“As patience is the greatest of friends to the unfortunate, so is time the greatest of friends to the lovers of landscape. It resolves the noblest works of art into the most affecting ornaments of created things. The fall of empires, with which the death of great characters is so immediately associated, possesses a prescriptive title, as it were, to all our sympathy; forming at once a magnificent, yet melancholy spectacle; and awakening in the mind all the grandeur of solitude. Who would not be delighted to make a pilgrimage to the East to see the columns of Persepolis, and the still more magnificent ruins of Palmyra? Where awe springs, as it were, personified from the fragments, and proclaims instructive lessons from the vicissitudes of fortune. Palmyra, once a paradise in the centre of inhospitable deserts, the pride of Solomon, the capital of Zenobia, and the wonder and admiration of all the East, now lies ‘majestic though in ruins!’ Its glory withered, time has cast over it a sacred grandeur, softened into grace. History, by its silence, mourns its melancholy destiny; while immense masses and stupendous columns denote the spot, where once the splendid city of the desert reared her proud and matchless towers. Ruins are the only legacy the destroyer left to posterity.”—Harmonies of Nature.
This city was the capital of Palmyrene, a country on the eastern boundaries of Syria. Its origin is uncertain; but a portion of its history is exceedingly interesting; and its vast assemblage of ruins are beheld with astonishment and rapture by the curious, the learned, and the elegant.
PALMYRA
It was situated in the midst of a large plain, surrounded on three sides by a long chain of mountains. It stands in a desert, in the pachalic of Damascus, about forty-eight leagues from Aleppo, and about the same distance from Damascus, eighty-five miles west from the Euphrates, and about one hundred and seventeen from the shores of the Mediterranean.
History is, for the most part, silent in regard to the early history of this city. It is said to have been built by Solomon, after he had conquered the king of Hamathzoba, within whose dominion the country lay, in which the city was afterwards erected. He called it Tadmor[50], which some have construed as the place of Palms[51]; and sometimes “Tadmor in the Wilderness.”
We are assured by Josephus, that this was the city which the Greeks and Romans afterwards called Palmyra. His words are:—“Now, Solomon went in the desert above Syria, and possessed himself of it; and built there a very great city, which was distant two days’ journey from the upper Syria, and one day’s journey from the Euphrates, and six long days’ journey from Babylon the great. Now the reason why this city lay so remote from those parts of Syria, that are inhabited, is this: that below there is no water to be had; and that it is in that place only that there are springs and pits of water. When, therefore, he had built that city, and encompassed it with very strong walls, he gave it the name of Tadmor; and that is the name it is still called by at this day among the Syrians[52]: but the Greeks name it Palmyra.”
That the city was built by Solomon is most probable; but that the present ruins have any relation to buildings of his erection is very improbable: indeed we must assume it as certain that they are not; they being entirely those of the Greek orders. With the exception of four Ionic half-columns in the Temple of the Sun, and two in one of the mausoleums, the whole architecture of Palmyra is Corinthian. Neither history nor even tradition, moreover, speaks of any other architect than Solomon.
Some have been disposed to give it an earlier existence[53]. The Arabic translator of Chronicles makes Palmyra older than Solomon; John of Antioch, surnamed Melala, says, that he built it on the spot where David slew Goliah, in memory of that action; and Abul-Farai mentions in what year, with the particulars. These and other accounts of the early state of Palmyra, which might be collected from the Arabic authors, bear such evident marks of fable and wild conjecture, that we shall pass them over.