Diversity will open up a creative path since

Northeast of Damascus, Syria, between an oasis surrounded by palms and two quiet mountains, Palmyra sleeps quietly. As a necessary supply stop across the Syrian desert, the importance of Palmyra cannot be overstated. It was incorporated into the Roman Empire as a province in the time of Tiberius and developed into the most influential trading center in the Middle East from the 1st to 3rd centuries AD. As the eastern gateway to the Roman world, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs and Syrians traded and coexisted peacefully, bringing together diverse cultures and untold wealth. The ambitious Queen Zenobia even took part in the race for the Roman throne, advocating a division between East and West. She was eventually defeated by Aurelian, however, and Palmyra fell from grace, leaving behind a majestic mix of styles and one of the most distinctive monuments of the ancient world. The ancient city of Palmyra was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1980, and the ruins have preserved the original appearance of the city intact and are of great importance for the study of the social, cultural, religious and artistic aspects of the region. In "Palmyra," a poignant little book, Paul Weiner, professor emeritus of the Ecole de la Principality de France and an expert on Rome, tells in elegant and moving terms the history, beliefs, culture, and art of this lost frontier city and why it was and still is important. By writing about the freedom and diversity of Palmyra, Weiner reflects on the difficulties and dangers facing the world today. This article is excerpted from Chapter 12 of the book, "The Portrait of Palmyra.

The Athena/Lat created in imitation of Pheidias' work has a purely classical style, a fine work and an introduced product. The mosaic of Cassiopeia, mentioned earlier, was also created by someone other than Palmyra; some private houses were decorated with mythological themes in imitation of marble carvings in a Greek style (such decorations generally came from some wandering group of artisans). In principle, we can say that in Palmyra, any artwork in the Greco-Roman style is the legacy of foreigners; anything in the Oriental or mixed style is the work of local artisans. Or it could be said that the public and private buildings were pre-Greek and later Greco-Roman, at least in terms of style, while the religious and funerary carvings were a mix of Eastern and Western elements, which is why they seem to us to have a different flavor. I am referring here to the famous "Palmyra", the busts of the deceased who contributed so much to the reputation of the ancient Eastern city-states (see Fig. 13).

The "Balmiras" come from the family cemeteries of some rich people. On the cemetery, the statues overlap and are arranged in several rows, each row containing dozens of statues. We know that there are more than a thousand of them. People engaged in illegal excavations and trade in ancient artifacts scattered these statues everywhere, from Damascus to Istanbul and Tokyo (all the museums wanted to acquire the busts). The male figures in ornate embroidered costumes, those of women wearing heavy headdresses, stirred curiosity, gave us a glimpse of an alternative oriented past, and served a need for taste - rare, chic, exotic, inexpensive, and historically nostalgic - rather than a simple aesthetic need. -rather than a simple aesthetic need.

We imagine these men and women coming to us one by one from a bygone era, showing their respective faces, their respective costumes, their respective jewelry: one can imagine how seductive the faces and images of the ancients are to us. The realism would be even stronger if there were more color, but unfortunately time has stripped away what little is left of the color. These busts were originally painted with oil. Until Donatello, all ancient and medieval carvings, reliefs and roundels were colored; Vénus de Milo had blond hair and was draped in a blue dress. On one of the Balmyra figures in the Louvre, the blue of the woman's eyes is still visible today.

We have just used the word "portrait," but the funerary statues were not specifically designed to represent the dead. The bust only vaguely resembles the deceased, and does not seek to be more than that. The bust is a symbol of the deceased, not a replica of his face: it is a male, a female, a child, nothing more.

Two statues of the same woman, Ala, daughter of Yarhai, were found at Palmyra, one with a wide, square face, the other with a narrow, triangular face, and both with so few individual features that it is impossible to say who they resemble. It is impossible to say who they resemble. In addition, two different statues of Palmyra people from the same era look like one person again, because they come from the same carving workshop. The craftsmen were content to represent the face with a series of elements, combining a few schematic lines indicating facial features ("straight nose, medium width forehead, round face"), and the craftsmen were either not talented enough or simply did not have the desire to express the individual characteristics of the figure to make it lifelike, or to give the the illusion of lifelike. The lines on the statue are abbreviated and random, without the anatomical accuracy or the aesthetic necessity to bring the figure to life. The artisan merely confined himself to aesthetic dogma, using the curvature of the lips to show a plausible smile (and sometimes a highly asymmetrical one), and also to observe the different requirements for men and women in the expression of dignity: men should have a cold, hard, arrogant expression and a raised chin, while women pouted angrily, making their chins protrude forward. These works do not have the unobtrusive casual and calm confidence of the Greco-Roman statue.

Before we leave Palmyra, let's take a trip to the Louvre, where two windows are filled with busts of Palmyrians. At first glance, we noticed that the heads had a realist character (or, in terminology, a naturalist character) and were handmade. We can see such exhibits in any archaeological museum, from Scotland to Arlon, Narbonne, Izmir (Smyrne), to the Turkish Highlands. Among every major city in the empire, and sometimes even in small towns, people went to local workshops to customize statues of the dead, reliefs of scenes from funeral feasts, or votive objects. Each workshop had its own uniqueness, or at least its own custom, when it came to the carving and style of the portraits.

In Palmyra, however, this local character is more evident than elsewhere. Both the busts and the funeral feast scenes feel artistically distinctive and not to be confused with the chic of Oriental costumes. The style that characterizes them is not strictly speaking what is called Oriental, but rather resembles the style of Greco-Roman portraits throughout the Empire. Although at times the lines are somewhat abbreviated, these portraits are not as dull and rigid as one might fear. Each face is individualized and sought after, and the expressions on the faces are diverse. As with the architecture, the mosaics, faux marble decoration, and portraits at Palmyra are evidence of the Hellenization of local art. One irrefutable proof is that these are busts, but there are no busts in the East. However, the heads on the busts are not Greek or Roman, and academic naturalists would say that they look unnatural, uninspired, and somehow "Oriental".

In fact, a second glance is all it takes to recognize that these busts could only have come from Palmyra. They have an eccentricity from elsewhere, or from the distant past, that makes these museum pieces so popular: the expressive eyes that the carvers gave to their subjects, and the frontal depiction of groups of people in funeral feast scenes, for example.

The eyes that the carver placed on the faces of realistic people do not look like human eyes. The eyes are too large and the lines are not at all realistic. Sometimes the eyes are round and bulbous, as if to attract the viewer's attention; other times they are decorative, with a deep groove above and below the orbits and a pointed arch like a leaf; other times the lines around the eyelids are curved and elegant.

The frontal perspective is also strikingly expressive. The figures in the funeral feast are leaning back on the dining bed, and it is common sense that they should be busy eating and drinking for themselves, or taking care of those sitting around them and pouring wine for them. Such is the case with the funeral scene reliefs of Greek art.

The sculptor of Palmyra borrows this theme but changes its spirit: instead of showing us the individual movements of the drinkers, the sculptor has them pause in their activities, turn to face us, and hold their cups in their hands so that the viewer can see their proper faces, just as our students do when they line up for their pictures. A dynamic scene becomes a group appearance. We have to think of the influence of this approach on the Byzantine mosaics of the later Ravenne. In the mosaics there, the crowd of wandering gods would suddenly stop, half turn around, and arrange themselves to face the viewer. Various scenic motifs in Palmyra have this arrangement of frontal appearances, which, whether justified or not, is often considered a turning point in art history.

Balmyra's artists absorbed the naturalistic detailing, but they did not capture the spirit of the style, and the vitality and drama of the picture as a whole remained foreign to them. On one side was the expression of a systematic debut style, and on the other was the Greek method, and they wavered between them. The Greek approach to the art is to show the character three-quarters of the way sideways, so that it feels natural, just as our theater actors have to face both the co-actors on stage and the audience in the theater. They have to show the plot of the story and at the same time let the audience see themselves. Balmyra's art does not have the same special attention and emphasis on the human body as Greek art. They were not sensitive to the incongruity between the traditional eye and the realistic face.

Balmyra's artists often reduced overly trivial details to hieroglyphic lines. A lock of hair becomes an arranged layer of strips, a strand of beard becomes a forest of small triangles, and the tucks of a garment do give the impression that they are tucks, but not the softness of the garment and the sense of gravity as it drops. Are these simplifications in service of some decorative effect? Or was it a naive way for the craftsman to give an artistic order to the natural chaos? Finally, although the lines of the face are simple, the decoration and embroidery on jewelry and beautiful clothes are expressed with such precision that they feel both enjoyable and inviting.

In this way, we understand why these works became museum collections: they are a mixture of styles. The local artists imitate Greco-Roman sculptures, but their approach retains the old habits inherited from the East, combined with a "primitive art style" that does not bear the stamp of the times, with the frontal appearance and the mask-like eyes. This mixture is quite original and weakens the concern for the artistic quality of the work in general; we can get from it a fresh feeling of non-academic art.

Balmyra's art has a native sensibility, because in this field it came out of the desert too late. It "missed" its first encounter with Greek art: after Alexander the Great's conquest of the East, Greek art spread all the way to India and Kabul, leading to the creation of some Greco-Mesopotamian, Greco-Iranian or Greco-Buddhist hybrid styles. -Buddhist hybrid art styles arose. The hybrid art of Palmyra was created three centuries later, when Palmyra was incorporated into Rome, bringing the city-state into the mainstream of world culture. Thus, the art of Palmyra had to be modeled on the imperial art of "Rome".

Palmyra was unlike any other imperial city-state. It did not matter whether its art was primitive, oriental, mixed or Hellenistic, whether its temples were open or closed, whether its dignitaries wore Greek or Arabic clothes, whether its people spoke Aramaic, Arabic, Greek, or even Latin on important occasions. In short, we feel a wind of freedom, a wind of non-conformity, a wind of "multiculturalism" blowing over Palmyra. As readers will recall, Palmyra is all things to all people: Aramaic, Arab, Persian, Syrian, Greek, Eastern, Western. Yet, like its neighbor Ames, it remains itself, and its diverse identity does not Hellenize it, nor does it Romanize it.

"Far from being universally homogeneous, diversity opens up a path of creation.

Here is a small and interesting example: In July 2014, a relief of a wandering god can still be seen on the large gable wall of the now-vanished Temple of Bel. The crowd of wandering gods came to worship the god Bel (see Figure 14). In front of them are men, each standing sideways, while behind them, a group of women, seemingly immobilized by the artist, gather and crowd together, wrapped from head to toe in an Arabian black veil. One by one, the black veiled people were huddled together, hidden, invisible and astonishing. People and people seemed to be rubbed together, the tucks of the clothes crossed each other, almost indistinguishable from the outline of the person: it was an indistinct mass of arabesques, not so much decorative as arbitrary lines, and the tucks on the clothes were not to reflect the sense of draping ...... we do not know why they were as if they had been cast in a fixation It is not clear why they are immobile, and it is not clear whether they are facing the audience from the front, the side or two-thirds of the side.

It is a very "abstract" image, and the viewer does not even know if they are moving forward with the procession of wandering gods, or if the sculptor has suddenly defied the logic of the subject matter and the realism of the representation by arbitrarily leaving the women fixed there. Such a non-realistic representation of the image is, as far as I know, unique in ancient art. When Malraux was in office, this work was the object of intense attention by critics and archaeologists of the time: a great deal of commentary linked it to the bold creations of the avant-garde painters of the time, saying that it was the source of abstract art. In any case, it is highly probable that the sculptors of Palmyra were confronted with a multitude of inspiring styles from the East and the West, and in order to be happy, they invented another style.

Yes, there is no doubt that if one knows and wants to know only one culture - one's own culture - one is doomed to a life of depression and dullness.