In 32 AD — the same decade Jesus was crucified outside Jerusalem — priests in the Syrian desert city of Palmyra finished the most ambitious temple their world had ever seen. They dedicated it to Bel, the Lord of the Universe, a supreme god who borrowed from the Babylonian Marduk and the Greek Zeus but was something entirely his own. He didn’t rule alone. The sun god stood at his right, the moon god at his left. Together, the three of them owned the sky.
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Gods & Monsters·4/5·1′
The place
Palmyra
The Temple of Bel — From Gods to Dust
The story of the greatest temple at the crossroads of civilizations -- consecrated under Tiberius, converted by Christians, repurposed by Muslims, and destroyed in seconds by explosives in 2015
32 AD (consecration) – August 30, 2015 (destruction by ISIS); survived 1,983 yearsPalmyra
Moral of the Story
“A building that survives two thousand years of conquest, conversion, and neglect is destroyed not by those who hate beauty but by those who fear what beauty reveals -- that before their certainties existed, other certainties flourished, and that the human capacity for wonder is older and more enduring than any single claim to truth.”
Characters
B
Bel (supreme deity of Palmyra, cognate with Babylonian Marduk)Y
Yarhibol (sun god of the Palmyrene triad)A
Aglibol (moon god of the Palmyrene triad)T
The Palmyrene priests and their sacred banquet associationsI
ISIS militants (destroyers, August 2015)Source
Seyrig, Henri; Amy, Robert; Will, Ernest. Le Temple de Bel a Palmyre, 1968/1975; Teixidor, Javier. The Pantheon of Palmyra, 1979; UNOSAT satellite imagery analysis, August-September 2015; UNESCO World Heritage Site inscription, 1980; Gawlikowski, Michał, excavation reports on the Temple of Bel; Browning, Iain. Palmyra, 1979