Oxbow Books

As early as the first travels by Europeans to the city, Palmyra has been associated with the Zenobian struggles for independence against oppressive Imperial authority and the monumental archaeological remains from Roman times. Aided by the position of the settlement at the fringe of the desert, these factors have contributed to the creation of a romantic and picturesque image of this ruined city in which the less impressive post-Roman remains have rarely found space. Indeed, a generalised story of decline, greatly inflated by neoclassical scholars and travellers, has dominated the theory used in secondary literature to describe the fate of this settlement following the collapse of the Palmyrene power.

Despite having lost its commercial position in the east–west caravan trade, Palmyra maintained a strategic role throughout Late Antiquity as a stronghold along the eastern borderlands, hosting one legion in the 4th century and one of the two duces of Phoenicia Libanensis in the first half of the 6th century. In the Early Islamic period, the city remained the political centre of the powerful Banū Kalb and played a pivotal role in supporting the caliphate until the collapse of the Umayyad dynasty. After this event, Palmyra became a minor settlement, experiencing a process of major shrinkage that ended with the creation of a village within the temenos of the Sanctuary of Bēl.

This form of urbanism finds its best parallel in the oriental urban planning tradition characteristic of cities such as Assur or Hattusa, rather than in those created anew by Romans (Frézouls 1976a, 199, n. 21; see also, Yon 2001, esp. 181). In this light, the installation of the Great Colonnade, which found its origin in Hellenistic times (Bejor 1999), can be read as an attempt to find a compromise between two architectonical traditions (Frézouls 1976a, 199).

key element is also the individuality of the settler as a concept and the understanding that the settler is a citizen with a role within the community, which normally becomes associated with ownership of urban and rural allocated plots. In the Mesopotamian tradition, which had enough mathematical knowledge to do perfect right angles, the distribution of urban spaces in new foundations was done by granting sectors to groups based on kinship or other form of collective self-definition, and this did not result in street grids

underlining the fact that the urban form at the foundation represents the cultural values of the founders and not necessarily those of their successors centuries after

One level of understanding represents the cosmological perception of the city. In this sense, the establishing of a new city should reflect the ideal concept of urbanism, but a city could also represent the values and visions of the cosmos. Circular cities are a very clear example of cosmological ideas imposed on an urban plan, but rectangular grids can also represent the ideal worldview

). This contrasts sharply with the Mesopotamian model, where roads work as axes towards focal buildings,21 or the nineteenth-century boulevards of many European cities

But deviations and alterations of the grid do not need to be part of decline and fall narratives: they represent the evolution of civic communities and changes in their perception of their own urban environment

distribution), the grid plays a main role in the early stages of a city. As such, the grid is closely linked to the cosmovision of the original founders. But these perceptions and associated meanings change, and we cannot expect them to be eternal.91 In their two thousand years of history, Roman grids in the Iberian Peninsula have had time to change and to be changed according to the shifting priorities of the