Palmyra was one of the ancient world's great cities, a forest of honey-colored limestone columns and temples raised in the middle of the Syrian desert and watered by a single spring. It grew rich as a caravan hub, taxing and guarding the merchants who carried silk, spices and gems between Rome and the Persian Gulf. What began as an Aramaic oasis town called Tadmor reached its height under Roman rule and then under its own queen, Zenobia, who around 270 AD broke away and briefly ruled an empire stretching from Egypt to Anatolia before Emperor Aurelian crushed the revolt and sacked the city in 273. Its Great Colonnade once ran more than a kilometre through the center, lined by the Temple of Bel — dedicated in 32 AD and the largest religious building in the Roman Near East — and a monumental arch marking the turn toward the agora and theatre.
Palmyra was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980; between 2015 and 2017 the militants of ISIS deliberately blew up the Temple of Bel, the Monumental Arch and several tower tombs, erasing a skyline that had stood for nearly two thousand years. Much of the Great Colonnade still stands, though, along with funerary tower tombs scattered across the nearby Valley of the Tombs and a 13th-century Arab castle, Qalaat ibn Maan, on the ridge above. Walking the colonnaded street as the low sun turns the stone deep gold, columns throwing long shadows over the gravel, gives some sense of the scale that once impressed Roman emperors and desert traders alike. After the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, archaeologists and a trickle of travellers have begun returning to Palmyra, but the modern town beside the ruins lies largely in rubble, with little water or power, and the promised restoration has barely begun.