The Arab East before Islam knew no period richer in momentous events, or more absorbing to the researcher, than those few years in which Zenobia ascended the throne of the Palmyrene kingdom.

Arab history after Islam neglected to record much concerning the ancient Arab states that flourished before Islam, and among what it neglected were the annals of Palmyra. Perhaps one of the reasons for this neglect is that the interval between the fall of this Palmyrene kingdom and the appearance of written record-keeping in Islam was no small one — it approached five centuries — and the accounts of the raids and conquests accomplished under Islam, and other such events, had distracted the Arabs from the annals of their earliest states and had all but monopolized their attention. Nor did the Arabs, in the last days of their Jahiliyya, remember of these states anything beyond the impression which their various surviving monuments had left upon their souls — a feeling now of admonition and lesson, now of awe and wonder.

They beheld the ruins of Palmyra, and these bewitched them with their splendor and dazzled them with their grandeur; so they wove about their builders what legends and fancies they pleased, and supposed that its builders were of the jinn whom God had subjected to obey the command of Solomon. Hence these famous verses of al-Nabigha, from the ode he spoke in praise of al-Nu'man ibn al-Mundhir, offering him his apologies:

I see no doer of good who resembles him, nor do I except any one among the peoples, Save Solomon, when God said to him: "Arise in creation and hold it back from error, And the host of the jinn — I have given them leave: let them build Tadmur with slabs and columns."

Truly those builders were jinn in their skill, and those engineers were geniuses in their art, since they were able to immortalize, in an oasis in the heart of the desert, those great temples and tall columns which stand firm to this day against the passage of time and all the storms and earthquakes that have shaken them — erect and upright, testifying forcefully to whoever beholds them that, for all the buildings that have crumbled before them, they proclaim the glory of their people, though they are mute, hewn from deaf rock.

Perhaps al-Nabigha's fancy would have struck deeper into the soul had he claimed that the jinn tore off a corner of Paradise and flew away with it on Solomon's carpet, and that God's angels pursued them until, overtaking them above the Syrian desert, the carpet was rent and the temples and columns fell — a garden standing in the wilderness.

Whoever visits Palmyra today is truly astonished when, after crossing nearly two hundred miles from Damascus, he beholds the extent of that ancient city, the variety of its monuments, the massiveness of its buildings, and the multitude of its columns, arches, palaces, and tombs, in such a place, so remote today from settled land, in the heart of the Syrian desert.

Nor did the ancient Roman historians fail to record what mattered of the annals of this ancient Arab state. They are all but unanimous that Palmyra, at the height of its greatness, was the connecting link between East and West: in its markets the companies of merchants met, exchanging the goods then in demand, and the Palmyrenes would import the wares of Yemen and India to sell them to the Romans. It mattered to the Roman state that relations with this principality remain good, so they concluded alliances with it and tightened the bonds of connection; hence the most important accounts we know of Palmyra are transmitted from the Roman historians, and from the inscriptions that remain to this day written in the two languages, Palmyrene and Greek.

It appears that the greatest period in Palmyra's history was the age of Zenobia, the subject of our talk today.

Odenathus son of al-Sumayda' was the emir of Palmyra in that age — the last third of the third century after Christ — and Zenobia was the daughter of the chief of the commanders of Odenathus's army. Her father had arranged for her the finest education a girl in the Roman Empire could obtain: in her childhood she studied at the school of Alexandria, was instructed in the sciences of her age, mastered the principal languages of her time, and trained herself in horsemanship, archery, and war. And before all this she was handsome of countenance, graceful of figure, and of the utmost bewitching Oriental beauty: dark-complexioned, with blazing eyes, teeth like strung pearls, and a soft, captivating voice. It was therefore no wonder that, when she had completed her learning, we find her the wife of Odenathus, emir of Palmyra, and his faithful companion in his struggle.

Then her husband was assassinated, and she rose up to take vengeance on his killer and slew him; she grasped the scepter of the throne in her own hand and put on the royal crown. She governed the state well and led the armies in person, teaching the commanders what steadfastness is, and what glorious defense is — the defense a bereaved lioness makes of her beloved den when it is assailed. She — as the Roman historian Trebellius Pollio says — lived in pomp like the Persian kings, as though in her glory and bearing she were one of them; and she carried herself with the manners of the emperors, as though in her breeding, her character, and her assemblies she were one of them. She attended gatherings and official councils wearing her helmet bound with a purple ribbon studded with jewels, her garments clasped with a diamond, and she strutted bare-armed. She rode in carriages but preferred horses to them; and when she went out on some errand of state, she rode her armored chariot, surrounded by a squadron of horsemen of her private guard.