The ruin of a ruin

In the welter of Syrian bloodshed, why should we remember the death of a single man? Because he was the archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad, tortured and beheaded by Isis two years ago when they destroyed the remains of Palmyra, one of the world’s most important ancient cities. Their victim was its director of antiquities.

In an icy fury, Paul Veyne, a French expert on Palmyra, has dedicated this comprehensive, passionate, but concise book to the memory of the murdered Syrian scholar. In it he relates thousands of years of Palmyra’s history, describing those who lived there and pausing only briefly to underline what monsters Isis were to smash the site.

You may suppose that Palmyra was just one of those many ancient cities scattered around the globe about which we should know more if only we had the time. But in fact, Veyne contends, it ranks alongside Pompeii and Ephesus, with remains reaching back at least 5,000 years. For a period it was part of the Roman empire, but before that it was a ‘merchant republic’, where Egyptians, Greeks, Jews and Italians, spoke Arabic, Aramaic, Greek and sometimes Latin, and worshipped and respected many gods. One Palmyrene observed that piety showed ‘a respect for divine human laws vis-à-vis everyone’.

Lucidly translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, Veyne’s book has plenty to say about Zenobia, Palmyra’s ‘sort of queen’, who in the 3rd century AD set out to conquer Rome no less, and after conquering Egypt and Arabia aroused the alarm of the Emperor Aurelian. He defeated her — but then what happened? Was she killed, imprisoned or given a minor throne? We don’t know, but thus one long story came to an end.

A not very populous city state, Palmyra’s majority poor lived outside its gates, though they worked within them, as curriers, cobblers and makers of inflated animal skins, which were sent to the Euphrates to be used as rafts.