The battle in May over the Syrian town of Palmyra was notable for being isis’s first major military victory against the forces of the Assad government. The Army fled, leaving the jihadis in control of sizable gas reserves, the brutal prison where thousands of Islamists and political dissidents had formerly been held (which they blew up), and the ruins of a fabled dominion that was once ruled by a queen named Zenobia, who dared to threaten the power of imperial Rome. Zenobia’s empire reached across Egypt and through much of modern-day Turkey. Her city’s remains are now in the hands of a force that wages war on civilization, both modern and ancient.
“Zenobia was esteemed the most lovely as well as the most heroic of her sex,” Gibbon wrote in an awestruck account of her brief reign. “She claimed her descent from the Macedonian kings of Egypt, equaled in beauty her ancestor Cleopatra, and far surpassed that princess in chastity and valor.” The only contemporary representation we have of Zenobia is on a coin, which makes her look rather witchlike, but Gibbon’s description of her pearly-white teeth and large black eyes, which “sparkled with uncommon fire,” cast a spell over future historians, both in the West and in the Arab world, who quarrel over nearly everything having to do with Zenobia and her confounding legacy.
She was probably in her twenties when she took the throne, upon the death of her husband, King Odenathus, in 267 or 268. Acting as regent for her young son, she then led the army in a revolt against the Romans, conquering Egypt and parts of Asia Minor. By 271, she had gained control of a third of the Roman Empire. Gibbon sometimes portrays the warrior queen as a kind of well-schooled Roman society matron. “She was not ignorant of the Latin tongue,” he writes, “but possessed in equal perfection the Greek, the Syriac, and the Egyptian languages.” Palmyra’s abundant wall inscriptions are in Latin, Greek, and an Aramaic dialect, not Arabic. But to Arab historians, such as the ninth-century al-Tabari, Zenobia was a tribal queen of Arab, rather than Greek, descent, whose original name was Zaynab, or al-Zabba. Among Muslims, she is seen as a herald of the Islamic conquests that came four centuries later.
This view, popular within the current Syrian regime, which boasts Zenobia on its currency, also resonates within radical Islamic circles. Glen Bowersock, a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, says, “I suspect isis believes Palmyra to be somehow a distinctively Arab place, where Zenobia stood up to the Roman emperor.” Indeed, isis fighters, after seizing Palmyra, released a video showing the temples and colonnades at the ruins, a unesco World Heritage site, intact. “Concerning the historical city, we will preserve it,” an isis commander, Abu Laith al-Saudi, told a Syrian radio station. “What we will do is pulverize the statues the miscreants used to pray to.” Fighters then set about sledgehammering statues and shrines.
Zenobia’s nemesis was the Roman emperor Aurelian, who led his legions through Asia Minor, reclaiming parts of the empire she had taken. Near Antioch, she met him with an army of seventy thousand men, but the Roman forces chased them back to their desert stronghold. During the siege of the city, Aurelian wrote to Zenobia, “I bid you surrender, promising that your lives shall be spared.” She replied, “You demand my surrender as though you were not aware that Cleopatra preferred to die a queen rather than remain alive.” Zenobia attempted to escape to Persia, but was captured before she could cross the Euphrates. Palmyra was sacked after a second revolt. Aurelian lamented in a letter to one of his lieutenants, “We have not spared the women, we have slain the children, we have butchered the old men.”
Today, that dire role is being enacted by the isis invaders. They have killed scores of civilians near Palmyra and executed soldiers in its ancient amphitheatre, in order to make yet another grotesque video documenting a new age of barbarism. In a region once ruled by a strong-willed queen, women who don’t bend to ISIS’s narrow beliefs may be sold into sex slavery.
Some Arab sources adhere to the theory that Zenobia committed suicide before she could be caught. Gibbon follows Roman accounts that place her in Rome as the showpiece of Aurelian’s triumphal procession. “The beauteous figure of Zenobia was confined by fetters of gold; a slave supported the gold chain which encircled her neck, and she almost fainted under the intolerable weight of jewels,” he writes. The grand homecoming apparently elicited a snarky response from the commentariat. According to the “Historia Augustus,” Aurelian complained, “Nor would those who criticize me, praise me sufficiently, if they knew what sort of woman she was.” Instead of beheading her in front of the Temple of Jupiter, once a common fate of renegades, he awarded her a villa in Tivoli. The historian Syncellus reported that she married a Roman senator; their descendants were listed into the fifth century.
As isis occupies the ruins of Zenobia’s city, it is worth comparing the goals and the acts of this modern phenomenon with those of Palmyra nearly two thousand years ago. “It was one of the most extraordinary cities in antiquity,” David Potter, a professor of Greek and Roman history at the University of Michigan, says. “It was literally a city where East meets West.” Palmyra, which in Western portrayals comes across as a kind of desert Camelot, was a center of learning and tolerance, enriched by its exposure to the outside world, as caravans from China, India, and Arabia passed through on their way to the Roman provinces. The city reached its multicultural zenith during Zenobia’s reign; although it was a largely pagan society, Jews and Christians also formed part of the social fabric and were represented at court. Zenobia herself may have been Jewish, or a convert, several sources suggest.
Perhaps Zenobia’s ambition outstripped her resources, but the ideal of an Arab empire equal to that of Rome still animates the dreams of many. The great Arab civilization of modern time still awaits its champion, but it is the values embodied by Zenobia and her city that will be the hallmarks of its success, and not isis’s rejection of modernity, its persecution of believers in other faiths, its subjugation of women, and its abolition of history. ♦
