Palmyrene Empire

A caravan city that briefly ruled a third of the Roman world, and was erased for it. Palmyra sat at an oasis in the Syrian desert on the route between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates, grew rich taxing the caravan trade in silk, spices and slaves, and built a monumental colonnaded city in a style mixing Greek, Roman and Parthian forms with inscriptions in both Greek and Palmyrene Aramaic. Its opportunity came from Roman collapse. After the Persians captured the emperor Valerian in 260, the Palmyrene noble Odaenathus drove them back, was rewarded with sweeping authority over the eastern provinces, and was assassinated in 267. His widow Zenobia then ruled in the name of their young son and, between 269 and 271, took Egypt, Anatolia and the Levant, minting coins in her son's name and effectively seceding. Aurelian marched east in 272, defeated her at Immae and Emesa, and took the city; a revolt the following year led him to sack it outright. Zenobia was probably displayed in his triumph in Rome. Palmyra never recovered as a power and shrank to a garrison town. Its ruins stood remarkably intact until Islamic State destroyed the temples of Bel and Baalshamin and killed the archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad in 2015. Palmyra's own name for itself was Tadmor, still its Arabic name. Its funerary tower tombs housed hundreds of burials each. The city's tariff inscription of 137 is one of the most detailed surviving Roman customs documents. Zenobia claimed descent from Cleopatra. Aurelian took the title Restorer of the World.

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