Palmyra

Where the trade routes met

Palmyra sat on the route between the Roman Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, a halfway oasis on the western reach of the Silk Road. It grew immensely rich taxing the caravans that passed through — silk from China, spices and pepper from India, incense from Arabia.

Its culture was a true crossroads: Greco-Roman architecture, Persian and Arab dress, local gods, and its own dialect of Aramaic, written alongside Greek on its monuments.

A city of columns

The Great Colonnade ran for more than a kilometre, lined with hundreds of columns. The Temple of Bel, dedicated in AD 32, was one of the most important religious buildings of the Roman East; the monumental arch and the tetrapylon punctuated the avenue; and at the desert's edge rose the eerie multi-storey tower-tombs in which the great families buried their dead.

Zenobia, and 2015

In the third century, Queen Zenobia of Palmyra rebelled against Rome and briefly ruled an empire from Egypt to Anatolia, before the emperor Aurelian crushed the city in AD 273.

Its ruins survived as some of the finest in the world — until 2015, when the militant group ISIS dynamited the Temple of Bel and the monumental arch and murdered Khaled al-Asaad, the archaeologist who had cared for the site for decades. The destruction made headlines around the world and turned Palmyra into a symbol of cultural loss.