Palmyra, Syria

The ancient Roman city of palms, Palmyra, may soon be no more. It may have survived the elements and marauders for 1800 years, but it may not survive the Islamic State's take-over of the Syrian Desert. Next stop: Damascus, only 150 miles away. This view is from the Ayyubid castle atop a nearby peak. [1995]

THE BACKSTORY ~ Posted on the 11^th Anniversary of Geographically Yours, 4 August 2021: Life in Syria was such an adventure. I lived there in the spring of 1993 as a visiting scholar. A scholar I was, and my mission was to be visiting as much of the country as possible. One of the places that cried out for a visit was Palmyra, the ancient oasis city in the middle of the Syrian Desert. Built by the Romans and abandoned, the city was slowly reclaimed by the desert and then unearthed by the archaeologists. Yes, I wanted to go so badly and would let my friends on the Aleppo University campus know of my desires. ‘Aiwa’ (أيوة), they would say, ‘we will go’ or, on one occasion: ‘The English Department has a special trip planned.’ I thought aiwa meant ‘yes,’ but my three months came and went without ever visiting Palmyra. Three years later, however, I returned to Syria with a friend to set up a seminar for Virginia teachers. That trip was not going to end until I got to the ancient city of palms, where I could ground truth the vocabulary of Roman city planning: forum, cardo, decumanus, tetrapylon. Once there, though, the big picture was hard to grasp: I needed to change scales. The old fort on the top of a nearby hill became the next stop on our itinerary. I hoped that a bird’s-eye view would put the puzzle of Palmyra together for me. But, how to get up there (‘cause it wasn’t that close)? We started asking around the ruins. Local voices always know: ‘The old fort is locked,’ they said, so you must go into town (the adjacent modern town named Tadmur) and find the man who has the key. We did, and not only did he have the key, he also had a three-wheel drive. The elevation of the fortress (built to protect the date palms and the caravan trade) gave us the perfect wide-angle view. Suddenly, geographical relationships became clear: This was a place in the desert where water collected underground, setting the stage for palm groves that seemed to go on forever. When you are walking down the cardo of the ruins, however, you would never guess that a super-sized palmarie was at hand. That’s because the ancients knew where to build a city: not in the oasis, which yielded wealth in the form of dates, but perched on the up-slope ledge where the desert begins. The size of the oasis clarified two more pieces of the puzzle: With all those dates, of course (1) you would need a service center the size of Palmyra, and (2) caravans would find it profitable to brave a great desert to get there. To finish the story, though, required another change of scale and a map of the Fertile Crescent: Palmyra is halfway between the Euphrates River in the east and Damascus, a far greater oasis city, in the west. The water and wealth of Palmyra made the short-cut between the two sides of the Fertile Crescent, an alternative to following the arch. D.J.Z.