The Ruins

At moonrise, Palmyra’s marble columns emerge from the desert darkness—avenues stretching beyond sight, a great city silent beneath the stars. What could turn such splendor into a wilderness of ruins?

In 1784, C.-F. Volney travels through the Ottoman provinces of Egypt and Syria, where abandoned fields, deserted villages and fallen monuments confront him at every turn. At Palmyra, among the remains of a temple to the Sun, he measures the grandeur of vanished empires against the misery of the people living amid their remnants. The contrast troubles him: why did prosperity belong to the nations of the past, while the present is marked by desolation? His journey becomes a search for the causes of civilization’s rise and ruin—and for the laws that govern human society. What, he wonders, has made these lands change so completely?

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