A detailed engraving by Giovanni Battista Borra published in Robert Wood's 1753 The Ruins of Palmyra, Otherwise Tedmor in the Desart, illustrates the building now known as the Sanctuary of Bēl (Fig. 1).Footnote 1 It was through such images of monumental ruins of the Roman period that Palmyra became known to Western audiences.Footnote 2 More recently, of course, it has been images of destruction that have become more familiar, with the Sanctuary of Bēl infamously damaged in spectacular fashion by ISIS explosives.Footnote 3 In Borra's engraving, the interior of the sanctuary walls is shown to be populated with what the 18th-c. caption calls “the huts of the Arabs.” That is to say: histories of Palmyra after the Roman era, of the people who lived there in Late Antiquity, in the Early Islamic period, and beyond, have been known as long as the Western study of the site has existed. And yet, those periods have received relatively little scholarly attention. In the volume under review, Palmyra after Zenobia, 273–750: An Archaeological and Historical Reappraisal, Emanuele Intagliata does a great service in bringing together much of the evidence for the site after its fall in 273 until 750, a service that is particularly significant given that the post-273 evidence is largely missing, or treated very briefly, in the substantial number of recent surveys of the site.Footnote 4
The Sanctuary of Bēl at Palmyra, as illustrated in Wood Reference Wood1753, plate 21. The original description was “View of the temple of the sun, taken from the north-west corner of the court.” Letters identified certain features: “C” denoted “Huts of the Arabs”.
Scan via https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/wood1753/0001.
Based on the author's PhD at the University of Edinburgh, the book aims to trace the history of Palmyra from its capture by Aurelian until the end of Umayyad rule in the middle of the 8th c., dividing this time into Late Antiquity (for I.'s purposes, 273–634) and the Early Islamic period (for I., from the conquest of Palmyra in 634 to the end of the Umayyad dynasty in 750).Footnote 5 The work draws on both archaeology and texts, including epigraphic evidence and Arabic sources, and two appendices supply a selection of the written sources in translation. After a useful introductory survey of previous work, I. appraises, in six chapters, different aspects of the site: its hinterland, townscape, housing, religious and military lives, and city walls. The penultimate chapter provides a historical summary of Palmyra after Zenobia and the final one a brief conclusion, “Palmyra in perspective,” which gives some context by examining what happened to other sites, such as Antioch and Apamea, in the same period.
From caravan city to fortress town
Much continuity after 273 is evident in the material I. assembles. The Palmyrena (as the territory outside the city is known) of Late Antiquity remained an active landscape enabled by the existing road network connecting monasteries, farms, villages, and forts.Footnote 6 The last of these became unnecessary when the Roman frontier system collapsed, and in the Early Islamic period the best documented evidence is that of the opulent elite residences.Footnote 7 From the hinterland I. moves into the city, which maintained its legal status as such after 273. The occupation history thereafter is complicated, with the settlement broadly reducing in size to within the city walls (enclosing 127 ha, still a large area). Within Palmyra, the occupation trajectory is a familiar tale of the transformation of urban space, with the pre-existing Roman-era site providing the backdrop and material preconditions for the later ones, from building materials to water supplies.Footnote 8 A new military role meant the city evolved into a fortress. Alongside this was a civilian community, increasingly a Christian one, known from the presence of churches, including those along the great colonnade, which also became a bustling commercial hub of shops. The existing roads were maintained in much of the city and so too was the water supply. Housing changed form, with smaller units carved out of what had been larger houses and productive installations constructed within them.Footnote 9
Pagan religious life continued alongside the increasingly Christian one, at least for a time, with the last pagan inscription in the early 4th c. Long before ISIS, Palmyra's religious buildings had been the target of violence: in the late 4th c., possibly because of the edicts of Theodosius, the deliberate mutilation of pagan sanctuaries is attested in the archaeology, including a head struck off the cult statue of Athena in the sanctuary of Allāth, whose altar was also cut.Footnote 10 Palmyra had an early bishopric, and at least eight churches are among the best-known public buildings of the period, including those along the great colonnade and those along “Church street,” perpendicular to the colonnade.
Long occupation histories make specific chronologies of monuments blurry. I. nonetheless draws together what is known, for example, of the church situated within the Sanctuary of Bēl, probably from the 4th to 8th c. The evidence is mostly from installations which were added (of which all that remains are recesses and sockets in the stone walls), but also from Christian paintings. Other churches (prosaically known as church II and III) became the setting for lime kilns, and still others have different taphonomic problems which make a full understanding of their design and use difficult. And yet, I. is able to make a clear case for the way Palmyra's churches fit well into northern Syrian architectural traditions, well known from the limestone massif.Footnote 11 However extensive Christianity was in Late Antique Palmyra, it was not wealthy – building material was spoliated, unlike the fresh cut stone of Apamea or Al-Rasafa and without the level of decoration found at those sites.
Palmyra in Late Antiquity was a military stronghold, with the Legio I Illyricorum attested there. Archaeologically, the military camp and the city circuit walls, known as the “Wall of Diocletian,” are the best-preserved and best-known remains. The city walls have long been noted (Wood, for his part, believed them Justinianic) but, like other parts of Palmyra, lack full publication or scientific dating, as I. points out, with assessment relying heavily on photographs in the archive of the Sapienza survey.Footnote 12 Several 3rd-c. phases are evident, later strengthened with abutting U-shaped towers. The “Camp of Diocletian” was built in the late 3rd/early 4th c. in the western side of the site, on a slope that had been a suburb neighboring the necropolis. The camp has been investigated by several teams (notably, the Polish concession under Michałowski and then Gawlikowski from 1959–87), although some details are still not well enough known to draw conclusive interpretations, as I. well demonstrates with the discussion of the features (perhaps shops, perhaps barracks) which separate the camp from the rest of the site along the earlier city wall. Hypogea and other local buildings were pillaged for materials with which to build the camp, demonstrating another way in which Palmyra has long been in a process of destruction and reconfiguration.Footnote 13
Early Islamic Palmyra
The Islamic takeover of Palmyra in 634 did not mark an immediate or major break, either materially or religiously, but was a time of continuing transformation. No monumental structures on the scale of the camp or city walls were constructed, but I. is able nonetheless to bring together a range of evidence testifying to the site in Early Islamic times. A sūq was built in the Umayyad period in the western stretch of the great colonnade, and there are five buildings identified as mosques (although their identifications are less well attested and secure than churches; I. hints that this has as much to do with archaeological interest as other factors). One mosque which I. believes to be secure in its identification is the congregational mosque adjacent to the Umayyad sūq, which repurposes a Roman building. Burials by this time, unlike the famed predecessors of the Roman era, were usually within the city walls and were not monumental, with inhumations made in pits or cists. The burials are relatively numerous but not well published (e.g., 78 post-Roman burials excavated in the 1960s by Syrian teams outside the modern archaeological museum). One group of ca. 30 burials excavated in 2001 near the “Dura Gate” had a mix of north–south and east–west burials which can perhaps be interpreted as Christian and Muslim communities burying their dead in the same place. A Jewish community was also present at Palmyra from the Roman period, attested through small finds (lamps decorated with menorahs in 4th-c. contexts) and inscriptions; I. suggests that the Jewish community attested in the 12th c. might have been their descendants.Footnote 14
Other aspects of the site after the fall of the Umayyad dynasty are similarly elusive, and I.'s closing epilogue states that “The city centre seems to have been deserted already by the mid-9th century…. By the end of the 10th century the settlement might already have shrunk into the Sanctuary of Bēl” (107).Footnote 15 The plan of Palmyra included in Wood's book indeed depicts a mosque which was visible there in the 18th c., but the millennium between the mid-8th c. and Wood's “discovery” is beyond the purview of I.'s book.Footnote 16
Palmyra from colonia to Medina to World Heritage Site
While the materials in Palmyra after Zenboia, including the most recent archaeological results, have been diligently assembled by I., it is not the fault of the author that the result is often frustrating. The problem is just how poorly the post-272 material has been treated and studied: chronologies are messy and incomplete, structures fragmentarily and often simply incidentally recorded, and far too much relies on partial plans of poorly phased and dated architectural remains. Given these existing issues, the volume under review might have been easier to follow if arranged chronologically rather than thematically. The structure means it is often repetitive and sometimes difficult to follow.Footnote 17 I.'s interpretation relies heavily on existing narratives of the transformation of Syrian cities, and indeed the chapter conclusions often seem to project narratives from Kennedy or Liebeschuetz onto evidence that can't always bear it.Footnote 18 The plans in the volume, of which there are many, are sometimes difficult to relate to the text and to each other. Because so many different teams and standards have been employed at Palmyra over many decades, they lack consistent scales, orientations, or conventions. While a useful site plan marks the main structures discussed in the volume, phased plans of the city showing the changes so carefully mapped out in the text would be helpful in visually bringing together the many fragments.
In some cases, the post-Aurelianic remains at Palmyra are genuinely more ephemeral than those that came before, but the fact that the monumental remains of the later period, including the city walls, are scarcely better known is harder to excuse. I. has done as much as one could (e.g., examining unpublished archival photographs), but these are problems that go beyond the character of the archaeological material and its preservation, and speak instead to the taphonomies of archaeological practice itself, to what is valued and worthy of study, and what is not, at “Classical” sites.Footnote 19 Methodologically, at Palmyra as elsewhere, there has been a tradition of clearing architecture rather than excavation of contexts, something also apparent in the glaring lack of material culture evidence.
Palmyra's is a story which doesn't end in 750. Until the Syrian conflict began, tourists visiting Palmyra would have entered the Sanctuary of Bēl through a gate and walls that had been restored in the 12th c., and while the citadel of Palmyra often serves as a picturesque backdrop to the monumental colonnade which frequents book covers (including I.'s), we rarely read of it, or of Shirkuh, Sultan of Homs, who fortified it in the 13th c.Footnote 20 Readers of JRA might well ask why such later periods should matter to them. The answer is that the occlusion of later periods at sites like Palmyra that are key to our discipline has been a real and often deliberate consequence of the work of Classical archaeologists at those sites. This is not only a matter of lack of proper attention to later (sometimes tellingly labelled “sub-Roman”) material as historically important in itself, but is also borne out in the consequences for living populations, such as the selective erasure of post-Classical structures and the forcible relocation of communities, as happened to those living inside the Sanctuary of Bēl under the French Mandate. The people gestured to, but diminished by, the “huts of the Arabs” in Borra's engraving (Fig. 1) are still missing from Palmyra's history: arguably, such histories, and a history of the foreign interventions at the site, are more urgent than the scramble to reconstruct it digitally and in the field.Footnote 21 We only know Palmyra as a Classical site because it has been invented as one, from Wood to the French Mandate to UNESCO's assertion of its “universal value” as a 1st and 2nd c. site.Footnote 22 That invention is not only about sweeping away the Arab houses from the Sanctuary of Bēl to create an empty ruin, but also about not telling the history of how and by whom it came to be excavated, and of the mechanisms by which Palmyrene sculpture can now be found globally in public and private collections. Intagliata's diligent work brings us closer to knowing a fuller history of Palmyra, but he also shows how difficult a task we have made for ourselves. The responsibility of that task is a burden far greater and more difficult than re-erecting fallen columns and perhaps even impossible: dealing with the legacies and human impacts of Palmyrene material that has already been “discovered,” excavated, sold, and accessioned.Footnote 23
