Palmyra is an ancient caravan city in an oasis of the Syrian Desert in central Syria, about 215 km north-east of Damascus, beside the modern town of Tadmur. Known as Tadmor in records going back about 4,000 years, it grew rich in the first three centuries CE as the desert link between the Roman Empire and Parthia, and briefly became the capital of Queen Zenobia's breakaway empire before the Roman emperor Aurelian sacked it in 273. Its ruins, including the 1.1 km Great Colonnade, the Temple of Bel and the tower tombs of the Valley of the Tombs, were listed by UNESCO in 1980. The site has been on the List of World Heritage in Danger since 2013, and between 2015 and 2017 the Islamic State group (ISIL) destroyed several of its main monuments.
The Efqa Spring and the Oasis of Tadmor
Palmyra exists because of water. A small seasonal valley, the Wadi al-Qubur or Valley of the Tombs, runs out of the western hills past the site, and just south of it rises the Efqa spring. Around the spring grew an oasis of date palms, with some twenty varieties recorded, sheltered by ranges of the Palmyrene mountains to the north and south-west and open to the desert on the south and east. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder, in the 70s CE, described the town as famous for its desert setting, its rich soil and its springs.
The first settlement was a Neolithic village beside the Efqa spring. Soundings under the later Temple of Bel uncovered a mud-brick building of about 2500 BCE, and around 2000 BCE a trader called Puzur-Ishtar "the Tadmorean" signed a contract at an Assyrian trading colony in Anatolia. Tablets from Mari, on the Euphrates, record the name as Ta-ad-mi-ir in the 18th century BCE, mentioning the place as a stop for caravans. The name Palmyra appears first in Pliny. The standard interpretation links Tadmor to the Semitic word tamar, "date palm", though the etymology is uncertain.
Middlemen Between Rome and Parthia
When the Roman general Pompey created the province of Syria in 64 BCE, Palmyra was left independent, trading with both Rome and Parthia and belonging to neither. Its wealth was already enough to tempt Mark Antony, who sent a force to seize it in 41 BCE; the Palmyrenes withdrew across the Euphrates into Parthian territory. Roman influence grew slowly through the 1st century CE, with tax collectors resident and a road to Sura on the Euphrates built in 75 CE, but the city kept its own council and institutions.
Palmyra did not sit on the main trade road, which followed the Euphrates, so its merchants made the desert route their own. Caravans ran east to the Euphrates at Hit and then south to Charax Spasinu on the Persian Gulf, where Palmyrene ships sailed to and from India. Goods from India, China and Central Asia came back across the desert and went west to Emesa, Antioch and the Mediterranean ports. Silk was the main income-earning cargo; other exports included jade, muslin, spices, ebony, ivory and precious stones. Palmyrene traders were recorded at Dura-Europos by 33 BCE, Babylon by 19 CE and Seleucia by 24 CE, and later as far as Merv and the Indus delta. The city's tax law of 137 CE, carved on a stone slab in the Tariff Court, set the duties on goods sold or exported. It was found in 1881 by Semyon Abamelek-Lazarev and is now in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.
The Temple of Bel, Dedicated in 32 CE
The wealth showed first in religion. The Temple of Bel, dedicated in 32 CE, honoured the Mesopotamian god Bel together with the moon god Aglibol and the sun god Yarhibol. Its sanctuary was a paved court enclosed by a wall 205 m long and lined with porticoes. In the middle stood the cella on a podium, ringed by Corinthian columns and entered by a gate in its long side, a Greek-looking building on a Semitic plan with two inner shrines rather than one. The merchant Male' Agrippa, who paid for the emperor Hadrian's visit in 129, also funded a rebuilding of the temple in 139.
The temple survived the end of paganism by changing use. It was closed during the anti-pagan campaign of the praetorian prefect Maternus Cynegius between 385 and 388 and later served as a church; from 1132 it was a mosque, with a fortified village growing up inside its courtyard. Until 2015 its cella was one of the best-preserved buildings on the site.
Tower Tombs in the Valley of the Tombs
West of the city walls, the Palmyrenes buried their dead in a necropolis about 1 km long that now carries the valley's name. More than 50 monuments stood there, most of them stone towers up to four storeys high, with rows of burial niches inside. Each niche was sealed with a carved portrait bust of the dead person, the frontal, heavily jewelled reliefs that are now the best-known form of Palmyrene art. Many burials held mummies embalmed in a way similar to Egyptian practice. Funerary temples replaced towers in the first half of the 2nd century; the latest dated tower is from 128 CE.
One of the finest was the Tower of Elahbel, completed in 103 CE by an aristocrat, Marcus Ulpius Elahbelus, and his three brothers. Fragments of Chinese silk yarn dated to the 1st century CE were found in its tombs, direct physical evidence of the trade that paid for it. ISIL blew the tower up in August 2015.
Odaenathus, Zenobia and the Revolt of 270–272
Palmyra's political peak came out of Rome's weakness. After the Persian king Shapur I captured Emperor Valerian at Edessa in 260, the Palmyrene leader Odaenathus raised an army, defeated the Persians near the Euphrates and then crushed rival Roman usurpers in Syria. Rome rewarded him with command of the East, and after campaigns as far as the Persian capital Ctesiphon he took the title King of Kings. He was assassinated in 267, and his ten-year-old son Vaballathus succeeded him, with real power held by the boy's mother, Zenobia.
Zenobia moved in 270. Palmyrene forces took Roman Arabia, invaded Egypt that October, and in 271 pushed into Anatolia as far as Ankara. At first she kept up a show of loyalty, minting coins in the name of the new emperor Aurelian, but in late 271 she and her son took the imperial titles Augusta and Augustus. Aurelian answered in 272, defeating her armies at Immae near Antioch and at Emesa. As the Romans besieged Palmyra, Zenobia slipped out to seek Persian help but was captured, and the city surrendered. When it rebelled again in 273, Aurelian levelled it.
The Great Colonnade and Diocletian's Smaller City
The city's main street, the Great Colonnade, ran 1.1 km from the Temple of Bel westward to a funerary temple at its far end. Most of its columns, each 9.5 m tall, date from the 2nd century, and brackets on them once held bronze statues of leading citizens. A monumental arch of the 3rd century stood in its eastern section. Off the colonnade lay the theatre, the Temple of Nabu and an agora measuring 71 by 84 m.
After 273 the city shrank. A new wall enclosed only about 80 hectares, far less than before, and shortly before 303 a legionary base, the Camp of Diocletian, was built in the western quarter. The tetrapylon in the middle of the colonnade also dates from Diocletian's reign: four platforms each carrying four columns of pink Egyptian granite. Only one of those 16 columns is original; the others are concrete replacements set up by the Syrian antiquities service in 1963. The Muslim conquest came in 634, and a large Umayyad market later filled part of the colonnaded street. Timur's army sacked the town in 1400, and for centuries the villagers lived in mud-brick houses inside the courtyard of the Temple of Bel, until they were moved to the new village of Tadmur, a resettlement completed under the French Mandate in 1932.
Islamic State Occupation, 2015–2017
The Syrian civil war began in 2011, and during it the Syrian army positioned troops inside the archaeological site. On 13 May 2015 ISIL attacked the modern town. The Syrian Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums moved more than 400 statues and hundreds of other objects to Damascus before ISIL forces entered on 21 May. During the occupation that followed, the group used the Roman theatre for public executions. On 18 August 2015 it beheaded Khaled al-Asaad, aged 83, who was born in Palmyra in 1932 and had been the site's head of antiquities for some forty years before retiring in 2003; he had refused to tell his captors anything about the city's antiquities.
In the months that followed ISIL destroyed the Temple of Baalshamin, the Tower of Elahbel, the Monumental Arch and the Temple of Bel. On 30 August 2015 the Associated Press reported, citing witnesses, that the Temple of Bel had been blown up; the next day United Nations satellite analysts confirmed that its main building and a row of nearby columns were gone. The Syrian army, backed by Russian air strikes, retook Palmyra on 27 March 2016. ISIL returned on 11 December 2016 and damaged the tetrapylon before the army recaptured the city on 2 March 2017. On 7 December 2024, a day before the fall of the Assad government, opposition forces took control, and the transitional government posted guards at the site.
Rebuilding Plans Since 2017
What to rebuild, and with whom, has followed the politics. Before the end of 2024, Russia was the main foreign partner: Russian researchers surveyed the site in 2016 and 2019, Syria and Russia agreed in 2021 to restore the Monumental Arch, and the Efqa spring was rehabilitated and reopened in 2022, although work on the arch did not go beyond data collection. Elsewhere, conservators restored the Lion of al-Lat, a large relief from the Temple of al-Lat, and put it on display in the National Museum of Damascus on 1 October 2017. A digital project, New Palmyra, launched in October 2015, used photographs taken by the Syrian internet activist Bassel Khartabil to build 3D models of the monuments. Since the end of 2024, UNESCO has worked with the Syrian government, ALIPH and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture on the site, but as of June 2026 that work was limited to surveys and damage assessments.
Palmyra makes most sense as one link in a much longer chain, so follow its caravans along the Silk Road, compare its temple with the Roman sanctuary at Baalbek in Lebanon, and see the Nabataean caravan city of Petra in Jordan, further south.