces. The structural collapse of partially standing elements is a measurable and ongoing risk.

Ongoing Armed Conflict and Institutional Absence — the Syrian civil conflict has not ended, and the institutional framework for heritage management in Syria has been severely disrupted. The Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums has operated under extraordinarily difficult conditions. International conservation teams cannot access the site with the frequency and security needed for systematic work. The absence of functioning institutions is not merely an inconvenience for conservation planning — it is the condition that allows continued looting, continued structural deterioration, and the accumulation of threats that sustained institutional attention would be able to address.

Looting — the systematic removal of portable antiquities from Palmyra during the ISIL occupation, and the continuation of opportunistic looting during subsequent periods of reduced oversight, has removed objects from the site and from their archaeological contexts in ways that cannot be reversed. The international art market's role in incentivising this looting — and the inadequacy of import controls in many countries to intercept looted Syrian antiquities — is a dimension of the problem that extends far beyond the site itself.

The photogrammetric and 3D recording work conducted at Palmyra before 2015 — by multiple institutions and individuals, accumulated over decades — has proved to be the most practically valuable form of conservation investment for a site that has since suffered catastrophic damage. The detailed digital models, orthographic drawings, and photographic archives that document the site as it existed before the ISIL occupation are now the primary resource for understanding what was lost and for informing decisions about what reconstruction is technically possible and culturally appropriate.

The question of reconstruction at Palmyra has generated significant debate in the conservation community. Proposals to use 3D printing technology to reconstruct demolished monuments have been met with a range of responses — from enthusiasm for the possibility of restoring the visual coherence of the site to scepticism about whether a printed replica carries meaningful heritage value and concern that reconstruction might obscure the historical record of what ISIL did. The conservation field has established principles distinguishing between the stabilisation of surviving fabric and the reconstruction of lost elements, and applying those principles in a context of profound political complexity is a challenge that has not been resolved.

The political dimensions of Palmyra scholarship and conservation are impossible to separate from the technical ones. The site has been instrumentalised by multiple actors — by ISIL as a target of deliberately propagandised destruction, by the Syrian government as a symbol of liberation and national heritage, by international cultural institutions as a case study in heritage protection in conflict zones. Navigating those competing uses of the site's significance while conducting technically rigorous conservation work is a challenge that has no parallel in the peacetime heritage management literature.

The structures that survived 2015 and 2016 will not survive indefinitely without intervention. Partially demolished walls, exposed to weathering without the protection they previously received from surrounding intact fabric, will continue to lose material. Structurally unstable elements will eventually fall. The absence of drainage works, vegetation management, and basic maintenance will accelerate deterioration at a rate that cannot be reversed once it has progressed beyond certain points.

The people who executed Khaled al-Asaad understood that heritage is not merely stone. It is a form of memory — the material record of who people were and what they made — and its destruction is an attack on that memory and on the communities whose identity it sustains. The case for conservation at Palmyra is not merely aesthetic or scholarly. It is an argument about what it means to protect human memory against those who would erase it.

What Palmyra requires now is security sufficient for systematic conservation work to proceed, institutional support for the Syrian conservation professionals whose expertise and commitment have survived conditions that would have ended most institutions, and international resources proportionate to the significance of what is at stake. None of those conditions currently fully exist. The work of creating them is as urgent as any technical conservation question the site presents.