The Last Stand of Palmyra’s Chief Archaeologist
The square in Tadmor town was crowded on the morning of August 18, 2015. ISIS militants forced an 82-year-old man to kneel on the pavement. Khaled al-Asaad had spent more than forty years as the Director of Antiquities at Palmyra — long enough that the international press called him “Mr. Palmyra.” He had buried statues in private gardens and trucked the most fragile pieces of the museum’s collection to Damascus before the militants arrived three months earlier. They had been interrogating him for over a month. They wanted to know where the gold was. They believed an old archaeologist must be hiding treasure somewhere in the desert.
He told them nothing. They beheaded him in the square and hung his body from a lamppost beside one of the Roman columns he had helped restore.
Palmyra has always been a city that empires tried to erase. The Roman emperor Aurelian sacked it in 273 AD for the crime of producing a queen who refused to be a Roman vassal. The desert buried what the soldiers left. European travelers rediscovered it in the eighteenth century and turned its ruins into a fashion. ISIS, eight months into its occupation, dynamited the Temple of Bel, the Temple of Baalshamin, the Arch of Triumph, and several of the funerary towers — not for military reasons, but because the past is a country every regime wants to control. Al-Asaad was killed because he stood between the city and the men who wanted to delete it. The story of Palmyra is the story of how a desert oasis became one of the most contested sites of memory on Earth, and how often the contest has cost lives.
The Ancient Oasis City of Tadmor and the Silk Road Crossroads
The Geography of an Impossible City in the Syrian Desert
Palmyra exists because of a single sulphurous spring called Efqa. The Syrian desert is one of the most hostile environments in the Middle East, and for hundreds of kilometers in any direction there was nothing else. Caravans crossing between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates had no choice. Whoever controlled the spring controlled the trade. The settlement around it took the Aramaic name Tadmor — “the place of palms” — and grew from a watering hole into a city whose ruins still stretch over fifty hectares of rubble and limestone hills.
The location was both a gift and a sentence. The oasis made Palmyra rich; the desert made it impossible to defend without subsidy from a larger empire. For most of its history that empire was Rome. When Rome fell, the city fell with it, and the sand began the long work of reburial.
From Aramaean Settlement to Roman Province
Tadmor appears in Mesopotamian texts as early as the second millennium BC, but the city that the modern world remembers was built after Roman annexation under Tiberius in the early first century AD. Palmyra became a province, then a free city, then a Roman colony under Caracalla — a slow upgrading that reflected its tax value, not its loyalty. Its inscriptions remained in Palmyrene Aramaic. Its gods kept their Mesopotamian and Arab names. Its merchants wore Parthian trousers in the funerary portraits they carved into the limestone of the Valley of the Tombs. The city dressed up as Roman when it was useful and stayed itself when it wasn’t.
The Caravan Kings and the Rise of Palmyrene Wealth
The Merchants Who Linked Rome to the Indian Ocean
Palmyra’s wealth came from a logistical gap that no one else could fill. Roman ships could sail from the Red Sea to India. Persian caravans could move overland to the Euphrates. Between the two systems lay the desert, and the Palmyrenes had spent centuries learning how to cross it. Their merchants ran armed caravans from the harbor of Charax Spasinu at the head of the Persian Gulf to Doura-Europos on the Euphrates, then west across the wastes to Palmyra, then on to Antioch and the Mediterranean ports. Silk from China, pepper and pearls from India, slaves from the Caucasus, and Roman silver from the imperial mints all moved through their hands.
The city’s most extraordinary surviving document is the Tariff of Palmyra, a stone tablet erected in 137 AD that lists the customs duties charged on every item entering the city: per camel-load of dried goods, per donkey-load of perfume, per prostitute, per slave. It was carved in both Greek and Palmyrene Aramaic and once stood in the agora. The honorific statues that lined Palmyra’s colonnaded streets were almost all dedicated to caravan leaders — men like Soados, son of Boliades, who in the second century AD was thanked by four separate caravans for protecting them on the route between Vologesias and Palmyra. He was given a public funeral, four bronze statues, and a permanent inscription. There is no equivalent in the Roman world. Rome honored generals and emperors. Palmyra honored merchants who made it home alive.
The Temple of Bel and the Gods of the Desert
The religious heart of the city was the Temple of Bel, completed in 32 AD on the site of an older sanctuary. It was one of the largest religious complexes in the Roman East, a square enclosure 205 meters on each side, with a central cella ringed by colonnades and decorated with reliefs of camel processions and astral deities. The chief god was Bel, a Babylonian sky-father imported into the desert and married to a local triad that included Yarhibol, the sun-god of the Efqa spring, and Aglibol, the moon-god. The Arab goddess Allat had her own sanctuary on the western edge of the city, guarded by a colossal stone lion. The Palmyrenes were religious cosmopolitans because their economy was cosmopolitan. They prayed in the languages they did business in.
The Temple of Bel survived 1,983 years. It was used as a Christian church in late antiquity, a mosque after the Islamic conquest, and a tourist attraction in the twentieth century. ISIS detonated it on August 30, 2015. Satellite photos taken the next morning showed nothing but the perimeter wall.
The Architecture of a City Built on Sand and Silk
At its peak in the second and third centuries AD, Palmyra had perhaps fifty thousand inhabitants. The Great Colonnade ran for 1.1 kilometers down the spine of the city, lined with 1,500 columns and punctuated by the ceremonial Tetrapylon — four groups of four columns marking the intersection of the main streets. The Arch of Triumph stood at the colonnade’s eastern end, a 20-meter monumental gateway built around 200 AD that hid a thirty-degree bend in the road. The Roman Theatre, carved into the natural rise of the agora, could seat several thousand people. On the hills outside the city walls, Palmyrene merchants buried their dead in the strangest funerary architecture of the Roman world — multi-story tower tombs that rose four and five floors into the desert sky, each one stacked with shelves of bodies and decorated with painted limestone portraits of the deceased staring straight ahead, eyes wide, hands raised in greeting.
These were not Roman buildings dressed in local stone. They were the architecture of a culture that traded with everyone and copied none of them completely. Visitors to nearby Crusader-era sites like Krak des Chevaliers often note that Syria has produced more singular buildings per square kilometer than any country its size; Palmyra is the proof.
Queen Zenobia’s Empire and the War with Rome
Odaenathus and the Birth of the Palmyrene Empire
The third century AD was the worst century Rome ever had. Plague, civil war, and a resurgent Persian empire reduced the Mediterranean superpower to a husk. In 260 AD the Sasanian shah Shapur I captured the Roman emperor Valerian at the battle of Edessa and dragged him east in chains. Rome had no army left in the region.
The defense of the eastern frontier fell, by default, to a Palmyrene aristocrat named Septimius Odaenathus. He was the king of Palmyra in everything but name, ruler of a desert city that suddenly found itself the only organized military power between the Mediterranean and the Persian heartland. He raised an army of Palmyrene archers and heavy cavalry, drove Shapur back across the Euphrates, sacked the Persian royal city of Ctesiphon twice, and was rewarded by Rome with the meaningless title corrector totius Orientis — “corrector of the entire East.” For seven years he ruled the Roman East as a viceroy who answered to no one. In 267 AD he was assassinated at a banquet, almost certainly by his own family.
His widow took over.
Zenobia’s Conquest of Egypt and Asia Minor
Septimia Zenobia was about thirty years old when her husband died. The ancient sources — the Historia Augusta is unreliable on most things but agrees on this — describe her as multilingual, surrounded by philosophers, capable of riding for miles at the head of her own army, and contemptuous of the Roman convention that women should rule from behind curtains. She declared her young son Vaballathus the rightful heir to Odaenathus’s titles and ruled as regent in his name. Within three years she had stopped pretending to defer to Rome at all.
In 270 AD her general Septimius Zabdas invaded Roman Egypt — the breadbasket of the empire — and took it in a single campaign. Zenobia herself led the army that conquered most of Asia Minor, pushing the Palmyrene frontier as far west as Ankara. By 271 AD she had stamped her son’s face on coins minted in Alexandria and Antioch with the title Augustus. It was the only time in Roman history that a province seceded under a woman and operated as an independent empire. From the desert oasis of Tadmor to the Nile delta, the Roman East was no longer Roman. It was Palmyrene.
Aurelian’s Vengeance and the Fall of Palmyra in 273 AD
The Roman response came from a cavalry officer who had risen to the throne by killing his rivals. Aurelian was the most ruthless emperor of the third century, and he had spent two years stabilizing the Danube before he turned east. In 272 AD he marched into Asia Minor with the entire field army of the West, defeated Zenobia’s forces at the battles of Immae and Emesa, and laid siege to Palmyra itself. The desert city held out for weeks before the queen tried to escape east on a camel, hoping to reach the Persian court. Aurelian’s cavalry caught her on the bank of the Euphrates.
He paraded Zenobia through Rome the next year in golden chains so heavy that slaves had to support them, walking ahead of his triumphal chariot. Most ancient sources agree that he then spared her life — possibly retiring her to a villa near Tivoli, where she may have lived as a Roman matron for another decade. The city itself was less fortunate. In 273 AD Palmyra revolted again, possibly hoping to exploit Aurelian’s distraction with the Gallic empire. The emperor turned his army around, marched it back across the desert at speed, and sacked the city. The colonnades were ransacked. The Temple of Bel was looted. The population that survived was sold or scattered. Aurelian wrote, in a letter quoted by the Historia Augusta, that he had not even spared the women and children. The city never recovered.
From Roman Outpost to Forgotten Desert Ruin
Diocletian’s Camp and the Long Silence
Aurelian’s successors built a small military camp on the western edge of the ruins. Diocletian’s Camp, completed around 300 AD, was a frontier garrison meant to watch the Persian border. It was a shadow of the city that had stood there a generation before. After the Islamic conquest in 634 AD the site dwindled into a small village inside the perimeter wall of the Temple of Bel — the only structure still solid enough to live in. A series of earthquakes in the medieval period collapsed the colonnades. The desert moved in. By the seventeenth century almost no European had seen Palmyra and almost no European believed the local stories that an entire Roman city lay buried under the sand at Tadmor.
European Rediscovery and the Age of Photography
The rediscovery is dated to 1751, when the English antiquaries Robert Wood and James Dawkins rode out from Damascus with an Italian draftsman and a small armed escort. They spent two weeks measuring the ruins. The folio they published in 1753, The Ruins of Palmyra, was a sensation in Europe — its engravings of the Great Colonnade and the tower tombs influenced the neoclassical architecture of London, Saint Petersburg, and Washington for the next century. The American capital’s Senate columns and the porticos of countless British country houses descend, in a real architectural sense, from drawings made by men who had stood in the rubble of Zenobia’s city.
French archaeologists arrived in the mandate period. The site was systematically excavated through the twentieth century. By 2010 Palmyra was a UNESCO World Heritage Site that drew about 150,000 tourists a year, most of them passing through Tadmor town on the way from Damascus to the Euphrates. The Syrian government had built a museum next to the ruins and staffed it with local archaeologists who had grown up looking at the columns from their bedroom windows. One of them was Khaled al-Asaad.
The ISIS Occupation and the Destruction of Palmyra
The Syrian Civil War and the Road to Tadmor
The Syrian civil war reached Tadmor in May 2015. By then the regime had lost most of the eastern desert to the Islamic State, and the strategic importance of Palmyra was less about its ruins than about the gas fields and the highway that runs west to Homs. The ruins were the side prize. They were also the propaganda prize. ISIS had spent the previous year systematically destroying ancient sites in northern Iraq — the museum at Mosul, the monumental gates of Nineveh, the ziggurat at Nimrud — and the world had watched on YouTube. Palmyra was the next obvious target.
The Syrian army withdrew on May 21. The militants entered Tadmor that evening. Within forty-eight hours they had captured the museum and most of the senior antiquities staff. Some of the collection had already been evacuated. Khaled al-Asaad had spent the preceding weeks supervising the removal of statues and sarcophagi to Damascus, working with his son Walid and a handful of museum employees. Several hundred of the most fragile pieces — including the crown jewel, the funerary bust known as the Beauty of Palmyra — never left the storerooms in time.
The Murder of Khaled al-Asaad
Al-Asaad was 81 when ISIS captured him. He had been born in Tadmor in 1934 and had run the Palmyra Department of Antiquities and Museum from 1963 until his retirement in 2003. After retirement he had not stopped working. His PhD students had grown up to be his colleagues. He had named one of his daughters Zenobia.
ISIS held him for more than a month. The questioning focused on the location of the artifacts that had been hidden — gold, statues, the contents of the tower tombs that had not yet been excavated. He gave them nothing. On August 18, 2015, he was driven into the central square of Tadmor and beheaded in front of a crowd of townspeople who had been ordered to attend. The body was suspended from a column or lamppost — accounts vary — beside a sign listing his alleged crimes. The list included “director of idolatry,” apostasy, and representing Syria at “infidel” archaeological conferences. He had attended a great many of them.
His son Walid identified the body. The remains were not recovered until the Syrian army retook the town the following March.
The Demolition of the Temple of Bel, Baalshamin, and the Arch of Triumph
The destruction of the major monuments began five days after al-Asaad’s execution. On August 23, 2015, ISIS detonated explosives inside the Temple of Baalshamin, the second-most-important sanctuary in the city. The cella collapsed entirely. A week later, on August 30, the same demolition team rigged the Temple of Bel with explosives and filmed the explosion. Satellite imagery published by the United Nations the next day showed the central cella reduced to a single arch and a pile of pulverized limestone. Several of the tower tombs in the Valley of the Tombs were dynamited in early September. The Arch of Triumph was destroyed in early October. By the end of the year the Tetrapylon and a substantial portion of the Roman Theatre’s stage building had also been damaged.
ISIS published a video of one of the demolitions in which a militant explained, in classical Arabic, that the temples had been “places of polytheism” and their destruction was a religious obligation. The actual logic was closer to what the British Museum’s Iraqi specialists had identified the year before in Mosul: iconoclasm as theatre, calibrated for the international press, designed to draw airstrikes and recruits in equal measure. The destruction of Carthage by Rome in 146 BC was a military operation. The destruction of Palmyra in 2015 was a marketing campaign.
The Executions in the Roman Theatre
The other use ISIS made of the ruins was as a stage. In May 2015 the militants assembled twenty-five Syrian soldiers in front of the Roman theatre and executed them in front of a seated audience of children. The killers were teenagers; the camera angles were chosen to frame the proscenium of the theatre behind the bodies. A second mass execution was filmed on the steps of the Temple of Bel before its demolition. The use of an ancient amphitheatre as a killing floor was deliberate — the same instinct, two millennia later, that had filled the Colosseum on holidays. The ruins were not just destroyed. They were used.
Recapture, Reconstruction, and the Politics of Ancient Memory
The Battles for Palmyra
The Syrian army, supported by Russian air power and Iranian-backed militias, retook Palmyra on March 27, 2016. The cleanup of unexploded ordnance took weeks. On May 5 the Mariinsky Orchestra of Saint Petersburg, conducted by Valery Gergiev, performed a concert of Bach and Prokofiev in the Roman theatre, broadcast live to Vladimir Putin. The symbolism was not subtle. Russia was offering itself as the inheritor of the European civilizational tradition that Palmyra had come, by the eighteenth century, to represent. Cellists played in front of a stage where ISIS had executed prisoners eleven months earlier.
ISIS retook Palmyra in December 2016 while the Syrian army was distracted by the battle for Aleppo. They held the site for another three months and used the time to dynamite the Tetrapylon and the front wall of the Roman Theatre’s stage. The final liberation came on March 2, 2017. The ruins have been under nominal Syrian government control ever since, although the area remains militarily fragile and most foreign archaeologists have not returned.
The Debate Over Rebuilding What ISIS Destroyed
The destruction triggered an international preservation effort that continues. The Institute for Digital Archaeology, based in Oxford, had spent the years before the war distributing 3D cameras to Syrian and Iraqi heritage workers; the resulting Million Image Database contained tens of thousands of high-resolution photographs of Palmyra taken before the explosions. In April 2016 a two-thirds-scale replica of the Arch of Triumph, machined in Italian marble from this archive, was unveiled in Trafalgar Square in London. It later toured to New York, Dubai, and Florence. Critics argued that a marble replica in a European capital was a kind of theft — a souvenir of someone else’s catastrophe — but the project produced something usable: a complete digital model of the arch that could, in principle, be used to rebuild the original.
The reconstruction itself has been bitterly disputed. UNESCO’s official position, formed in consultation with the Venice Charter on heritage conservation, is that destroyed monuments should generally be stabilized rather than rebuilt. The Syrian government, supported by Russian preservation experts, has argued for full reconstruction. The fundamental question — whether a rebuilt Temple of Bel is the Temple of Bel or a memorial to its absence — has no clean answer. The same question is being asked, with different stakes, at every site where the twenty-first century has caught up to antiquity.
Visiting the Ruins of Palmyra Today
Palmyra is technically open to visitors. The road from Damascus is open. The site is not closed. A handful of foreign journalists, archaeologists, and the rare adventure tourist have made the journey since 2017. Practically, it is one of the more dangerous heritage destinations on earth. The Syrian government does not control all of the surrounding desert, ISIS sleeper cells remain active in the area, and sanctions on Syria mean that almost no Western insurance product covers travel to Tadmor. Independent visits are not realistic. The few legitimate trips have been organized through Syrian government tourism agencies, which require pre-approved itineraries, military escorts, and substantial fees.
What survives is more than the headlines suggested in 2015. The Great Colonnade still stands along most of its length. Diocletian’s Camp is largely intact. The Valley of the Tombs has lost several of its towers but retains many others, including the well-preserved Tomb of Elahbel. The museum was looted, but a portion of the collection was evacuated to Damascus in time and is held there. The Roman Theatre, despite ISIS demolitions, is still recognizable as the structure where Gergiev’s orchestra played. The Tetrapylon and the Arch of Triumph are rubble, but the foundations and many of the architectural fragments remain on site.
What you cannot recover is the man who stood at the entrance of the museum for forty years, learned the inscriptions on every column, and knew which sarcophagus belonged in which tomb. Khaled al-Asaad’s body was eventually returned to his family, but the head was never found. A bronze bust of him stands in the Damascus museum; a memorial plaque has been placed near the entrance to the Palmyra ruins. He is the closest thing the discipline of archaeology has produced to a martyr in the twentieth century. Standing in the ruins today, surrounded by the limestone of a city that survived Roman cavalry, Persian sieges, Islamic conquests, and a thousand years of desert silence, the loss that registers most clearly is not the loss of buildings. The buildings can, in some form, be rebuilt. The custodianship cannot.
Frequently Asked Questions About Palmyra
Where is Palmyra located?
Palmyra is located in central Syria, approximately 215 kilometers northeast of Damascus, in the middle of the Syrian Desert. The ruins sit beside the modern town of Tadmor, which derives its name from the city’s original Aramaic designation. The site is roughly equidistant between the Mediterranean coast and the Euphrates River, a geography that defined its role as a caravan hub for over a thousand years.
Who was Queen Zenobia of Palmyra?
Queen Zenobia was the third-century AD ruler of Palmyra who broke the Roman East away from Rome and created a short-lived Palmyrene Empire stretching from Egypt to Anatolia. She ruled as regent for her young son Vaballathus after the assassination of her husband Odaenathus in 267 AD. Within four years she had conquered Egypt and most of Asia Minor before being defeated by the Roman emperor Aurelian in 272 AD. Ancient sources describe her as multilingual, intellectually accomplished, and personally led troops in battle.
What did ISIS destroy at Palmyra?
ISIS destroyed several of the most important monuments at Palmyra during their occupation in 2015 and again in late 2016. Major losses include the Temple of Bel, the Temple of Baalshamin, the Arch of Triumph, the Tetrapylon, several tower tombs in the Valley of the Tombs, and significant portions of the Roman Theatre’s stage building. Many other structures, including most of the Great Colonnade and Diocletian’s Camp, survived in damaged but recognizable condition.
Who was Khaled al-Asaad and why was he killed?
Khaled al-Asaad was the chief archaeologist of Palmyra for more than four decades, serving as Director of Antiquities from 1963 to 2003 and continuing to work at the site afterward. ISIS captured him in May 2015, interrogated him for over a month about the location of artifacts that had been evacuated to Damascus, and beheaded him in the Tadmor town square on August 18, 2015 when he refused to disclose what he knew. He was 81 years old. His body was suspended from a column near the ruins he had spent his life protecting.
Can you visit Palmyra today?
Palmyra is technically accessible but practically extremely difficult and dangerous to visit. The Syrian government controls the site, but the surrounding desert remains militarily unstable with ISIS sleeper cells still active in the region. Independent tourism is not realistic; the few foreign visitors since 2017 have traveled with Syrian government escorts on pre-approved itineraries. Most foreign offices, including those of the United States and the United Kingdom, advise strongly against all travel to Syria.
Is Palmyra being rebuilt?
Reconstruction of Palmyra is ongoing but contested. The Syrian government and Russian preservation experts have advocated for substantial rebuilding of major monuments, while UNESCO and most Western archaeologists favor stabilization over reconstruction in line with the Venice Charter on heritage conservation. The Institute for Digital Archaeology produced a two-thirds-scale marble replica of the Arch of Triumph in 2016 using pre-war 3D scans, and high-resolution digital models exist for most of the destroyed structures. Whether any of the major temples will be physically rebuilt remains undecided.
Sources
* [The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmor, in the Desart] - Robert Wood and James Dawkins (1753)
* [Zenobia of Palmyra: History, Myth and the Neo-Classical Imagination] - Rex Winsbury (2010)
* [Palmyra and Its Empire: Zenobia's Revolt against Rome] - Richard Stoneman (1992)
* [The World of Palmyra] - Andreas Kropp and Rubina Raja, eds. (2016)
* [Caravan Cities] - Michael Rostovtzeff (1932)
* [Historia Augusta: Lives of the Later Caesars] - Anthony Birley, trans. (1976)
* [The Roman Near East, 31 BC – AD 337] - Fergus Millar (1993)
* [Satellite-Based Damage Assessment to Cultural Heritage Sites in Syria] - American Association for the Advancement of Science / UNITAR (2014–2017)
* [Khaled al-Asaad obituary] - The Guardian, Kanishk Tharoor (2015)
* [Mr Palmyra: Khaled al-Asaad's lifelong devotion to Syria's lost city] - The New York Times (2015)
* [Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered] - Raymond Baker, Shereen T. Ismael, Tareq Y. Ismael (2010)
* [UNESCO World Heritage List entry: Site of Palmyra] - UNESCO (1980, with damage updates 2015–2017)
