SYRIAN LETTER:These are hard times for the Bedouin. Once valued as guides, they now sell plastic jewellery to a dwindling number of tourists, writes MARY BOLAND
THE WIND kicks up clouds of sand in an oasis in the Syrian desert, battering palm trees that bend and sway as though exercising in the 40-degree heat. Through the haze the honey-coloured ruins of Palmyra, one of the world’s most complete Roman archaeological sites, stand stoically while sheets of grit and dust lash their gnawed facades.
Palmyra’s temples, agora and majestic colonnaded avenue saw their heyday in the second and third centuries AD, when this fertile city cashed in on its strategic location on the trade routes between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates.
As an important Silk Road halting-point for camel caravans travelling between the rival superpowers of Roman Empire to the west and Parthians to the east, Palmyra’s fortunes flourished thanks to high taxes levied on everything being shipped through town, from spices and silks to ebony and slaves.
Today the ruins have outlived the trade. The place seems suspended in time, with gusts of airborne sand floating on quivering heatwaves like a scene from a snow globe. Camels carrying young Bedouin men saunter aimlessly by, the animals adorned with brightly coloured tassels, their masters in traditional robes and long check headscarves. It would come as no surprise if Omar Sharif or Peter O'Toole wandered into the frame and acted out a scene from David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia.
But unlike the days of TE Lawrence – himself a keen participant in archaeological digs in these parts – these are tough times for Syria’s Bedouin, most of whom have had to forgo their nomadic existence and settle down with their extended families among the hundreds of black goat-hair tents that line the roads leading to Palmyra.
Valued for their skills in guiding caravans across the deserts and supplying camels and protection against bandits, the Bedouin here are reduced to selling camel rides, scarves and plastic jewellery to a dwindling number of tourists.
“Please buy this necklace,” pleads a man who introduces himself as Zayed, holding up a brightly coloured string of beads, only part of his weather-beaten face visible in a tightly wrapped scarf. “My sister made it. Support my family, please.”
Along with the invention of the airplane and the depletion of Syria’s grazing lands, more recent world events have conspired to rob this Arab ethnic group of their traditional lifestyle.
“No one comes here now,” says teenage boy Tahnoon, touting yet more plastic while referring to the effects on tourism of the economic downturn. “How can we survive?”
For an inspirational example of brazen resilience in the face of hard knocks, Palmyra’s Bedouin could do worse than look to local hero Queen Zenobia, for whom their distant ancestors would have worked. Zenobia took on the Roman Empire and, for a time at least, showed more muscle than its combined armies. The rebel queen, after whom Palmyra’s best-known hotel – surreally located on the site of the ruins – is named, symbolises the city’s most glorious episode in history.
Rome’s troubles with Zenobia began about 267 AD, when her husband, Odainat – who won great favour from the emperor Valerian by defeating the Sassanian army, long-standing rivals of Rome – was assassinated.
Although nominally part of the Roman Empire, Palmyra had long enjoyed a certain autonomy, even more so after Odainat had proclaimed himself king and was placed in control of the region’s Roman forces.
When Zenobia quickly took his place, in the name of their young son Vabalathus, Rome refused to recognise the arrangement, particularly since she was suspected of involvement in her husband’s death.
The emperor dispatched an army but Zenobia met the Roman force in battle and won. She later led her army against the garrison at Bosra, then capital of the province of Arabia, and successfully invaded Egypt.
With Syria, Palestine and part of Egypt under her command, Queen Zenobia, as audacious as Irish pirate queen Granuaile, declared complete independence from Rome.
Within a few years she had carved out a vast empire for tiny Palmyra. For the new Roman emperor, Aurelian, Zenobia’s decision to have coins minted in Alexandria bearing her image and that of her son, who assumed the title of emperor, was the final straw.
When Zenobia refused to negotiate, Aurelian’s forces moved in. After defeating her army at Antioch and Emesa in western Syria in 272, the Roman emperor laid siege to Palmyra itself. Zenobia, defiant to the last, made a dash on a camel through the encircling Roman forces, making it as far as the Euphrates before being captured.
Legend has it she was paraded in chains through Rome as Aurelian’s war trophy but then later freed, and lived out her days married to a Roman senator in Tivoli.
Palmyra's decline, which continues to this day, began with the defeat of Zenobia, whose personal undoing is recounted in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Abandoned for centuries and covered over by sand, the mesmerising classical site was “rediscovered” in the 1920s.
It would take a lot more than a revived tourism industry to bring back the Bedouin way of life. The descendants of Zenobia’s camel herders and desert guides are condemned to finding ways of adapting to a harsh world that has moved on without them.