Locations

 Zenobia's Time

Temple of Bel — religious heart of Palmyra; enormous precinct, architecture, ritual, priesthood, processions.

Temple of Baalshamin — smaller sanctuary with a different religious atmosphere from Bel.

Temple of Nabu — especially interesting for Longinus: a Mesopotamian god of wisdom and writing in a strongly Hellenized architectural setting.

Temple of Allat — including the famous Lion of Allat; useful for Palmyra’s Arab religious inheritance.

Temple of Arsu — another strand of Palmyrene religion worth investigating.

Great Colonnade — the city's monumental spine; perhaps the single most useful landmark for understanding movement through Palmyra.

Monumental Arch — the architectural transition along the colonnaded street and a natural visual landmark for scenes.

Theater — performance, public ceremony, civic identity, and potentially political gatherings.

Agora — civic and commercial life; probably indispensable for understanding merchants, public business, and everyday interaction.

Senate/Council Building — especially valuable for your political scenes, though we should be careful about exactly what scholars call and identify the building.

Tariff Court / Customs complex — potentially very important in a caravan city; connects directly with taxation and international trade.

Public Baths — everyday Romanized civic life rather than just elite monuments.

Efqa Spring — absolutely essential: water supply, oasis, cult, bathing, and social life.

The Oasis and irrigation system — palms, orchards, gardens, canals, agricultural land; really a landmark in its own right.

Residential quarters — particularly the excavated southwestern houses and elite courtyard residences. These may ultimately be more useful to the novel than another temple.

Commercial streets and shops along the colonnades — where we can reconstruct actual street life rather than just monuments.

Caravan facilities / caravanserais — warehouses, animals, guides, merchants and the logistical machinery that made Palmyra wealthy.

City gates and approaches — especially useful because a visitor's experience of Palmyra begins before entering it.

Western Necropolis / Valley of the Tombs — tower tombs rising along the approach to the city.

Tower of Elahbel — one of the best-known individual tower tombs and a way into Palmyrene family burial culture.

Tower Tomb of Iamblichus/Jamblichus and other surviving named family towers — worth individual profiles once we establish which ones were still standing and important in your period.

Hypogea / underground tombs — especially the painted and sculpted interiors with funerary portraits you've been interested in.

Temple Tombs — later development of Palmyrene funerary architecture and visually very different from the towers.

Northern, southeastern, and southwestern necropoleis — useful for seeing that burial surrounded Palmyra rather than occupying one isolated cemetery.

The city walls and towers — but this one needs careful chronological treatment because the fortifications changed substantially.

Road toward Emesa — important for your characters and for Palmyra's western connections.

Road toward Damascus — commercial and political connection southwest.

Eastern caravan road toward the Euphrates and Mesopotamia — the route toward Persia and the great eastern trade.

Jebel al-Muntar and the surrounding heights — important for understanding what could be seen from the city and how Palmyra sat in its landscape.

Later Palmyra

Camp of Diocletian

Temple of the Standards

Diocletianic military alterations

later fortifications

possibly elements of the Tetrapylon, depending on exactly which phase we're talking about.