A Stunning Main Street
In ancient times, Palmyra’s Great Colonnade was lined with statues of wealthy patrons who funded the city’s building programs. Today, only the grand columns remain.
Why Palmyra, Recently Liberated, Is a Historical Treasure
Fabulously wealthy and distinctly multicultural, this desert crossroads also had a rebellious streak.
In Palmyra, history is literally written on the walls: across temples and above doorways, encircling funerary monuments and snaking up the towering limestone columns that rise above the Syrian desert some 134 miles (215 km) northeast of Damascus.
These inscriptions were often written both in Greek and Palmyrene Aramaic, a bilingual phenomenon unique to Palmyra. The site is a UNESCO World Heritage site that has been a focus of international attention since May of last year, when the Islamic State (ISIS) seized the territory around the ancient ruins.
On Sunday, the Syrian Army retook the city. The military is currently removing explosives and booby traps placed around Palmyra, after which specialists will arrive to perform a damage assessment on its monuments.
One example: An inscription from around 130 A.D., in which the
