Photography and text by Craig Hull
These photographs are the record of a place that no longer exists as it once did. They document Palmyra, the ancient “Pearl of the Desert,” whose ruins once rose from the Syrian sands as a monument to resilience, culture, and exchange.
For nearly two thousand years, Palmyra stood at the crossroads of civilizations. A caravan city on the Silk Road, it connected Rome, Persia, Arabia, and beyond. Its colonnades, temples, and tombs bore witness to a blending of traditions — Greco-Roman forms mingling with Mesopotamian and Persian influences, inscriptions carved in Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. Palmyra’s most famous queen, Zenobia, defied the empire of Rome and became a symbol of independence and defiance.
To Syrians, and to the world, Palmyra was not only a ruin but a living archive — a reminder that history does not belong to one people alone, but to all who inherit the richness of human civilization.
That continuity was violently broken in 2015. During the occupation of IS, Palmyra’s monuments — which had endured for millennia through empires, wars, and the shifting desert — were dynamited, looted, and reduced to rubble. The Temple of Bel, the Arch of Triumph, the Temple of Baalshamin, and countless funerary towers were obliterated in acts of cultural erasure. What the desert had preserved for centuries was undone in moments.
Some fragments were sold into the black market, scattered across the world, stripped from their context. Others were left in ruins, scars upon the landscape. What remains is absence — and memory.
These images now serve as testimony. They record not just the stones, but the spirit of a place that once embodied resilience, beauty, and the interconnectedness of cultures. To look at them is to witness both survival and loss, to remember that the destruction of heritage is not only an attack on the past, but on the future — on identity, continuity, and the possibility of shared history.
This project is an act of preservation, a resistance to forgetting. Palmyra’s ruins may have been reduced to dust, but through memory, image, and record, their presence endures.
