Urban Landscape

For roughly the first thirty years of her life, the Syrian city of Palmyra was Zenobia’s home. Zenobia called Palmyra Tadmor; it shaped the terms of her very existence as well as many of her lived experiences. This chapter provides a basic introduction to Zenobia’s Palmyra and enables the reader to glimpse Zenobia as she crosses its terrain in religious procession. As the procession takes Zenobia among Palmyra’s main thoroughfares, civic spaces, and religious precincts, it introduces the reader to various key sites of the urban terrain that Zenobia inhabited and certain aspects of her religious world, including the famous precinct for Bel.