ABSTRACT
Halifax gave the Royal Society in London a detailed account of the journey, to be published in the Society's Philosophical Transactions, culminating in the assertion that no city in the world could rival the splendour of Palmyra. Antoine Poidebard, one of the pioneers of aerial archeology, had been extensively searching the Syrian Desert focusing mainly on Palmyra's hinterland for settlement traces of all periods. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. Palmyra entered history for the first time as a settlement in the second century BC, precisely at the time when the Seleucid Empire, the largest of the Hellenistic territorial monarchies, was crushed between the expanding empires of the Parthians and the Romans. Palmyra turned from commercial centre to garrison town, from polytheistic cult centre to bishop's see and finally from Byzantine border town to supply centre for a Syrian Desert revived by the Umayyad rule.
