I’ve trawled through the dusty records of the ruined city of Palmyra, where the walls once burst in crimson, ochre, and turquoise—no fruit bowl, but a riot of color that would have made a modern painter blush. If you imagine a great bowl splashed with every hue that the sun could lend to a stone, it’s more like the frescoes in the Hall of the Great Serpent at the ancient site of Ubar, where the artisans painted the sky in deep indigo and the fruits in a spectrum so bright the pigments now barely survive the desert wind. I kept a note, not a bookmark, that the pigment used was lapis lazuli mixed with cinnabar, a combination so deliberate it suggests the artists intended the walls to glow from within. Those murals, if ever discovered again, would not be merely decorative but a statement of power, of a city that saw itself as the heart of a living, breathing sun.

They would have walked as if the walls were a compass pointing toward daylight. In the inscriptions I found at the eastern gate of the city, the scribes recorded that the frescoes “remind the soul of the sun, so that the people, in their daily labors, do not forget their place beneath it.” When a traveler enters such a bright space, the colors do not merely decorate; they stir a sense of awe, a subtle reassurance that the city itself is alive. The bold blues would have echoed the sky at dawn, while the crimson of the sunset would have made the stone seem to breathe. So the citizens likely felt a kind of reverent uplift, as though they were walking inside a living sunbeam that would ward off darkness, both literal and metaphorical.