Palmyra

Palmyra was a wealthy caravan city in the Syrian desert, on the trade routes between the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia (modern Tadmur, Syria). In the third century AD it became the seat of Queen Zenobia's short-lived empire. The Greek rhetorician and critic Cassius Longinus served as Zenobia's chief counsellor at Palmyra and was executed by the emperor Aurelian after the city's fall in 273; the historian and sophist Callinicus likewise spent time at Zenobia's court.