Saturday, January 10, 2009

PALMYRA is covered in a detailed travel piece in the Malaysia Star:
Palmyra — past & present
By LEE YU KIT

Palmyra was once ruled by Queen Zenobia, a descendant of Cleopatra. She defied Rome and her country was subjugated. All but forgotten, travellers have brought her back to life.
Excerpt:
My guide, Fayez, is a charismatic Syrian who has taught archaeology at a local university and so is an excellent source of information if prodded with the right questions. Within the tomb, the mummified remains of the dead were stored in drawers recessed into the walls and stacked vertically on top of each other. Each drawer cover bore a bust of the dead person — not as he or she was, but as he or she was thought to have become in a glorious afterlife.

In all, the tower could store over 300 remains.

Another type of burial place, as exemplified by the Tomb of the Three Brothers, is the underground chamber called a hypogeum. A flight of stairs leads to a large underground chamber which sports the same arrangement of sliding drawers stacked vertically for storing mummies. Two-thousand-year-old murals decorate the walls.

Fayez translates the script on the tomb door, in a Palmyrene dialect of Aramaic, the lingua franca of the day. It declares the tomb a commercial venture — a funeral service that accepted bodies for a fee, some two millenniums ago!

The known tombs have all long been looted and emptied, but there are some mummies at the Palmyra museum, with a detailed explanation of the mummification process — not recommended reading immediately after lunch!
An intricately carved ceiling in the Temple of Ba’al.

Palmyra is mentioned as Tadmor in ancient texts dating as far back as the second millennium BC. It is also mentioned in the Bible, and was a part of the Roman empire in the first century BC when its importance as a trading centre grew as trade flourished.

Exotic materials — fabrics, spices, ceramics, glassware and ivory — passed though Palmyra, since it was on a crossroads between the Roman empire and the great civilisations to the east.

The Roman emperor Hadrian visited Palmyra in 129 AD and was enchanted by it. The great structures that remain today were largely built during this period, the halcyon days of Palmyra.

The greatest of these is the Temple of Ba’al (sun). In the sandy wastes of toppled columns, there is little left that hints at the grandeur of the temple. It falls to my guide, who has come equipped with drawings of the temple as it once stood, to conjure up images of what must once have been a monument to the wealth and power of Palmyra.
More on recent excavations at Palmyra is here, here, here, and here. I've commented on a Greek inscription here and on an inscription in Palmyrene Aramaic located in Britain here.