Speaking of ancient cities, it's easy to think of Pompeii near Naples or the massive ruins of Ephesus on the Turkish coast. Few people have heard of Palmyra standing in the Syrian desert. In 1980, the site of Palmyra was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Under its prestige, Palmyra is the "entrance" to the former Roman world, presenting "another world" different from the "Roman imagination". It used to be the real entrance of the frontier people into the Roman world, if you are in the streets of that time and place, you will hear Aramaic, Arabic, Greek ringing in your ears at the same time, there is no arena, only a public bath, the locals worship their gods in their own way, the favorite things of the Romans and Greeks, none of them are very popular there. These converged into a "wind of multiculturalism" blowing over Palmyra.
Today, to get to Palmyra, you need to take a four-hour flight from Paris to Damascus, then drive 200 kilometers along a restored asphalt road from an ancient post road. However, in 2015, ISIS seized control of the area and began a planned destruction of the city and the massacre of residents. Why would a terrorist organization loot buildings from the distant past that are not offensive?
The book was written by the recently deceased French historian Paul Veyne. In the book, Weiner argues that behind this atrocity was a clash of civilizations, that is, Westerners worshipped the buildings, and that the bombing was done to show that they did not respect what Westerners respected. He is not without anger in the book: from now on, we can only appreciate this great historical and cultural treasure from the book.
Palmyra, by Paul Weiner, translated by Yan Suwei, Century Wenjing| Shanghai People's Publishing House, August 2022.
When the historian temporarily acts as a painter
Ironically, Syria's ancient city of Palmyra rose to prominence again due to barbaric atrocities.
In 2015, the Islamic State invaded Syria and captured the ancient city of Palmyra. On July 4 of that year, in the small Roman theater in Palmyra, on the stage of the Romans performing a play, 25 Syrian soldiers knelt in a row, each with an executioner standing behind them, and these soldiers were either cut their throats or beheaded, and the whole process was deliberately videotaped. The barbarism did not stop there, with ISIS members brutally killing retired museum director and archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad on August 18, the Temple of Balshaming (built in the second century BC) on August 23, the peculiarly shaped Temple of Bell (with the door open on the side and built in the first century AD) on August 30, and the funerary tower of the ancient city in early September.
Funeral Tower © DEA / C. Sappa / De Agostini / Getty Images / Visual China. (Photo courtesy of the publisher)
Subsequently, works about the ancient city of Palmyra have been published in the West, such as Charles River, Ancient Palmyra, which was quickly published in September 2015, Ferrante Ferranti, Adieu, Palmyre, published in April 2016, and Annie et Maurice Sartre, published in May 2016. Palmyre. Vérités et légendes), and the bilingual book Manar Hammad, Bel/Palmyra hommage, published in French and Italian in December of the same year.
In 2015 and 2016, Andreas Schmidt-Colinet, a classical archaeologist at the University of Vienna, published two articles with similar titles: "Palmyra is about all of us: the destruction of our cultural heritage" and "Palmyra is about all of us." A war destroys our historical memory", the titles of these two articles seem to perfectly explain the close attention paid to Palmyra in Western publishing and academic circles, because this ancient city is the cultural heritage and historical memory of mankind, and it concerns all people (regardless of the scope of "us"). Andreas explained that Syria is the beginning of fundamental achievements in our society today, such as the agricultural use of land, human settlement and urbanization in this region have been confirmed for the first time.
Of all the publications about Palmyra after ISIS destroyed it, French historian Paul Veyne's pamphlet Palmyra: An Irreplaceable Treasure (subtitled "A Lost Roman Frontier City Chinese edition) elicited the greatest repercussions. Professor emeritus at the Académie de France, who wrote Le pain et le cirque and Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes?, and author of Foucault, sa pensée, sa personne, There was a swift and emotional response to the brutal massacres and the destruction of civilization.
Although Weiner's research focuses on Roman history, this book is not the first time he has written about Palmyra: he wrote a 50-page foreword to Palmyra, the metropolis of desert caravans, published in 2001, and in 1986 he published a paper deciphering a Latin dedication inscription from a Palmyra expatriate (The Evolution of Greco-Roman Paganism).
Weiner's Palmyra is not strictly an academic work, it does not provide a lengthy interpretation of Palmyra's Latin, Greek, and Aramaic inscriptions, nor does it make a historical argument for the material that is still on the border between "real" and "legendary"; it is more like the result of a historian temporarily acting as a painter or art historian, pointing to the obvious, the emotion, and the cultural memory. As Weiner says in the foreword: "In the face of this incomprehensible destruction, it is my duty to express my astonishment and outline the glory of Palmyra." From now on, we can only appreciate this great historical and cultural treasure from the book. ”
Palmyra: the city of commerce and "capitalism"
According to the topography of Palmyra, which has been excavated today, it is a typical Roman city, with all the elements of a Roman city: large columns on both sides, avenues across the city, arches, squares, temples, theaters, local councils and baths. But if we combine history and world geography, Palmyra was on the edge of the Greco-Roman world at a certain time, and further east was the nomadic Persian civilization and the easternmost Chinese civilization, the metropolis of desert caravans on the Silk Road.
Thus, in Weiner's view, commerce and "capitalism" largely shaped the city. In Palmyra's most glorious period, an inquisitor Chinese was sent to the West, and when he returned, reported that the profit of doing business with Palmyra was one to ten. Palmyra is a commercial republic.
Business makes diversity. The city is full of Greek, Latin and Aramaic speakers (the languages of most people), so many inscriptions in these languages have been handed down, just like in contemporary Wenzhou, where merchants speaking Mandarin, Wenzhou and Hokkien were trading in a market in the southern county of Wenzhou.
© Mosaic akg-images / Gérard Degeorge. (Photo courtesy of the publisher)
Palmyra was thus not a community of citizens (in the legal sense) as in Rome, but a community based on tribal groups and dominated by a few wealthy merchant families. Weiner said that Palmyra's aristocracy was proud of their authority, which in turn gave them the capital to act boldly and take advantage of their dual culture: they were not frightened, did not resent, and stood on an equal footing with Greek culture.
It wasn't until after the surrender to Caesar that the city changed. It began to call itself a "civitas, polis" (polis) in public documents, and local authorities were organized on the model of Greek or Roman city-states. Emperor Hadrian reconfirmed Greece as the cultural center of the Roman world during his reign (117-138 AD), while Palmyra was an unequivocal stop on his tour of the eastern provinces (129 AD), and the Palmyrans erected a statue of Emperor Hadrian with an inscription of praise.
Palmyra was still in a tension between local culture and cosmopolitan Greek culture and the Italian model of the Roman Empire, and inscriptions, architecture and visual art all provide proof of this complex tension. On a sarcophagus at the Archaeological Museum of Palmyra, the reliefs show figures dressed in Greek costumes, but the commemorative inscription is in Aramaic. During Hadrian's time, Palmyra's civic spirit gradually took shape, and a Greek-style town hall (boulē) was created by the city's elite. Palmyra's famous "Tariff Decree" shows how Palmyranians skillfully transformed intercultural tensions into a Greco-Roman civil order, which showed that the city's councils had the power to regulate desert caravan trade, local trade, and slave trade.
Over the centuries, Palmyra became more and more familiar with Italian Roman culture, which, as mentioned above, was typically Romanesque in shape, and it increasingly identified itself as a member of the Roman Empire, not to mention the Roman citizenship granted to all inhabitants of the empire in 212 AD, except for some of its inhabitants. By what historians call the "crisis of the third century," Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, even attempted to usurp the Roman throne. Around 475 AD, a das Syrisch-Römische Rechtsbuch (das Syrisch-Römische Rechtsbuch) was published in Greek, which included provisions on inheritance, debt, slavery, and marriage, as well as some criminal laws, but legal historians debate whether this law book was a successor and vulgarization of Roman law or purely Eastern Greek law.
As a result, the Palmyrans of the time may still speak Aramae, but they would also walk across arcades, go to the small Roman theater that could only accommodate one or two thousand spectators, and go to the baths of Diocletian to bathe and socialize. A bilingual inscription records that a man who once provided natural oils and fats for free to all those who used public baths for use as soap, of course he was a rich man.
Doubts from locals?
Palmyra's independence and vassals
Of course, Weiner's historical picture and travel through time have also been criticized by Syrian historians, although not the harshest.
In a book published in May 2016 called Palmyra: Truth and Legend, the authors try to distinguish between history and legend about Palmyra. The book is divided into 29 chapters, each of which is titled with a common assertion, a quotation, or a question. In Chapter 7, "Palmyra, the City Free of Hadrian," the author refutes the assertion imagined by many scholars that Hadrian's innovations made the city a free city. In the epigraph of Chapter VIII, "A Commercial Republic," the author quotes Weiner in Palmyra, arguing that many historians often forget the geography of Syria when talking about Palmyra's trade, and that caravans are difficult to travel all year round due to its mountainous terrain and cold winter climate.
Rally Square © Andrea Jemolo / Electa / Mondadori. (Photo courtesy of the publisher)
In addition, they dissected the political and legal term "république," arguing that the term was reminiscent of medieval liberal Italian cities, independent of external powers, which never happened in Palmyra. In short, in their view, Palmyra's commercial nature is ancillary, not its essence. And the scholar M. Gaulikovsky Gawlikowski argues that Palmyra's cross-border commercial exchanges were primarily with the Persian Gulf region rather than through the Silk Road.
In chapter XVII, "Palmyra Became a Hereditary Duchy and a Roman Vassal," the authors argue that Palmyra in the mid-third century AD was not, as Weiner claimed, a Roman vassal, and they cite the bad Latin translation of the concept of "princeps Palmyrenorum" in the Historia Augusta to point out that "princeps" are Palmyra rulers. The position is hereditary from their ancestors and is not designated by a higher authority.
Fall back to the spirit world
Putting aside the controversy of professional historiography, Weiner's journey through time and space ends up in the spiritual world of the Palmyra, their religion and art. We know of more than 60 gods worshipped by the Palmyra: tribal gods, local gods (ibel), and foreign gods (such as Isis of Egypt), but these gods are not competing here. The Palmyra people most revere the gods Bell and Balshamin, the two most famous temples mentioned above that were blown up by the Islamic State.
Weiner believes that the Islamic State blew up the two temples not because they were pagan gods, but because of the clash of civilizations, that is, Westerners worship these buildings, Western culture contains a love of historical buildings, and a strong curiosity about beliefs in other regions and other times. And the act of blowing up is to show that they do not respect what Westerners respect.
Palmyra's art is also diverse, like the buildings built in the mountains of the ancient city of Petra, Jordan, all Greco-Roman style is foreign; Oriental or mix-and-match styles are made by local artisans.
Bird's eye view of Palmyra © Marco Brivio / Getty Creative / Visual Chinese birds. (Photo courtesy of the publisher)
Palmyra is a little book not only a historian's remembrance of "our" common cultural heritage and historical memory, a condemnation of barbarism in contemporary society, but also a conscious written record, as he said angrily and regretfully, from now on, we can only appreciate this great historical and cultural treasure from the book.
This echoes Mallarmé's saying: the world ends in a book.
Author/Guo Yihao
Editor/Shen Lu Qingqingzi
Proofreader/Liu Baoqing