What the Roman empire can tell us about the modern middle east

And it was not lost on me that in the coffee shop around me, men and women were speaking the same language as the Yemenis who died in those doomed Atlantic ships. To the east of us lay the great ruins of the Baalbek temples and, further still across the Syrian desert, the wreckage of Roman Palmyra – or those ruins which Isis decided to spare for us amid their iconoclasm.

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