Palmyra is an ancient Semitic city in present-day Homs Governorate, Syria. It changed hands on a number of occasions between different empires before becoming a subject of the Roman Empire in the first century AD. The city’s wealth enabled the construction of monumental projects, such as the Great Colonnade, the Temple of Bel, and the distinctive tower tombs. In 273, Roman emperor Aurelian destroyed the city, which was later restored by Diocletian at a reduced size. During the Syrian Civil War in 2015, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant destroyed large parts of the ancient city.
About Palmyra in brief
Palmyra is an ancient Semitic city in present-day Homs Governorate, Syria. It changed hands on a number of occasions between different empires before becoming a subject of the Roman Empire in the first century AD. The city’s wealth enabled the construction of monumental projects, such as the Great Colonnade, the Temple of Bel, and the distinctive tower tombs. In 273, Roman emperor Aurelian destroyed the city, which was later restored by Diocletian at a reduced size. During the Syrian Civil War in 2015, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant destroyed large parts of the ancient city. It was recaptured by the Syrian Army on 2 March 2017. The etymology of the name is unclear; the standard interpretation, supported by Albert Schultens, connects it to the Semitic word for \”date palm\”, tamar, thus referring to the palm trees that surrounded the city. An alternative suggestion connects the name to the Syriac word for wondermurtām, which means “miracle” or “wonderful” The city was destroyed by the Timurids in 1400 and reduced to a small village under French Mandatory rule in 1932. It is generally believed that \”Palmyra\” derives from \”Tadmor\” and linguists have presented two possibilities; one view holds that Palmyra was an alteration of Tadmor. According to the theory, both names originated from the Hurrian language and the other from the Greek word Palma, meaning ‘palm’ or’miracle’ The name was changed to Palmura by the influence of the Latin word palma, in reference to the city’s palm trees, then the name reached its final form of ‘Palmyra’ in the 4th century AD, when the city became a Roman colonia.
The Palmyrenes converted to Christianity during the fourth century and to Islam in the centuries following the conquest by the 7th-century Rashidun Caliphate, after which the Palmyrene and Greek languages were replaced by Arabic. The Greek name was first recorded by Pliny the Elder in the 1st century AD and was used throughout the Greco-Roman world. The name Palmyra is a corruption of the word for palm, which had been used by the ancient Greeks to refer to the date palm, or ‘date palm’, and is believed to have been derived from the word ‘tamar’, which means ‘to wonder’ or to ‘to look at’ The city is located in what is now the Homs governorate, in the north-east of the Homs region of Syria, near the border with Iraq. It has been the site of numerous archaeological finds, including the remains of a Bronze Age temple and the ruins of an ancient Roman colony, as well as the remains from the Roman city of Tarsus. The ruins of Palmyra have been excavated by archaeologists since the 1970s and 1980s. The ancient city was once a prosperous regional center, but became a minor center under the Byzantine and later empires.
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This page is based on the article Palmyra published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 14, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
