In 1751, the antiquarians Robert Wood and James Dawkins visited Palmyra. Theirs was the first scholarly expedition to this site, which had become a city of legend long after its heyday in the first three centuries CE and which had attracted the interest of early travelers. Wood and Dawkins meticulously recorded the measurements of the monuments, and the architect Giovanni Battista Borra drew detailed plans of the ruins of buildings. Two years later, Wood published The ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmor, in the desart (London, 1753). The book was a success, and Palmyra became fashionable: James Grainger refers to the city in his ode ‘Solitude’ (1760), the Palmyrene queen Zenobia was deemed a suitable subject for operas (Zenobia in Palmira, by Pasquale Anfossi, in 1789; Aureliano in Palmira, by Gioachino Rossini, in 1813), and the drawings of Borra inspired the architecture and decoration of English country houses such as Syon House. It also inspired an interest in Palmyrene objects. James Dawkins himself collected a few inscribed fragments and an altar that his brother Henry Dawkins donated to the Ashmolean Museum after his death in 1759, while the French consul Pierre de Ségur-Dupeyron donated two objects he had acquired in Syria to the Musée du Louvre in 1852.
The western collections of Palmyrene art were primarily formed between 1880 and 1930. Museums such as the Louvre in Paris, the British Museum in London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired large numbers of Palmyrene objects, but the largest of these collections is located in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek at Copenhagen. Between 1883 and 1887, Carl Jacobsen, an ardent collector of Greek and Roman antiquities, began collecting Palmyrene objects. Jacobsen believed that Palmyrene portraits were comparable to those of Greece and Rome and so were essential for making his collection as wide-ranging and inclusive of the art of the ancient Mediterranean as possible. With the help of Julius Løytved, the consul of Denmark and Sweden in Beirut, and E. Puttmann of the German Vice-Consulate at Damascus, Jacobsen acquired more than a hundred funerary reliefs and fragments of other sculptures. These were donated to the state in 1888 and form a large part of the Palmyrene collection of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Johannes Elith Østrup also acquired pieces for this collection. The third large contributor was Harald Ingholt, who acquired the majority of the tesserae as well as other smaller objects, such as plaster heads and glass vases, and a few large reliefs.
These European and North American collections were formed through the activities of museum curators who acquired antiquities from the art market and through the donations of travelers who had acquired ancient artefacts as ‘souvenirs’. The collection histories of museums in Turkey and the Middle East is very different. Illicit excavations in Syria were already a massive problem in the middle of the 19th century, and the authorities of the Ottoman Empire had taken measures against it. From 1880 to 1918, any object found in smugglers’ hands was confiscated and taken to the Musée Ottoman Imperial, which became in time the Arkeoloji Müzeleri of Istanbul. The objects in the museums of Damascus and, of course, Palmyra, were mostly found in excavations undertaken by the official authorities of Syria, either under the League of Nations Mandate (1920–1922), the French Mandate (1923–1943), the Republic of Syria (1943–1963), and the Ba'athist Republic of Syria (1963–2011). In 2011, the civil war halted all excavation activities in Palmyra.
