In their rampage across Syria and Iraq, the zealots of ISIS have wrecked and looted countless sites of archeological wonder: in the ancient Assyrian cities of Nimrud and Khorsabad, they’ve smashed temples and icons; in the Mosul Library, they’ve torched ancient manuscripts; at the Mosul Museum, they’ve turned deities and statues to rubble and dust. They even sacked Jonah’s tomb. Happy in their work, the ISIS wrecking teams have posted videos of their deeds. We can now only wonder if Palmyra, an ancient city in central Syria that fell to ISIS fighters this week, is next.

I visited Palmyra in the summer of 2003. It was a strange time to be in Syria. The Iraq War was only a few months old. The situation inside Iraq was deteriorating fast, but in Damascus, among the members of Bashar al-Assad’s government, there was still a pervasive fear that Syria would be the next American target. There was a wild rumor about government officials streaming to a certain palm reader in Aleppo, in order to have him divine whether and when the American invasion would come; even Assad himself, the rumor went, had paid the soothsayer a visit. I stayed in a Sheraton, then the nicest hotel in Damascus, and every night the senior officials of the Baath Party, some of them wearing pistols in their belts, would gather to drink and dance and carouse. When I asked one of those senior officials, Bouthaina Shaaban, whether the regime would ever loosen its grip, she told me, “We will always believe in the vanguard role of the Baath Party.” One day, I drove to the Iraqi border, where I found dozens of jihadis waiting to cross over to fight the United States; the Assad regime was only too happy to let them pass.

Apart from the buzz of impending invasion, and the jihadis on the border, Syria in 2003 was calm—it had the eerie quiet of an efficient dictatorship. Palmyra was even more so. I went on an afternoon in July. If you haven’t been to the Middle East in summer, it’s difficult to appreciate how hot it can be. The sky was shadowless and white, and there was no wind. The ancient city was treeless and empty, pervaded by a quiet that matched the tombs.

On entering the city, I remember my jaw dropping a little. Palmyra is the kind of place that is so vast and so stunning that you don’t have to know much about art or history or architecture to appreciate it. (Better if you do, of course.) Block after block of temples, columns, walls, archways, and amphitheatres, many of them remarkably well preserved, stretched far and wide. Nothing was fenced off that day, and the guards were dazed by the heat; I wandered about at will. Palmyra grew to prominence as an oasis town long before the birth of Christ, and as a stop for caravans crossing the desert. The architecture is essentially Greco-Roman, with distinctive Near Eastern influences. The high point is the Temple of Bel—named for a Semitic god—a six-hundred-foot-long wall with a magnificent row of columns inside. I remember thinking that in all of Rome, and all of Italy, there was nothing as impressive as the Roman-seeming architecture of this city in the Syrian desert.

What will happen to Palmyra now? With ISIS in control, we should fear the worst; the place is filled with just the sort of religious likenesses that ISIS fighters have been smashing in their lunatic journey. What they don’t destroy they will likely loot and sell; ISIS has made millions this way. There is reason to hope that some antiquities will survive. Syrian officials say they managed to cart off many of the most priceless icons to Damascus before ISIS arrived. “This is the inheritance for the nation and for humanity,’’ Muhammad al-Shaar, Syria’s Interior Minister, told reporters this week. (Shaar, otherwise known for his iron fist, must have been grateful to be able to sound so humane.)

During the Cold War, some of the most staunchly anti-Communist theoreticians used to make a distinction between what they said were “totalitarian” regimes, like the Soviet Union, and “authoritarian” ones, like, say, the military regimes of Chile and Guatemala. The totalitarian regimes, these proponents said, were worse than the merely authoritarian ones, because they were possessed of a sort of religious zeal. I never thought much of that distinction then, and I still don’t. A repressive regime is a repressive regime, and a torture chamber a torture chamber, no matter what country you’re in.

Still, watching ISIS pillage its way across the desert, I wonder if, at least when it comes to the world’s cultural patrimony, the distinction doesn’t have some resonance. Strolling through the ruins of Palmyra that day, I remember harboring a vague thought that as awful as Assad’s dictatorship was—Tadmur, one of the regime’s most notorious prisons, sat nearby—at least it left places like Palmyra alone.