Leadership and diaspora - Palmyra's elite abroad

Inter duo Imperia Palmyra between East and Weste Edited by Michael Sommer Oriens et Occidens -Band 31, 2020

This paper examines the power ressources Palmyra's local elite based its social status on. Palmyra’s ruling class was no leisure-class of notables, but rather represented themselves as frontier warriors, and economic and political gatekeepers

Palmyrenes Abroad. Diaspora from Rome to Mesopotamia and Beyond, 2025

Journal of Urban Archaeology 4, 2021

Professor Rubina Raja, has collected almost four thousand portraits, and collated data on over three hundred recorded tombs from the site of Palmyra, Syria. Combined with the archaeological evidence for building activity, trade, and historical events that affected the city, it is possible to trace the highs and lows of this trading oasis and reveal the growth and decline of Palmyra's elites. The study discusses the factors and historical events, such as wars or plagues that might have caused changes to the elite's activities during these specific periods.

2004

This is a study of identity, community, and the process of state formation in the Roman period at Palmyra, an oasis city in the Syrian desert, from the first to third centuries C.E. I address the key issue of cultural transmission and the development of an indigenous Palmyrene identity and community in the Roman Near East, as influenced by their pastoralist backgrounds and their contacts with Parthian and Roman powers. I examine these issues primarily through a reevaluation of the local epigraphy in its urban context, complemented by examinations of the archaeology of the city and narrative sources. I demonstrate how the Palmyrenes managed to build a civic community that was distinctively Mediterranean in its makeup, and where a small elite dominated public affairs. I demonstrate how, despite increasing Roman influence over the city during the period of this study, the Palmyrenes retained their native identities in a communal setting, characterized by a cultural blend of Roman, Parthian, and indigenous habits. the east the Parthians prevailed until their eventual overthrow by the Sassanian Persians in 224 C.E. 3 Palmyra was closely connected with the strategic and commercial interests of both empires, and, though isolated in the Syrian desert, the city and its territory bridged the distance between them. 4 Palmyra became, as Pliny perceived, a center of interaction and exchange, a crossroads between east and west. As a community comprised largely of merchants, the Palmyrenes prospered in their role of supporting and protecting the flow of caravan traffic between east and west.

Journal of Archaeological Science 133, 2021

For almost 300 years wealthy Palmyrenes commemorated their deceased with portraits set up in elaborate family tombs. Now we can use this wealth of information to reconstruct the historical trajectories of the city's elite. We present an extensive analysis of over 3500 funerary portraits and other funerary data collected in the Palmyra Portrait Project and contrasted with other sources of data on the city's wealth and status as well as the historical timeline of the region. We examine whether the trends in portrait production can serve as a proxy for i) demographic changes in the city population, ii) social transitions or iii) economic phenomena. The results of the analysis demonstrate that broad historical trends in the portraits concur with our understanding of Palmyrene history, but the more detailed patterns highlight the impact of particular historical events over other ones. In general, the funerary data reflects the continuously changing socioeconomic circumstances of the Palmyrene elite more closely than its demographic history. Although the outline of Palmyra's history is known thanks to written sources, large archaeological datasets can provide a backdrop to historical events by evaluating their impact on the communities involved. Thus combining historical and archaeological data enables us to gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the social and economic transitions that past societies underwent over century-long time scales.

The paper discusses the issue of Palmyrene trade and the city’s standing in the long-distance trade of the Roman Empire. Although the city’s involvement in exchange with other countries is undisputed and itineraries developed by the Palmyrene merchants for travel to the East have been studied in the past, relatively little is known about goods imported to Palmyra and their origin, as well as about cargo exported from or via Palmyra. The text of the famous Palmyrene Tariff lists only products exchanged on a local, inner-Roman level. The goods in foreign trade were taxed on the border and no document concerning such an exchange has survived, but some information on the subject can be gleaned from archaeological data from Palmyra itself as well as from indirect literary sources.

ISBN 978 1 78491 279 6 ISBN 978 1 78491 280 2 (e-Pdf)

in: Hoffmann-Salz, J. (ed.). 2021. The Middle East as Middle Ground? Cultural Interaction in the ancient Middle East revisited, Vienna, 129-146., 2021

Maarav 19.1-2

The caravan city of Palmyra, called Tadmor (tdmr/tdmwr) in Aramaic, is famous for the diverse cultural strands that shaped its urban fabric in the first through third centuries c.e. 2 The nature of Hellenistic Palmyra, located to the southwest of the Roman monumental site, and its material connections to the broader Mediterranean and Near East have received much illumination through recent archaeological work and publication. 3 But the social structures of the Roman period settlement, to which a recent work has given elucidating treatment, are the topic that this article addresses. 4 Situated by an oasis on the dry 1 Key abbreviations are: CIS = Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum (1881-); Inv. = Inventaire des inscriptions de Palmyre (12 vols.; Jean Cantineau et al., eds.; Publications du Musée national syrien de Damas 1-12; Beirut: Impr. catholique, 1930-1975); PAT = Palmyrene Aramaic Texts (Delbert Hillers and Eleonora Cussini, eds.; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ., 1996); SEG = Supplementum epigraphicum graecum (1921-); IGLS = Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie (1929-); IGLS 17.1 = Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie: Palmyre (J.-B. Yon, ed.; Beirut: IFPO, 2012).