The capture of Palmyra by the gunmen of the Islamic State threatens the world with the

most grievous loss to its cultural patrimony since the Second World War. Just as the Nazis
felt themselves perfectly justified in destroying the heritage of those they saw as lesser
breeds - Poles, Russians, and above all Jews - so are jihadis pledged to flatten anything that
smacks of idolatry. Divine fiat and the example of the Prophet Muhammad obliges them,
so they trumpet, to smash into pieces anything that redounds to the glory of paganism. It
is not only their brutally literalist reading of the Qur'an, though, which has inspired them
in their vandalism of the Near East's incomparable archaeological heritage. The Islamic
State is at least as cynical as it is god-fearing. Any antiquity that it can sell on the black
market is duly smuggled to the outside world. Everything else is very ostentatiously
demolished. Piety and an eye for a profit make for a lethal combination.
No one should doubt, then, the mortal danger that now threatens Palmyra. Already, the
Islamic State have shown themselves ready to use bulldozers and explosives on
monuments which stand testimony to the pre-Islamic world. The Assyrian cities of
Nineveh and Nimrud, capitals of an empire which ruled much of the Near East back in the
days of the Old Testament prophets, lie shattered in their wake. Excavations which were
abandoned during the Gulf War will now never be completed. The loss to our
understanding of Assyrian civilisation is immeasurable. Yet for all that, the visual impact
of their destruction was muted. The Assyrians used bricks fashioned out of dried mud to
build their cities, with the result that much of them had already crumbled into dust
millennia before the Islamic State turned up with their Kalashnikovs. Palmyra, though,
was different. Founded in a desert oasis, the colonnades and temples raised during its
golden age were fashioned out of stone. It is that which has enabled them to stand proof
against the passage of the centuries. It is that as well which would make their destruction
an unspeakably tragic spectacle of ruin.
The significance of Palmyra lies less in the promise it holds of finds yet to be made than in
the incomparable beauty of its cityscape. Only Machu Picchu, the Inca stronghold in the
Andes, and Angkor Wat, the great temple complex deep in the Cambodian jungle, can
rival its status as the most romantic archaeological site in the world. Tellingly, all three
cities were long lost to the knowledge of travellers. Machu Picchu, high in the mountains,
was never discovered by the Spanish conquistadors; Angkor Wat vanished for centuries
beneath creepers; and Palmyra, after rising to a dazzling pinnacle of splendour and power,
declined to become a forgotten backwater, half buried by sand. Only in the seventeenth
century did adventurers bring back the first reports to Europe of its splendours; and only
in the eighteenth century did illustrations of the abandoned city serve to establish it in the
Western imagination as a veritable archetype of decayed greatness. The notoriety of the
Assad regime, which established a prison with a particularly evil reputation in the
neighbouring town of Tadmor, helped to ensure that Palmyra never succumbed to the
embrace of mass tourism. Even before the outbreak of the civil war, the site was largely
empty. The aura of romance which had so inspired Georgian architects and Victorian poets
still clung to the ruins.

Romance alone, though, is insufficient to explain what currently lies at stake. For anyone
with even a passing interest in Roman civilisation, Palmyra stands as an incomparable
treasure. No more complete or impressive panorama has survived from classical antiquity.
Of the columns which lined the city's central colonnade, a splendid thoroughfare just over
a kilometre long, almost half are still standing. Deep in the desert though it stood, on the
easternmost limits of Rome's empire, Palmyra boasted all the most cutting-edge
appurtenances of a Roman metropolis: baths, theatres, arches. Despite an initially fractious
relationship, which in 41 BC had prompted Marc Antony to launch an abortive attack on
the city, its annexation some sixty years later soon saw it flourishing as a loyal outpost of
the Caesars. When the Emperor Hadrian visited Palmyra in AD 129, he graced it with
signal and magnificent honours. Meanwhile, Palmyreans were taking full advantage of the
Pax Romana. In particular, they flourished as merchants and soldiers. Some were even to be
found at the opposite end of the empire, on Hadrian's Wall. One of them, a merchant
named Barates, married his British slavegirl, and erected a splendid tombstone to her
when she died. It can still be seen, complete with moving Palmyrene inscription, in Arbeia
Museum, in South Shields.
Yet the fascination of Palmyra is that it was never merely a Roman city. Its wealth was
dependent on trade; and this trade, which enabled the city's rulers to establish it as the
most glittering entrept in the entire Middle East, the Dubai of its day, was in turn
dependent on contacts with rival empires to Rome. East of Palmyra lay Mesopotamia, as
the Greeks called Iraq: a land ruled by Iranian emperors. Relations between these
emperors and the Caesars were rarely good - but that did not stop the most impressive
temple in Palmyra being dedicated to a god whose name derived from the ancient
Mesopotamian city of Babylon. Meanwhile, in another temple, Arab tribesmen established
a sanctuary to a deity of their own: a goddess named Allat. Her cult would prove an
enduring one. In due course she would end up condemned by name in the Qur'an.
Roman, Mesopotamian, Arab: Palmyra was all of these, and more. As such, she embodied
the authentic spirit of Syria, which had always been a teeming melting-pot of cultures. The
most spectacular demonstration of this came in the 3rd century AD, when Zenobia, the
queen of Palmyra, was able to take advantage of a Roman civil war to establish herself as
the effective mistress of the entire Near East. Posing as a defender of Roman interests, she
first took possession of Syria and a chunk of Anatolia, then coolly had herself proclaimed
the Queen of Egypt. For a few short years, Palmyra found itself gloriously and improbably
elevated to the status of an imperial capital. In the event, though, Zenobia's rule did not
last long. Defeated in battle, she was taken to Rome and paraded through the streets in
golden chains. According to tradition, she then retired to a country villa, and lived out her
days as a Roman matron. Nevertheless, the brief arc of her meteoric career was a portent of
things to come. Even though it was her defeat that precipitated the spectacular decline of
Palmyra itself, there were others out in the desert who, over the course of the following
centuries, dared to dream of empire much as she had done. When the Arabs, in the 7th

century, finally succeeded in ending Roman rule of Syria for good, they were following in
Zenobia's footsteps. The Caliphate they established, just as Palmyra had been, was a
remarkable fusion of many cultures - and all the richer for it.
Hence the bitter irony of the doom that now threatens Zenobia's capital: that its
conquerors claim a mandate to destroy it in the name of a reconstituted caliphate. In truth,
the regime that the Islamic State aspire to establish over Syria is all the more of an
abomination for trampling down traditions of pluralism in the country that are millennia
old. It is this which makes the threatened destruction of Palmyra such a human as well as a
cultural tragedy: for the city is the most potent symbol imaginable of the society that Syria
used to be. When, in due course, the killing stops, the blood dries, and the Syrian people
attempt to refashion something out of the rubble to which their land has been reduced,
they will need symbols. To mutilate a country's past is to cripple its future. That is why the
fate of Palmyra matters. It is not just ancient stone that is menaced.
'What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?' Constantine Cavafy, in his most famous
poem, imagined an emperor and his people gathering in a city very like Palmyra, and
waiting for the barbarians. In the event, though, the barbarians do not show and the
crowds who had gathered to greet them, far from feeling relieved, dissolve instead in a
sombre mood. 'And now,' the poem concludes, 'whats going to happen to us without
barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution.'
But Cavafy did not live to see the depredations of the Islamic State. Today's barbarians, as
the world has learnt to its bitter cost, are no kind of a solution at all.