Digging Up Palmyra: Syria’s Top Tourist Attraction Is Slowly Emerging

PALMYRA, Syria —  Archeologists have been excavating this ancient oasis for more than 50 years, but it will take 30 more before the full splendor of Palmyra’s temples, tombs and colonnades is restored.

Lines of weathered columns gleam golden against green date palms. Hundreds more lie buried in the sand, along with piles of huge stone blocks dating back 1,800 years to a time when Palmyra was the center of a kingdom on desert caravan routes.

“If we brought in bulldozers, we could clear the site in six months, but we’d also destroy much evidence needed to assess the city’s role in history,” said archeologist Khaled Assad, the site director.

“Doing it slowly means another generation of work by Syrian and foreign excavators. . . . We’ll also be restoring as much of the ancient city as possible.”

International Effort

Polish, French, West German, East German and Japanese archeologists are digging in different areas of Palmyra.

Syria, where human habitation has been traced back 150,000 years, is an archeological treasure house of the remnants of countless civilizations that have flourished and fallen throughout its history.

About half of ancient Palmyra, about 4 1/2 square miles, has been unearthed.

It’s Syria’s top tourist attraction, drawing more than 70,000 visitors a year.

Palmyra was important because it was the hub of the network of caravan trails that carried silks and spices from eastern Asia across the Roman province of Arabia to the Mediterranean.

A Challenge to Rome

But its rebellious Queen Zenobia challenged Rome’s authority. The city was plundered in AD 272 after Zenobia was captured during a long siege.

“Palmyra is a unique site . . . a great responsibility, and we have to look after it, restoring the architecture, bringing it back to life,” said Culture Minister Najar Attar.

This year, conservators finished renovating a 3,000-seat amphitheater overlooking a colonnaded main avenue where plays, concerts and youth festivals will be staged.

A tall, arched portico forms the backdrop, flanked by deep-set doorways and pillars made of limestone hauled from local quarries.

“Palymra boasts very lively Roman architecture, and its public buildings are superbly planned,” said Asif Bahnassi, a recently retired director of antiquities who supervised the restoration.

“We’ve re-erected more than 150 columns as well as many masonry blocks. . . . You can feel the sense of spaciousness and grandeur.”

When excavations started in the 1930s, the villagers of Palmyra lived in the ruins of the huge temple of Bel, the Babylonian equivalent of Zeus, king of the Gods in Greek mythology.

Residents Resettled

They were resettled in a town that now has a population of 30,000.

The only modern building among the ruins is the 12-room Hotel Zenobia dating from 1918, mentioned in many Middle East travelers’ memoirs.

But it’s unlikely to be torn down because “it happens to stand in the courtyard of a temple to the rain god Belshamin and doesn’t overlie anything important,” Assad said.

Last year, he said, Syrian archeologists pulled 30 pieces “of really beautiful statuary” from an underground tomb dated around AD 98.

In that period, wealthy Palmyrenes buried their relatives in family tombs decorated with sculptures and wall paintings of the deceased.

The excavators are still looking for a likeness of Queen Zenobia.

“She doesn’t appear in the archeological record although we have a good deal of information about her. Her career was recorded in detail by Roman historians,” Assad said.

Remains Were Razed

The site of her palace has been identified, but a later Roman emperor, Diocletian, razed its remains and built a military camp there about 30 years after the city was captured.

In the 3rd Century, Palmyra won tax breaks from the Romans that helped boost its commercial importance.

In addition to its markets for luxury goods, the city operated a network of caravan hostelries at 15-mile intervals--equivalent to a day’s journey. Palmyrene merchants owned ships that sailed in the Persian Gulf.

But Zenobia provoked imperial anger by asserting the city’s independence after her Arab husband, Odeinat, died.

“She was very ambitious for her son, Wahballat, but she was also a strong personality in her own right,” Assad said.

Called “the most beautiful woman in the Orient,” she wore Roman purple and addressed her troops on horseback like an emperor on campaign. She followed political developments in Rome and hired a Greek philosopher, Longinus, as an adviser.

Zenobia was seized by the Romans near the Euphrates River, while riding a camel to seek help against the Emperor Aurelian’s siege of Palmyra.

According to some historians, she was taken to Rome where she married a Roman senator and lived in a villa at Tivoli.