Palmyra

Palmyra was the oasis city between Rome and Parthia, a caravan capital of monumental colonnades, tower tombs, and temples, above all the Temple of Bel, where a Semitic pantheon centered on Bel and Baalshamin was served in a sanctuary that made the city's wealth visible in stone. Queen Zenobia ruled from here in the third century in revolt against Rome. UNESCO inscribed the site in 1980, and before 2015 Palmyra was counted among the more intact great archaeological sites of the ancient world.

Then comes the part this entry exists to record, plainly. In 2015, during its occupation of the city, ISIS destroyed the Temple of Baalshamin and then the Temple of Bel, confirmed destroyed by UN satellite imagery, along with the Arch of Triumph and other monuments, and it killed Khaled al-Asaad, the retired head of Palmyra's antiquities, in his eighties, after he reportedly refused to tell them where the city's artifacts had been hidden. The city changed hands again in 2016 and 2017; in 2025, after the fall of the Assad government, Syrians began returning to the ruins and officials spoke of tourists coming back, but the site is not a place of ordinary visitation. This entry is written as documentation of a loss, in honor of the man who died for the collection and the city, and with the explicit acknowledgment that what the monuments meant, to Palmyrenes, to the region, and to the archaeology of the ancient Near East, outlives the stone.

Visiting

The UNESCO World Heritage listing documents the property and its damage assessments. The site is effectively closed to regular visitation; reporting in 2025 describes local returns and reconstruction hopes, not tourism. Do not plan a visit; follow UN and heritage-sector guidance on travel to Syria.

Photo: Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons ([source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Temple_of_Bel%2C_Palmyra_01.jpg)). A pre-destruction photograph of the Temple of Bel, which ISIS destroyed in 2015.