History

Palmyra enters written record in the early second millennium BC as Tadmar. By the 1st century AD it was a Roman province, formally annexed under Tiberius, yet it operated with substantial autonomy — the Palmyrenes collected their own tolls and governed their own trade guilds. The city grew rich on the differential between what goods cost in the east and what the Roman market would pay. Its merchants are documented from Roman Britain to the Persian Gulf.

The defining episode came in 260 AD, when King Odaenathus — a Palmyrene nobleman allied with Rome — defeated the Sasanian emperor Shapur I after his capture of the Roman emperor Valerian, a humiliation Rome could not avenge. Odaenathus was assassinated in 268, and his widow Queen Zenobia assumed power as regent for their son. She did not govern quietly. By 270 she had conquered Egypt and much of Asia Minor, declaring independence from Rome and styling herself “Queen of the East.” Emperor Aurelian marched east in 272 and defeated her forces at Immae; Palmyra was sacked, and Zenobia was taken to Rome. A subsequent Palmyrene revolt prompted Aurelian to raze the city more thoroughly. Emperor Diocletian later rebuilt it at reduced scale as a frontier garrison. The temples were converted to churches, then to mosques after the 7th-century Arab conquest. Timur’s forces destroyed it again in 1400.

In 2015, fighters of the Islamic State captured Palmyra. Their campaign against the site was methodical. The Temple of Bel, a 1st-century AD structure that combined a Mesopotamian cella with a Greco-Roman colonnade peristyle, was demolished with explosives in August 2015. The Temple of Baalshamin, dedicated to the Phoenician sky god, was destroyed weeks later. The Arch of Triumph was blown up in October. Khaled al-Asaad, who had served as director of the Palmyra Museum and head of antiquities for 40 years, was captured, detained, and interrogated for weeks about the locations of artefacts he had helped evacuate before the city fell. He knew where things were hidden. He refused to say. On 18 August 2015, aged 82, he was publicly beheaded in the main square. His body was hung from a column. The antiquities he had protected were not found. He is buried in Palmyra.

Syrian government forces retook the city in March 2016, only for ISIS to recapture it briefly in December of that year. Government forces held it again from March 2017. Subsequent political changes brought further military transitions; the Syrian Free Army entered in December 2024. UNESCO and international teams conducted damage assessments throughout. The arch was partly reconstructed in digital and physical replicas by the Institute for Digital Archaeology, displayed in London, New York, and Dubai. The Temple of Bel and Temple of Baalshamin no longer exist.