Site of Palmyra

Colonnades rise from the desert at Palmyra, the caravan oasis north-east of Damascus that grew fabulously rich linking Rome with Persia and the East. In the 1st and 2nd centuries its artists fused Graeco-Roman forms with local and Persian traditions to create something unmistakably its own. Inscribed by UNESCO in 1980, the site suffered grievous deliberate destruction during Syria's war, yet remains one of antiquity's most evocative ruins.