The heart of the world has been touched by the pathetic spectacle of proud, beautiful Zenobia led captive through the streets of Rome to grace Aurelian’s triumphal procession. Yet the emperor seems to have treated his captive with unusual consideration and respect, and he generously bestowed upon her a large estate near Tivoli. There, in the company of her two sons, she passed the rest of her days quietly, though we dare not hope happily.
Palmyra was afterwards partially rebuilt by Diocletian and was fortified by Justinian, who made it a garrison town; but it never regained its former prosperity. The city was overrun by the desert Arabs, and suffered severely during the conflicts among the rival Moslem conquerors of Syria. In the year 745 it was again destroyed; in the eleventh and twelfth centuries it suffered from severe earthquakes; in 1401 it was plundered by the Tartar Tamerlane; in the sixteenth century it was taken by the Druses, and in the seventeenth it was razed by the Turks. For many generations the ancient city on the oasis was completely unknown to the Western world, though the wandering Bedouins delighted to talk of the marvelous ruins in the midst of the great desert.
Modern Tadmor—for it has taken again its old Semitic name—is but a wretched Arab hamlet of perhaps three hundred inhabitants, whose mud-plastered hovels lie in the midst of imposing ruins. Fully a square mile of the plain is strewn with the débris of temples, palaces and majestic colonnades. Many columns are still standing, after having braved the wars and earthquakes of sixteen centuries; but by far the greater number of them lie prone on the ground, half buried by the drifting dust.
The most prominent object that meets the eye is the Great Temple of Baal, the sun-god, which stands on a high platform overlooking the plain. Although Aurelian himself had this edifice restored after the final subjugation of Palmyra, it has since been badly damaged by earthquakes and defaced by the fanaticism of Moslem iconoclasts. Yet eight of its tall fluted columns and practically all of one side-wall enable us to guess what must have been the beauty of this structure when it was the chief sanctuary of Zenobia’s capital.
Other ruins rise above the intricate mass of fallen columns which cover the area occupied by the ancient city. This huge pile of carved stones surmounted by a broken portico was once the royal palace. Yonder curving colonnade includes the fragments of the theater. Smaller temples are recognized here and there, and on the hillside at the edge of the oasis can be seen a number of the tall, square towers which were built as burial-places for the wealthier families.
But the chief architectural glory of ancient Palmyra was its far-famed Street of Columns. This imposing avenue stretched from the western edge of the oasis to the Temple of the Sun, a distance of about three-quarters of a mile. On each side of it was a continuous, elaborately carved entablature, supported by nearly four hundred columns of reddish-brown limestone. About two-thirds of the way up these columns were corbels which, as the inscriptions still show, bore statues of prominent citizens. At every important crossing, whence other colonnaded avenues stretched to the right and left, four massive granite pillars supported a vaulted tetrapylon or quadruple gate.
Over a hundred of the columns of this beautiful avenue are still standing in their places, and large portions of the entablature remain unbroken. One can easily follow the course of the colonnade and understand its relation to adjoining structures; and the traveler must be sadly lacking in imagination who cannot sometimes, as the light of the twentieth century day grows dimmer, see a dream city of wondrous, unbroken beauty stand proud again beneath the calm, still gleaming of the desert stars. Not shattered stones but well-built homes and busy bazaars spread far outward from the foot of the mountain; a multitude of graceful pillars stand upright around the palaces and temples of a mighty capital, and between the long lines of statues on the reddish shafts of the great colonnade a splendid vista reaches to the triumphal arch and then, through its triple portals, to where the Temple of the Sun keeps silent watch over a city of imperial grandeur and a queen who sees visions of world-wide dominion.
The few hundred residents of Tadmor are of Arab blood, but the Bedouins of the surrounding desert consider them a poor, degenerate race, as doubtless they are. Shortly before we visited the village, its sheikh had made a wonderful trip to Paris as guest of a French lady who had previously traveled through the desert under his guidance. It seemed very strange, in this lonely little hamlet among the ruins of a vanished people, to hear an Arab sheikh tell stories—and he loved to tell them—about his adventures in the most modern of twentieth century capitals.
We were so fortunate as to be invited to a great feast which the sheikh gave the entire village in honor of his birthday. Feeding the poor in this wholesale way is regarded by the Arabs as a deed of great merit. A slaughtered camel provided the pièce de résistance of the banquet. In the center of the room was placed an enormous tray piled with a mountain of burghul, or boiled wheat, into which had been inserted huge pieces of camel’s meat. A large funnel-shaped depression had been scooped out in the top of the pile and filled with melted butter. This percolated through the mass and added the final touch of flavor to what was—if you liked it—a most rich and delicious repast. The anxious villagers were then admitted in groups of eight or ten. They immediately squatted around the tray, thrust their hands into the mass, grasped as much as they could, plunged it into their mouths and, in order not to lose any time, swallowed it with as little mastication as possible. One greedy fellow got an unusually large chunk of camel’s meat into his throat and, as a consequence, nearly choked to death before his comrades relieved him by strenuous blows upon his back.
In order to visit Hama, we returned from Palmyra by another route; and, as a large part of this journey was to be across a trackless, waterless and absolutely uninhabited desert, we engaged a Bedouin to act as our guide.