Middle East Trip: Palmyra

After Aleppo, we travelled to Palmyra, located near the center of Syria.  These amazing ruins date mostly from the 2nd century AD and were ruled at various times by the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Seleucids, before becoming a Roman colony on the eastern edge of that empire.  

The ruins are pretty sprawling, so we had to drive between each site (thank goodness for air conditioning!).  The first stop were some tower tombs like this one:

They are about four stories high, and each story has several sets of niches where coffins were stacked one on top of another.  The coffins have been removed, but you can see the empty niches and the ledges where each coffin would go. 
The niches would have been sealed, and in front of each coffin was a portrait of the shoulders and head of the deceased person carved into the stone.  (These were kept in the museum, and we couldn't take pictures there--sorry!)

From the tombs we went to the Temple of Bel--the most complete section of the ruins.  Bel was apparently the most important deity to the Palmyrenes (like Zeus for the Greeks), but this temple was eventually also used by both Christian and Muslim conquerors for their own religious purposes.

Here are Brian and I taking pictures of the underside of what used to be a crosspiece between two columns.
The carvings underneath this piece weren't as exposed to the elements, so they still had remnants of the original paint.
Here is a shot of some collapsed columns in the temple area.  It was crazy how few other visitors were at the site that day--at times it felt like we had it all to ourselves.
Now, I know I just said there weren't many other people around, but in one specific instance that wasn't true.  Below is the grand arch leading to the entrance of the temple.  It's absolutely enormous, and we wanted to get a picture of one of us standing beneath it to give you a sense of the scale, but there was a family literally having a picnic at the base of it, and they refused to budge.  We tried to wait them out, but they weren't feeling the pressure, so in the end we just pointed our camera above them and cut them out of the picture.  Oh well, you can still get a feel for how imposing the structure is.
Before we proceeded to the city's main street, we stopped to look around at the theatre.
Along the main street, all the columns used to have pedestals near the top, on which rested statues of prominent Palmyrene figures, such as politicians, princes, and priests.  Below most of them were descriptions (not sure which language this would have been) of the person's great accomplishments.
One of my favorite sections of the site was this group of columns called the Tetrapylon, marking a pivot point on the main route through the city.
The great colonnaded avenue that goes through the heart of Palmyra covers almost a kilometer and is simply impossible to capture adequately in a photo.  Suffice it to say that visitors to the ancient city would have been impressed.
Here is a closer shot that gives you a better idea of what I mentioned earlier about the statues on the pedestals.  The statues are long gone, but you can see where they would have stood.  I just can't imagine the effect this would have had with a statue on EACH of the columns!

Overlooking the ruins to the west is a castle called the Qala'at ibn Maan, which was built much later (17th century) by the Lebanese when they were battling the Ottomans.  
We went up to this castle for an evening view, but first we had dinner at the Zenobia Hotel (named after Palmyra's most famous queen).  This is a picture of the ruins from the hotel entrance, just as the sun was setting.
When we finally did make it up to the castle after dinner, it was all lit up and seemed to glow against the darkening sky.
Here's a shot of the desert to the west of the castle--no buildings for miles and miles.
Like I said, Palmyra is spread out over a very large area, so it's difficult to get a sense of its overall scale when you're right down in it.  From up above, though, you can get a better feel for it as an actual city, rather than just a collection of separate sites.
What blows my mind is that what we can see may only be the tip of the iceberg.  For example, just to the south of where we were are these recently excavated tombs.  Who knows what still lies beneath the shifting sand?

We had to wake up early the next day to drive west to the Krak des Chevaliers (photos in the next post), and as we looked out our hotel window, we were greeted with these dawn views of the ruins.

Again and again I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be a traveler on the Silk Road.  They would have been hot, dusty, and exhausted, and then as the caravan came over the final dunes before Palmyra, they would have looked down on this incredible city lying before them.  It had to have felt like a mirage!