Palmyra tour

It remains one of the most famous capitals of the ancient world. Palmyra is separated by some 100 km of steppe from the lush valley of the Orontes to the west. There are more than 200 km of desert to cross before you reach the fertile banks of the Euphrates to the east. To both north and south there is nothing but sand and stone. But here at Palmyra a last fold of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains forms a kind of basin, on the edge of which a spring rises out of a long underground channel whose depth has never been measured. This spring is called Afqa (or Ephka) in inscriptions, an Aramaic word meaning "way out".  Its clear blue, slightly sulphurous waters are said to have medicinal properties; they have fed an oasis here with olives, date palms, cotton and cereals. For generations this oasis was known as Tadmor.

The Great Temple of Bel

The temple is surrounded by a great blank wall, 200 m on each side - the walls of the fortress that replaced its ancient propylaea during the 12^th century. This bleak exterior gives no hint of the magnificence of the building's internal layout. There is an immense courtyard surfaced with smooth rock, which rises gently towards a majestic edifice at its highest point; this is the cella, the holy of holies, towards which the faithful used to crowd, and where the sacrificial mysteries were celebrated. The wall surrounding it, lined with porticos whose columns are still standing for the most part, allows one to appreciate the vast proportions of the whole building, but at the same time emphasises the enclosed nature of this shrine to the chief god of the city.

The layout of the temple corresponds to the arrangement of Semitic sanctuaries - thus here there is, in front of the cella, the great sacrificial altar and a ritual basin in which the priests performed their ablutions and in which ritual vessels were washed. The cella was surrounded by a colonnade. Its capitals were made of bronze; only the stone cores remain.

The Valley of the Tombs

There are enormous cemeteries all around the city, but it is above all on the slopes of the hills to the east that the ancient tombs have furnished new evidence about the Palmyrean civilization. There are four types of burial places to be found here: the tomb tower (a square structure with narrow windows), the house tomb (the one that stands in the perspective from the Great Colonnade, for example), the hypogeum tower (a stairway linking a network of underground chambers inside a tomb tower, and finally the hypogeum tomb, built to receive the bodies of one family over a period of two centuries, a real underground house decorated with frescoes, each cell of which is sealed with a sculpture representing the deceased.

To the north of the city, beyond the ramparts, is the Marona house tomb, behind Diocletian Camp the Jamblique tomb tower built in 83 AD, and 500 m further on, up the hill, the tomb tower of the Elhabel family, 103 AD. Near the latter, on the edge of the sandy road, is a hypogeum tower, from the terrace of which, in the evening, there is a fine view over Palmyra. Near the top of the hillside there is an entrance at ground level, to the hypogeum of Atenatan which was dug in 98 AD. But the most impressive of all the underground tombs is that known as the Tomb of the Three Brothers (at the beginning of the Valley of the Tombs), which contains some 400 niches and whose walls are covered with frescoes in a remarkable state of preservation.

- Comfortable shoes are recommended.
- As this is an outdoor tour, sunscreen and hat are recommended. 

English/ French/ Spanish/ German/ Italian/ Russian/ Turkish speaking guide available.