The Religious Life of Palmyra 3515080279, 9783515080279

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ORIENS ET OCCIDENS Studien zu antiken Kulturkontakten und ihrem N achleben Herausgegeben von Josef Wiesehofer in Zusammenarbeit mit Pie‫ח‬e Briant, Amelie Kuhrt und Fergus Millar Band4

Ted Kaizer

The Religious Life of Palmyra A Study of the Social Patterns of Worship in the Roman Period

@ Franz Steiner Verlag Stuttgart 2002

Cover: Temple of Baal-Shamin, Palmyra. Photo Ted Kaizer

for my dear mum, and in memory of my fantastic father, Arie Kaizer (7 November 1928-18 July 2000)

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Kaizer, Ted: The religious life of Palmyra : a study of the social patterns of worship in the Roman period/ Ted Kaizer. - Stuttgart: Steiner, 2002 100\>30Jt3'9J(Oriens et Occidens ; Bc'i. 4) Zugl.: Oxford, Univ., Diss., 2000 ISBN 3-515-08027-9

§ ISO 9706

Jede Verwertung des Werkes auBerhalb der Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist unzuliissig und stratbar. Dies gilt insbesondere filr Ubersetzung, Nachdruck, Mikroverfilmung oder vergleichbare Verfahren sowie filr die Speicherung in Datenverarbeitungsanlagen. Gedruckt auf saurefreiem, alterungsbestandigem Papier. © 2002 by Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH, Sitz Stuttgart. Druck: Druckerei Proff, Eurasburg. Printed in Germany

CONTENTS List of plates....................................................................................................... 8 Acknowledgements............................................................................................ 9 Conventions ................... ....... ............... ......... .... ................ ..... ... ... ........ ..... ... ...... 12 Introduction ..... ............................ ... ................. ................ .................... ............... Legendary Palmyra ............... ................ ...... .............. ... ..... ... ...... ... .. ..... ... ... . The sources .................................................................................................. The history of the study of Palmyrene religion .. ............... ........................ Problems of approach ............ .......................... ... .......... ..... ... ................ ... ... The phenomenon of bilingualism at Palmyra ............................................ Outline .........................................................................................................

13 13 18 20 24 27 34

Palmyrene society and Palmyrene religion................................................ t'Palmyra and the Roman Empire ................................................................. • The urban development of Palmyra ..... .......... ............................................ It' Problems with regard to the model of 'civic' vs 'tribal' forms of worship ........................................................................................................ J The process of Palmyrene urbanization ...................... ............................... • Classification of the divine world of Palmyra ........................................... 'The four tribal sanctuaries' .......................................................................

35 36 41

0•

43 51 56 60

II Sanctuaries and cults ....... ... ....... ............. ... .... .. .... .. ................ ...................... 67 The temple of Bel........................................................................................ 67 The temple of Baal-Shamin ........................................................................ 79 The temple 'of Nebu' .................................................................................. 89 The temple of Allat ............................... .... .. .. .. ........ ........ .... .. ................. .... . 99 The temple of Bel-Hamon on top of the Jebel Mun tar .. ........................... 108 The temple of Arsu .. ............................... .......... ..................... .... .......... .... ... 116 The 'Sacred Garden' of Aglibol and Malakbel ......................................... 124 Yarhibol and the Efqa spring ...................................................................... 143 The imperial cult ......................................................................................... 148 The temple ofRabaseire ............................................................................. 152 The temple of Atargatis .............................................................................. 153 The cult of the Sun ...................................................................................... 154 Concluding remarks .................................................................................... 157 III The rhythm of religious life ........................................................................ 163 Cultic regulations from Palmyra: the so-called sacred laws ..................... 167 The sacrificial act .. .. .... .. .. ... .. .. .. .. ... .. ... .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ... ... .. .. .. ... ... .. ... .... .. .. 177

Contents

8

Sacrificial terminology ............................................................................... Lectistemia ... ... ..... ... ....... ........... ................... ... ......... ...... .............. ... .... .. ...... Processions .................................................................................................. An Akitu festival at Palmyra? ....................................................................

194 198 200 203

IV Groups of worshippers, priests and benefactors ........................................ The application of genealogical terminology to define groups ................. The terminology and archaeology of dining and drinking societies ......... Marzeah ....................................................................................................... 'ti. Priesthoods .................................................................................................. ~Funerary foundations at Palmyra ............................................................... t Worship and its role in society ...................................................................

213 213 220 229 234 242 256

Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 261 Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 265 Abbreviations used ...................................................................................... 265 Secondary literature .................................................................................... 266 Indices ............................................................................................................... 295 Index locorum .............................................................................................. 295 Inscriptions in Palmyrene Aramaic, including bi- and trilinguals ..... 295 Inscriptions in other Semitic languages ............................................... 298 Inscriptions in non-Semitic languages ................................................. 298 Literary sources .................................................................................... 299 Index of place-names .................................................................................. 300 Index of divine names ................................................................................. 301 Index of personal names ............................................................................. 303 General index .............................................................................................. 303 Plates .................................................................................................................. 307

LIST OF PLATES Cover Plate I Plate II Plate III Plate IV Plate V Plate VI Plate VII

Temple of Baal-Shamin, Palmyra. Photo Ted Kaizer Map of the Near East. © C. N. Ro~u. Map of Palmyra. After Teixidor (1979), with minor additions. By kind permission of Brill Academic Publishers, Leiden, The Netherlands Relief of four Palmyrene gods, now in the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. Photo © Studio Basset. Sarcophagus from Palmyra, now in the garden of the Museum of Palmyra. Photo Ted Kaizer. · Sarcophagus from Palmyra, now in the Museum of Palmyra (front). Photo Ted Kaizer. Sarcophagus from Palmyra, now in the Museum of Palmyra (back). Photo Ted Kaizer. Altar from Palmyra, now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. Photo Ted Kaizer. By courtesy of the Visitors of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book is a slightly revised version of my doctoral thesis, written at Brasenose College, Oxford, under supervision of Professor Fergus Millar between 1996 and 2000, and examined in October of that year by Professors Martin Goodman and Stephen Mitchell. To them, and to Professor Josef Wiesehofer and his subeditors of Oriens et Occidens (especially Professor Amelie Kuhrt), I owe many thanks for their advice on the process which turned the thesis into a book. The structure of the four chapters which constitute the main body of the work has been left virtually unchanged, and the text has undergone only necessary editing and inserting of relevant literature which has appeared since the submission of the thesis. Accordingly, the bibliography has been updated to include recent works on the field, even if these do not always receive sufficient consideration in the main text. The introduction has been completely rearranged, with some sections newly added and others amplified. This is not the first preface in which Fergus Millar is mentioned in acknowledgement of his supervision of someone's doctoral thesis. But even if I cannot help using old cliches, I am more than grateful to him for his unfailing support throughout my D.Phil. (and afterwards), for his conscientious reading of every single page that I dared to hand in, and for allowing and encouraging me to make my own decisions and to do things my own way. If the preface had ended here, I would have had very good reasons for gratitude. However, I have been even more fortunate, and the list of individuals and organisations which I should further like to thank for the help during the preparation of this work is a long one. If the cover reads only my own name, rather than 'Ted Kaizer & friends', it is because I would not like to lay any blame for the final result on others. Dr. Lucinda Dirven read through the complete draft of the text, and I have benefited a lot from her comments. From my Leiden MA thesis onwards she has been a teacher and discussion partner, and I am very happy with the fact that our friendship could develop alongside our growing academic disagreements. I owe many thanks also to those who read drafts of separate chapters or parts of them, and who were very generous with their time and suggestions at various stages throughout my research: Professor Robert Parker, Dr. Sebastian Brock, Dr. Simon Price, Dr. Alan Bowman, Dr. Stephanie Dalley, Olivier Hekster, Nicole Mulder and my teachers at Leiden, Professors Luk van Rompay (now at Duke) and Henk Versnel. I am especially grateful to Michael Macdonald for his fantastic support. For helpful suggestions, references, unpublished material or general discussions, further thanks are due to Dr. Andreas Bendlin, Dr. Margherita Pacella, Ulla Lehtonen, Dr. Jane Lightfoot, Dr. S.M. Moors and Dr. David Taylor.

11

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

I am also most grateful to Dr. Jean-Baptiste Yon for sending me a copy of the list of unpublished inscriptions from the temple ofNebu as given by the Sorbonne doctoral thesis of A. Bounni from 1986, and for allowing me to use his own excellent thesis on the Palmyrene notables, which is in preparation to be published as a monograph. Professor Andreas Schmidt-Colinet was so kind as to provide me with helpful information about two sarcophagi which were unpublished by the time I wrote my thesis. I also owe thanks to him and to Dr. Khaled al-As'ad for allowing me to incorporate my own photographs of these monuments in this book. With a dinosaur of the computer industry on my own desk, I have been dependent on the printing equipment and skills of Priscilla Lange, who was always happy to help me out with a big smile.

In autumn 1999 I visited Syria again for two weeks, co-funded this time by the Committee for Graduate Studies (Oxford). As holder of the Thomas Whitcombe Greene Scholarship for Classical Art and Archaeology, I also received grants from the Craven Committee to conduct research at Yale, Turin and Warsaw. In February 1999 I was based in the office of Dr. Susan Matheson, the Curator of Antiquities at the Yale University Art Gallery. I am grateful to her for the freedom to browse through all the relevant material in the unpublished archives from the Yale expedition to Dura-Europos. I also owe thanks to Professor John Matthews and Dr. Andrew Gregory from the Department of Ancient History at Yale for their hospitality, and especially to Dr. Vasily Rudich for guiding me on a pilgrimage to Rostovtzeff's tomb and house. In summer 1999 I spent an extremely enjoyable and productive month at the Dipartimento di Scienze Antropologiche, Archeologiche e Storico-territoriali of the University of Turin. I would like to thank Professoressa Roberta Venco Ricciardi and all the others working on Hatra very much for their hospitality and for being so generous with their time and suggestions: Professor Fabrizio Pennacchietti, Dr. Anny Allara (t), Dr. Roberto Bertolino, Francesca Dorna Metzger, Marco Moriggi, and especially Alessandra Peruzzetto, grazie tante! Finally, in winter 1999 I stayed for three weeks at the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology of the University of Warsaw, and I am grateful to KrzysztofDomzalski, Ela Katzy and Marta Zuchowska for their help and discussion. Last but not least, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the director of the Centre and greatest living authority on Palmyrene religion, Professor Michal Gawlikowski. Not only did he make time in his busy schedule to read some of my work and to discuss it with me at various occasions, he has also been very generous in showing me unpublished material from Palmyra. In particular, I thank him for providing me with a list of the unpublished inscriptions from the temple of Allat.

10

I am very grateful to the various funding bodies who have made it possible for me to pursue my studies at Oxford after graduating at Leiden. For the year which I spent as a visiting student at Brasenose (1995-1996), I received scholarships from the Reiman-de Bas Fonds and the Stichting Dr Hendrik Muller's Vaderlandsch Fonds. The D.Phil. course at Brasenose was funded by the Stichting voor Historische Wetenschappen, the Reiman-de Bas Fonds, the Dutch Assumptionists, the Stichting Pro Musis, the Stichting Fundatie van de Vrijvrouwe van Renswoude te 's-Gravenhage, the A.A. Brediusstichting, the Stichting Robert Fruin Fonds voor Studiereizen, a euergetic organisation which wishes to remain anonymous (all from The Netherlands), and the Craven Committee (Oxford), which awarded me the Thomas Whitcombe Greene Scholarship for Classical Art

and Archaeology. In addition, the Craven Committee gave me financial support to make three study trips to the Near East. In spring 1997 I was fortunate in visiting Syria for five weeks and Lebanon for one week, a trip for which I received additional travel grants from Brasenose College, the Programme in Hellenic Studies (both from Oxford), the Stichting Frank Scholten Fonds and the Stichting Philologisch Studiefonds Utrecht (both from The Netherlands). For much help in Syria I am indebted to the General Directorate of Antiquities and Museums, and in particular to the director of the Museum of Palmyra, Dr. Khaled al-As'ad. I would also like to mention my friend Abdullah Zamel, thanks to whom I managed to visit more 'dead cities' than I could have expected. In Lebanon, I received immense hospitality, advice and support from the family of my friend Martin Accad. In autumn 1998 I travelled through Jordan for a month, a trip which was co-funded by Brasenose College, the Committee for Graduate Studies (both from Oxford) and the Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust (London), and which was further facilitated by help of the British School at Amman and the Department of Antiquities. Thanks to the advice of Dr. Erika Hunter I also had the chance of visiting Iraq for ten days, which was made possible by the Iraqi National Commission for Education, Science and Culture. I am grateful to the State Organization of Antiquities and Heritage, and especially to Dr. Donni George, for allowing me to stay three days at Hatra, where I was taken care ofby Abu Adnan, Abu Maryam and Ismael.

It had always been in my mind to dedicate my thesis to my parents in gratitude, and to the memory of two friends of our family, Mrs. Elin Gudrun Hansen and Father Jan van der Meer a.a. Upon the sudden decease of my father, who lived to know that the final draft of the thesis was finished, I had to change the formula. The thesis has become a book, but the formula remains the same: I am still missing him sorely, for the walking Latin dictionary of which he played the part with pleasure until 4 am in the night before my Latin exam at secondary school and at many later occasions, and for much, much more.

CONVENTIONS

INTRODUCTION

As regards ancient languages used in the text, Greek is reproduced in its own alphabet, Latin in capitals, and Palmyrene and other Aramaic dialects in standard transliteration into lower case. As regards personal names, I have opted for the following. In the direct translation of inscriptions a Greek name is rendered with its own transliteration, but an Aramaic name is rendered with both a standard vocalisation and, between brackets, the Aramaic name in transliteration. This method has the advantage to reveal any inconsistency in onomastics in bilingual inscriptions. In the main text, however, where the representation of personal names is less important, I have only given the standard vocalisation of an Aramaic name, without the unvocalised name added. I have added dots under the transliteration of some Aramaic characters only in the reproduction of the Aramaic text, but not in the vocalised version of words (e.g. mrz}J, but marzeah). Similarly, the aleph(') and the ayin (') are usually not represented in the vocalised version of words (with some exceptions). Both divine names and so-called tribal names are only rendered in the translations of inscriptions with standard vocalisations, without the unvocalised name added. All translations of inscriptions or texts are mine unless otherwise stated. Due to obvious reasons of copyright, I have not actually quoted - and only referred to - the unpublished inscriptions from the temples of Allat and 'of Nebu' that are important for the argument. With regard to illustrations I have not aimed for completeness. Only a few plates are included in order to illustrate the argument at important places. In the text I refer to them between square brackets (e.g. [PLATE I]).

This book is a study of the social patterns of worship in Palmyra in the Roman period. It aims to investigate how the different aspects of the religious life of the city contributed to the way in which the society of Palmyra, in which religion played so important a role, was built up and worked. The problem has to be studied within the framework of the continuing progress of Roman rule over the Near East, from the establishment of the provincia Syria by Pompey in the mid60s BC onwards. It ought to be taken into account that the changes which the Palmyrene society underwent could result in an evolution of the functioning of at least some features of religious life within that society. Comparative studies have made clear that, although there were many similarities between the several towns, local areas and regions in the Near East, above all the various places were very different from each other. 1 It follows that patterns of worship and religious reverence in these places will not have been identical, and a category such as 'Oriental religions' conflates matters which ought to be kept separate. This term implies a non-existing unity and does not do justice to the diversity of the forms under which religious experiences could be expressed in various localities. 2 It will therefore need no further justification to concentrate on the immediate local context of worship. The focus of this book will be on Palmyra, which has enjoyed more study and research than most other places in the Near East. The religious life of the city presents one of the clearest examples of a complex religious system in which different elements coexisted and might have influenced each other. Above all, its unique position as a publicly bilingual city, with inscriptions drawn up in both Greek and the local dialect of Aramaic, is a reason in itself to concentrate on its religious terminology.

LEGENDARY PALMYRA Palmyra has always enjoyed attention, not only from the academic community, but also from the general public. A still growing number of tourists each year visits the magnificent ruins of the colonnades and temples, situated against the background of an oasis of palm trees to the south and a hill boasting a medieval citadel to the west. Taxis bring the modern travellers to the outskirts of the 1 Drijvers (1977); Van Rompay (1990); Millar (1993a), p.225-532; Ball (2000), p.30-105 and p.149-245; Sartre (2001), p.35-65, p.711-33 and p.959-79. 2 The term was coined by Cumont (1929), and preserved by Vermaseren as editor of the series Etudes preliminaires sur les religions orientates dans ['empire romain (Leiden: Brill, 1961-). I have dealt with some of the problems involved in this notion in more detail in a separate paper, see Kaizer (forthcoming 2).

Introduction

Legendary Palmyra

ancient city, where the remains of the tower tombs and hypogea create a ghastly drawing of the necropoleis of what was once a thriving community: silent cities of the dead, behind whose ingeniously constructed multilevelled tower tombs and ramified underground galkrit~s, with their sculptures of whole families reclining nt ha11q11ds aml their captivating frescoes of the proudly gazing entombed ones, lies a strntifkd world of societal rivalries. 3 In museums all over the world visitors s!Hml in awt· of what are the most famous finds from the graves, the poignant hmi~rnry rdids whose frontal poses and intensely fixed looks seem to transmit 1111spokcn reminiscences of a remote civilisation.4 From Boccaccio and Chaucer to Lindsey Davis, and from Schmalz' nineteenth-century painting to twentieth-century Syrian currency, the modern world has been obsessed by the famous Zenobia and her kingdom that briefly rocked the Roman world to its foundations. 5 Romanticised descriptions of "the hushed plains of the desert across which endless trains of richly burdened camels silently plod with swinging motion" 6 , combined with the effects of "the advance into high, rolling sand-dunes" of the caravan of the modern-day pioneer of the legendary Silk Road7 , have all contributed to a widespread propensity to view Palmyra as the caravan city par excellence, located on the crossroads of the trade routes of the ancient world. "La Venise des sables"8 honoured her caravan traders with statues set up on inscribed column consoles at the colonnades, the agora and the precincts of the temples. Most of these statues are now lost, but it is the unique nature of the honorific and mostly bilingual inscriptions, recording the assistance given to the caravans, which manifests the significance of the long-distance trade for Palmyra, and the standing of its chief beneficiaries in her society .9 The epigraphic material reveals trade with localities in the south of Mesopotamia, patterns of settlement of Palmyrene traders in the Gulf area, and certain connections with the sea trade from the Gulf to the north of India. 10 Recent discussions

of the nature of Palmyrene trade have attempted to integrate the city's longdistance trade with the notion of local trade between the caravan city and DuraEuropos 11, expressed scepticism about the relationship between Palmyra and the Silk Road 12 , and shown how the prospering of Palmyrene trade was unconnected with the annexation of the Nabataean kingdom and the subsequent establishment of the provincia Arabia in AD 106. 13 Much less known, but as much debated, is the so-called intellectual life at 'Zenobia' s court' . 14 Presence at Palmyra and influence on matters of policy can be confirmed for the rhetorician and philosopher Cassius Longinus, a 'living library and walking museum' (Eunapius, Lives of the Sophists, IV) who was invited to Palmyra by a letter from the new rulers (Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, XIX) and executed when Aurelian captured the oasis (SHA, 'Divus Aurelianus', XXX). In contrast, it is highly doubtful with regard to Callinicus of Petra (the author of a History ofAlexandria which he is said to have dedicated to Zenobia), Nicostratus of Trapezus (the author of a History that ended with Odenathus' victories in the East) and Genethlius (a rhetor from Petra), not to speak of completely legendary members of the Palmyrene "cabinet of intellectuals" .15 Taking into consideration that the new ruling 'dynasty' originated in a very Roman colonial constitutional framework, it is indeed possible that the application of the term 'court' to this context presupposes some kind of Near Eastern royalty that simply was not present at the oasis.

14

3 The

only general study of the funerary monuments from Palmyra is still Gawlikowski ( 1970a). For a recent case study of one of those monuments, see Schmidt-Colinet ( 1992), and see now also Yon (1999b), for a discussion of some of the problems of societal stratification involved. A project involving the 'photogrammetrische Aufnahme' of the Palmyrene tower tombs has been undertaken recently by a team from the Technische Universitat Berlin, led by Michael Breuher, Agnes Henning and Fabian Hohmuth. Henning's doctoral thesis on the tombs will be published shortly as a volume of Damaszener Forschungen. 4 For recent collections, see Sadurska and Bounni (1994) and Ploug (1995). 5 For an overview of Zenobia' s survival in modern literature, art and politics, see Stoneman (1992), p.197-200. The complicated episode of Roman imperial history in which the rulers of Palmyra rose to power in the eastern provinces of the empire has only recently become the subject of serious professional monographs, see Equini Schneider (1993) and now above all Hartmann (2001). 6 Stoneman (1992), p.18, also quoted by Kennedy (1994), p.243. 7 A reference to Sir Aurel Stein's crossing of the Taklamakan desert in the early months of 1908. For the famous photograph, see A. Walker, Aurel Stein. Pioneer of the Silk Road (London: John Murray, 1995), pl.18. The quotation is taken from ibidem, p.178. 8 The subtitle of Will (1992). 9 Millar (1998a) and now also Young (2001 ), esp. p.170--2. 10 As is now well-known, the famous customs-law or tariff of Palmyra does not deal with

15

long-distance trade. See above all Matthews (1984 ). For a recent list of the inscriptions relevant to the caravan trade, see Gawlikowski ( 1994a), p.32-3. The most recent discussion of Palmyrene trade is now by Young (2001), p.136-86. 11 Dirven ( 1996), slightly revised in eadem (1999), p.34-40. According to her hypothesis, caravans leaving Palmyra travelled the shortest way to the Euphrates, emerging from the desert at Dura-Europos, from where goods were taken downstream to the Gulf. On the way home, the merchants could only navigate the river to Hit, from where a much longer caravan track (attested in modern times) would lead them through the desert. In the meantime, the camels which stayed behind in Dura-Europos could have been used to provide Palmyra with agricultural products from the Euphrates region. 12 Thus Millar (1998a), p.132: "Strictly speaking there is no Palmyrene evidence to show that they ever took the route north-eastwards into Central Asia, starting from Seleucia and crossing the Zagros Mountains, which Isidorus' Parthian Stations indicates." Agreed on by Ball (2000), p.133-9. Compare now also Young (2001 ), p.190--1, who argued that "the overland route seems to have existed as an important alternative supply of silk during the predominance of Palmyra." 13 Thus Young (2001), p.136-8. He argued, p.117-22, that the Arabian trade continued well into the period in which Palmyrene trade flourished. In addition, Young emphasised that the sources describe the trade to Petra only in terms of incense and other aromatics from Arabia while the basis of the wealth of Palmyra was constituted by trade in spices and other goods fro~ Persia and India. In the process, he also makes the illuminating remark, p.138, that "we should not think in terms of the city coming into existence due to the trade route, but of the trade route coming into existence due to the enterprise of the inhabitants of the city." For a discussion of the process of urbanization at Palmyra, mostly in agreement with Young's remarks and partly complementing him, see also below, p.51-5. 14 For a romanticised sketch, see Stoneman (1992), p.129-53. All the relevant sources have now been studied in minute detail by Hartmann (2001), p.300--8 and p.315-23. 15 Thus labelled by Stoneman (1992), p.129-32. For all references and a thorough evaluation of the sources, see Hartmann (2001), p.300-8.

16

Introduction

The most famous of all in Zenobia's surroundings was no doubt Paul of Samosata, the bishop of Antioch who was accused and condemned of heresy at a synod in the late sixties of the third century, and whose adversaries petitioned the Roman emperor Aurelian to force the heretic to leave his church after his condemnation. 16 It remains unknown what precisely was the relationship between the bishop and the Palmyrene queen. Eusebius, whose Ecclesiastical History (VII) forms the most reliable source for the episode, does not at all relate the letter written by the synod in Antioch to any form of Palmyrene expansion or influence in the wider region. Only later Christian sources, such as Athanasius, John Chrysostom and Theodoret, emphasise the connection between the process against Paul and the Palmyrene rise to power and to a position of influence in the eastern provinces of the empire: Paul's teaching, which denied Christ's divinity, would have been attractive to Zenobia's leaning towards Judaism. Nothing is certain with regard to this 'leaning towards Judaism', but it may have been connected in some way with the apparent popularity in Palmyra of the so-called Anonymous God, who may have been a local response to the worship of Zeus and/or Theos Hypsistos, a divine designation common amongst both pagans, Jews and Christians.17 As Millar has shown, the affair is especially relevant to illustrate how "the orthodox party in Antioch could appeal to a pagan Emperor", without need to think in terms of a clash between 'indigenous Near Eastern culture' and the empire with its Graeco-Roman elite culture. 18 If the relationship between the ruling class at Palmyra and Paul of Samosata must remain a mystery, it is in any case clear that there were elements of religious life present at Palmyra which must have had their place in the religious world of the city, but whose impact on the social patterns of worship in that same city is completely obscured by a domination of our sources by more traditional and more typically Palmyrene religion. In addition to some clear but few indications of Jewish presence at Palmyra 19 , and possibly of Christian groupings (the arrival at the oasis of Paul of Samosata can hardly have been an isolated incident), there is now a growing number of hints that also a Manichaean mission was active in the city in the last years before the city's capture. 20

16 See the classic article by Millar (1971), and now also Hartmann (2001), p.315-23, for all further references. 17 See already Cumont (1929), p.263-4 n.82. On the Anonymous God, see also (briefly) below, p.160, with further references. 1s Millar (1971), p.17. See also ibidem, p.14: "It is crucial to our understanding of both the Roman Empire, and of the place of the Church within it, to realize that we do not have to find exceptional political circumstances to explain recourse to the Emperor as arbiter." 19 See Schurer, HIP III, 1, p.14-5, and Hartmann (2001), p.324-32. Compare below, p.108 with n.226. 20 See now, for a collection of all relevant sources and further references to modern literature, Hartmann (2001), p.308-15. According to Dalley (1995), p.149-50, any success of the sect should be explained by the fact that the legacy of Mesopotamian culture at Palmyra could be seen as a breeding ground for the religious grouping that is known to have included older Babylonian material in some of its own sacred texts.

Legendary Palmyra

17

The oasis Palmyra - whose indigenous name was, and still is, Tadmor (tdmr) - is situated in the middle of the Syrian desert or steppe, ea 200 km northeast of Damascus, ea 150 km east of Emesa, ea 125 km southwest of Resafe and ea 230 km west of Dura-Europos on the Euphrates river [PLATE I]. The ancient city was, and still is, bordered by a sea of palm trees to its southeast. The Efqa spring, situated towards the southwest of the ruins, functioned as the main source of irrigation for the Palmyrene gardens. However, as the water from the sulphurous source will not have been very drinkable, it is necessary to emphasise that the city was dependent on aqueducts. 21 It is difficult, if at all possible, to establish how large the population of Palmyra and of her wider territory will have been in the city's 'golden age'. Naturally, the settlement at the beginning of the Roman period was not as much developed in number of inhabitants as the city which was captured by Aurelian. The present outline of the ancient city, surrounded by a wall which was built many years after the capture in order to incorporate the place as a Roman stronghold in the Strata Diocletiana, seriously disrupts our vision of Palmyra as it expanded in the period of more than three hundred years from which our main material evidence dates [PLATE II]. According to the most recent calculation, second-century Palmyra will have been able to accommodate between 40.000 and 60.000 people (assuming a population density of one hundred to one hundred and fifty inhabitants per ha), with a further 250.000 people living in the wider territories belonging to the city (assuming a density of five to fifteen inhabitants per square km). 22 Although it ought to be stressed that these numbers can only be the result of academic hypotheses, they do have a certain relevance with regard to the still enigmatic availability of sufficient military resources to the Palmyrene rulers in the armed conflict with the central powers of the empire. 23 From its modest foundations Palmyra quickly developed in the Roman period into a major city in the East, whose riches sprang from the longdistance trade, and whose distinctive visual art forms reveal both a high degree of individuality and certain connections with the art of East Syria and North Mesopotamia in general. 24 That neither the particular visual means of expression nor the unique language situation at the city seem to have found any recognition among the Classical authors is indeed striking. 25

21 In general, see Crouch (1975). Compare Millar (1998a), p.130, who pointed out that "the limit of the zone of 200 millimetres rainfall comes quite close to Palmyra, whose date-palms still benefit also from a natural spring." 22 Savino (1999), p.69-75. 23 See now Young (2001), p.175-7, who points out that the ancient sources imply that Odenathus recruited most of his troops from the countryside, and who states that "the most probable origin of his forces ... is the Palmyrene caravan police." 24 The standard work on Palmyrene art is still Colledge (1976a). For an overview of the evolution of Palmyra in the Roman empire, mainly concentrating on constitutional aspects, see below, p.36-41. 25 As was remarked by Millar (1998a), p.130. On the process that made the city a unique officially bilingual conglomeration see below, p.27-34.

18

Introduction

THE SOURCES The overall picture of Palmyrene civilisation seems to be a homogeneous one. However, it will be argued throughout this book that if the various expressions of the local culture suggest some form of typical 'Palmyreneness', it is only because they manage quite well to hide the heterogeneity underneath. Palmyra had a culture which cannot be described unambiguously, and when one attempts to label the various facets of her accomplishments either as 'western' or as 'eastern', those generalisations turn out to be very problematic.26 Its archaeological remains show a city which was largely hellenized in its outward appearance, but with many non-Classical peculiarities in its individual monuments. 27 The distinctive and still enigmatic art points to a wide range of influences: the reliefs and sculptures from the city and its territory have been characterised as 'Parthian art', a term used for the art of East Syria and North Mesopotamia on the basis of resemblances in style, of which the consistent frontality is the most important characteristic. 28 Both Greek and the local dialect of Aramaic were used alongside each other as written languages in the public life of the city. 29 The religion of Palmyra is usually described as almost completely Semitic. The view expressed in the concluding remarks of the main work on Palmyrene religion is that an indigenous substratum was transformed by Babylonian and Canaanite influences in pre-Hellenistic times, followed by the penetration of socalled Arab and Syrian deities by the first century BC. With the urban development from the early empire onwards came theological systems and astrological doctrines which may have had their origin in Hellenistic Babylonia. 30 A number of Graeco-Roman divine names and images also appear, but the identification of a Palmyrene deity with a Greek one is usually perceived as secondary, and believed to have also been regarded as such in Roman times. 31 This interpretation, which seems to have become widely established, will be examined critically in this book. The evidence for religious life at Palmyra consists of epigraphic and sculptural material and the remains of temples. We know close to nothing with regard to mythology or the nature of the deities worshipped inside. As the rapidly 26See especially Millar (1993a), p.319-36. See also the general overviews by Starcky and Gawlikowski (1985) and Will (1992). 27 Freyberger ( 1998), p.74-88. 2s On the problematic use of this term and for an overview of the scholarly debate, see Drijvers (I 990). On Palmyrene art in general see Colledge (1976a), and compare Elsner (1998), p.115-43. 29 I will refer to the local dialect of Aramaic as 'Palmyrene', although 'Palmyrenean' has sometimes been used by others, see e.g. DNWSI, p.xiii. Palmyrene can be labelled as 'Middle Aramaic' within the classification of the Aramaic language as proposed by Fitzmyer (1979). As such, it was still very much influenced by what had been the linguafranca in the Persian period, the so-called 'official' or 'imperial' Aramaic. For extensive discussion, see Greenfield (1974a) and Lipinski (1990). See now also, briefly, Bertolino (2000). For further discussion see below, p.27-34. 30Gawlikowski (1990a), esp. at p.2652-3. 31 Gawlikowski (1991).

The sources

19

expanding number of inscriptions (mainly Greek and Aramaic), that forms an almost inexhaustible source of data, is often strictly tied both to place and time, the epigraphic sources will provide the basis for the study that follows. One must, in the first place, attend to the names and epithets actually given to deities by worshippers, and to the often basic information with regard to dedications. The amount of relevant archaeological remains is also still increasing. The various architectural forms of sanctuaries and the religious topography of the city contribute to our understanding of Palmyrene religion and express the role which religion could play within a local community. It is equally important to pay proper attention to the iconographic material, since deities could be represented in multiple and often ambiguous ways. There are no literary sources from Palmyra itself, but there is some supplementary information on pagan practices in literary sources from elsewhere. It will be clear that these texts must be approached with caution. On a number of occasions, the Palmyrene evidence will be compared with relevant material coming from other places in the Near East. One simply cannot discuss aspects of a local religion without bringing in visual and textual sources from other local or regional cultural spheres of influence in order to illustrate one's argument or to help filling in the gaps. But by focussing on the evidence from one locality it proves only too easy to lose sight of the necessity for justification for bringing in material from elsewhere. The main problem is how to account for the application of comparative data and items from other places to a study of a local religion (in this case that of Palmyra), without falling in the trap of creating a construct which is similar to the notion of 'Oriental cults' from which I would rather dissociate myself. What was nominally the same deity could be worshipped in many places in many different manners and contexts, even if part of the ritual apparatus in use was identical. It is the cumulative effects of different cults - seemingly belonging to the same 'notional network' - from ' ,..; "'" lne;1litit>" and regions that served and still serve to create conceptions of instances of 'Oriental cults' .3 2 'll'To demonstrate that the religious life of Palmyra was first and foremost local,~ one needs to compare the evidence with similar sources from places such as Hatra, Gerasa, Edessa and Dura-Europos, and one needs to apply the models of worship as known from the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and from the cult of the 'Syrian goddess' at Hierapolis as recorded by De Dea Syria, attributed to Lucian of Samosata. 33 All these places are, each in their own particular way, good representatives of the variety of cultural and religious life in the Near East in the Roman period [PLATE I]. Gerasa, modern Jerash in the north of Jordan, whose culture and religion are the best documented amonst the cities of the Decapolis, presents an official Greek facade. But the fact that many scholars still agree with 32 The argument is spelt out in detail in Kaizer (forthcoming 2). 33 For the Jewish evidence from the Roman period, see Schurer, HJP, rewritten in three volumes by G. Vermes, F. Millar and M. Goodman. For De Dea Syria, see the text with translation by Attridge and Oden (1976), and now above all Lightfoot (forthcoming). On the question of authorship see Dirven (1997a) and Elsner (2001).

Introduction

The history of the study of Palmyrene religion

Rostovtzeff that the basis underneath this Greek facade was Arab does not mean that we can have a real knowledge about the nature of the religious life in Gerasa and places such as Pella, Abila and Hippos: tracing the assimilation process is not the same as grasping its full significance. 34 Hatra, on the other hand, seems to have been hellenized less, or at least in a different way, than Palmyra. The divine world of this stronghold in the north Mesopotamian steppe, and especially the religious topography, shows its own peculiarities. Both the cults and the sacred architecture reveal important differences between the temples within the enormous central precinct and the numerous smaller shrines spread throughout the ancient city. 35 Any study of the pagan religious life of Edessa, modern Urfa in southeast Turkey, has its own problems in that it has to be approached almost completely by means of much later Syriac Christian sources. Inventories of divine names have been readily produced, but it has to be taken into consideration that the key texts, such as the Oration of Melito the Philosopher, provide oversimplifying accounts of the religious world of the city. 36 As far as DuraEuropos is concerned, patterns of worship in this stronghold on the Euphrates are not only interesting because of the coexistence of Greek and indigenous gods, but also because it sheds light on the religious behaviour of Palmyrenes outside of their own city. 37 Absolute clarity of when it is appropriate to bring in comparative evidence from outside Palmyra and when not can hardly be attained. The way in which a study such as this one presents its material has been at least partly shaped by the imbalance in spread of evidence. The challenge is to use the full range of sources in such an integrated way that this imbalance can be redressed.

catching of the early expressions of interest in 'the queen of the desert'. With new texts brought to light by Wood and Dawkins, the deciphering of the Palmyrene Aramaic script and language swiftly took place simultaneously and independently by the French abbot J.B. Barthelemy and the Englishman J. Swinton in 1754.39 The second half of the nineteenth century saw the publication of more than one hundred new Palmyrene inscriptions by Marquis M. de Vogiie, followed in the early twentieth century by the epigraphic work in situ of the priests A. Jaussen and R. Savignac from the Ecole Biblique de Jerusalem, and accordingly abbot J.B. Chabot's massive collection of Palmyrene texts in E. Renan's brainchild Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum. In the mid-thirties, J. Cantineau and F. Rosenthal independently published what are to this day the only two comprehensive grammars of Palmyrene.40 The early twentieth century also saw two epochmaking archaeological expeditions (in 1902 and 1917) by a German team, headed and inspired by the ubiquitous T. Wiegand. His two volumes of detailed descriptions of all the ancient monuments hitherto known provided the frame of reference for all later excavations and archaeological studies. 41 The first overall study of the religious life of Palmyra was published in 1931. J.G. Fevrier divided La religion des Palmyreniens into three parts, dealing with the variety of deities, aspects of cultic life, and the possible religious influences from elsewhere. In an extremely critical review, which started by wondering whether the book was opportune considering the flood of new material which appeared immediately following its publication, H. Seyrig stated that Fevrier did not have sufficient knowledge of sculptures and of how they ought to be interpreted. Referring to the epigraphic material as laconic, Seyrig pleaded that attention should go in the first place to the reliefs and tesserae in order to build up a picture of Palmyrene religion. 42 In numerous articles, which appeared mainly in the journal Syria, Seyrig published, republished, discussed and commented upon a wide range of monuments referring to the divine world of Palmyra and elsewhere in the Near East. 43 His knowledge of the relevant material was unmatched and his contributions towards the field of Palmyrene (and other Near Eastern) studies have played a decisive role in the way in which subsequent research developed. But the approach of many of Seyrig' s successors in the field is sometimes based upon identifications of epigraphically unidentified and iconographically multi-interpretable figures, which have led to a number of very ingeniously constructed designs of the religious world of Palmyra. It is indeed one of the main devices for approaching Palmyrene religion in this book to point out where the

20

THE HISTORY OF THE STUDY OF PALMYRENE RELIGION The history of the study of Palmyrene civilisation and of the religious life of Palmyra goes back a long time. 38 The visit to the site by British merchants based at Aleppo in the late seventeenth century, the fortnight's expedition of R. Wood and J. Dawkins in the mid-eighteenth century (followed by their publication of a beautifully illustrated folio which appeared both in English and in French), and the nearly triumphal entry of Lady Hester Stanhope, who was enthusiastically greeted as the new queen of the Arabs, in March 1813, are but the most eye34 Rostovtzeff ( 1932), p. 85. See on the Decapolis also the collection of articles in A ram 4 ( 1992). In an unpublished thesis it has been argued that archaeological finds point to the worship of Artemis, Dionysus, Zeus, Athena, and the Muses at Abila. See M.J. Fuller, Abila of the Decapolis: a Roman-Byzantine city in Transjordan, 2 vols (Ph.D. Washington University, 1987), p.358-67. 35 For all further references see now Kaizer (2000b ). 36 Drijvers (1980); Ball (2000), p.91-4; Ross (2001), p.85-101. 37 See now above all Dirven (l 999). 38 For recent and more complete accounts of the history of Palmyrene studies, see Starcky and Gawlikowski (1985), p.22-7; Stoneman (1992), p.1-14; Will (1992), p.13-18. For earlier overviews of the study of Palmyrene religion, see Drijvers (l 976a), p.5-7, and Lipinski (l 979).

39 The

21

story is told in detail by Daniels (1988). °Cantineau (1935) and Rosenthal (1936). 4 1 Wiegand e.a. (1932). 42 Seyrig ( 1935). The review ought to be read in the context of a mordant public correspondence between both scholars, see Syria 16 (1935), p.115-6, and 17 (1936), p.205-8. 43 Most of these articles were collected in six volumes of Antiquites syriennes ( 1931-1965), and in Seyrig's Scripta Varia (1985). In the footnotes, references are made to the original publications. The corresponding volume and page numbers in the subsequent collections are mentioned in the bibliography. 4

22

23

Introduction

The history of the study of Palmyrene religion

many uncertainties with regard to the interpretation of reliefs and statues lie, and to re-examine carefully the various conclusions which were drawn from these, before seeing how near one can actually get to an understanding of Palmyrene religion. Together with H. lngholt and father J. Starcky, Seyrig published a corpus of all known tesserae, which they interpreted as religious dining tickets, in 1955. Their Recueil des Tesseres de Palmyre, followed by A. Caquot's linguistic commentary, is still the main tool to approach these small tokens. The work of the French count R. du Mesnil du Buisson, who based his study of Palmyrene tesserae and coins on the collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, is monumental in appearance and especially with regard to its illustrations, but his approach is a clear example of the questionable explanations to which pure speculation can lead, and consequently his interpretations have been confronted by strong resistance. 44 From the fifties date two overviews of the religious life of Palmyra by Starcky, one of them updated in the mid-eighties. 45 J. Hoftijzer's book from 1968 (in Dutch), on religious phenomena as they appear in Aramaic inscriptions, is, in the author's own words, merely a descriptive inventory of what is known about these, and certainly not written within the framework of comparative religion. 46 Naturally, most of its information is out-ofdate by now, but, as a study by one of the greatest linguists in the field (Hoftijzer is above all the (co-)author of both the 1965 and the 1995 edition of the invaluable dictionary of North-West Semitic inscriptions), it also suffers the more basic weakness of providing a one-sided epigraphic account (although Hoftijzer did not completely disregard other sources, as has sometimes been claimed). Equally emanating from the epigraphic material, but of far more importance in the long run, is the major contribution to the field of Palmyrene studies by one of the main scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls, J.T. Milik. The first volume of his Recherches d'epigraphie proche-orientale, ready for the press in early 1968 but not published until 1972, developed from a list of sixteen inscriptions, which contain socalled dedications made by the gods themselves, into a massive but strangely constructed and often rambling book, in which he took into account virtually every more or less relevant inscription from the region, proposed corrections in reading and interpretation of various texts, elaborated on onomastic and genealogical issues, but above all wildly speculated about numerous aspects of religious life at Palmyra and elsewhere in the Near East in a way which must have dazzled even the brightest of his linguistic colleagues.47 A real breakthrough in the study of Palmyrene religion was the almost simultaneous publication of M. Gawlikowski's Habilitationsschrift on the Palmyrene temple, according to its

subtitle a study of epigraphy and of historical topography .48 This very important book by K. Michalowski's successor as leader of the Polish mission at Palmyra was the first one in which the inscriptions were studied within their proper archaeological context. As such, it naturally forms the cornerstone in every subsequent Palmyrene Tempelgeschichte, and my own book could certainly not have been written without this precedent and the many articles by Gawlikowski himself which helped to complete the picture he had first drawn. The second half of the seventies first saw the publication of an invaluable volume in the Groningen series Iconography of Religions by H.J.W. Drijvers, in which he collected and discussed - in Seyrig's spirit - virtually all known religious sculptures from Palmyra (except the tesserae). 49 M.A.R. Colledge's book from the same year, The Art of Palmyra, should be mentioned here as well, since the majority of what can be discussed as Palmyrene art comes from a more or less religious context. And in 1979 the epigraphist J. Teixidor published The Pantheon of Palmyra in the EPRO-series of M. Vermaseren (n° 79), "a guide for the historian of ancient religions and not an inventory of divine names for the use of Northwestern Semitic philologists" (p.ix), which ought to be used in combination with the remarks and corrections made by Lipinski. 50 Teixidor elaborated on, and slightly modified, his theories in an article a year later which - despite the fact that one does not find it quoted too often - came to represent the most outspoken exposition of the (now communis opinio) model of civic vs tribal forms of worship, which I will propose to revise in chapter 1. 51 The main work of reference for the study of the divine world of Palmyra is now the survey article by, again, Gawlikowski, in ANRW. 52 This article concentrates on the way in which the deities are grouped together and worshipped independently of the various origins of their divine names, but it pays scant attention to social and ritual aspects. The two most recent books which take into account a variety of aspects concerning Palmyrene religion, both published in EPRO' s follow-up Religions in the Graeco-Roman World (n°s 128 and 138 respectively), are by Dutch students of Drijvers. K. Dijkstra's thorough epigraphic study of the way in which social relations in the Near East in the Roman period worked, grew out of a detailed examination of those inscriptions which mention the formula 'l IJ,yy, 'for the life of' .53 The book by L. Dirven, well-constructed around the question of to which extent the r ~ u r a - E u r o p o s (thus outside their home city) was determined by their ne~nditions, is, in fact, a comprehensive account of numerous facets of the divine world of Palmyra itself. Basing her 48

Gawlikowski ( 1973a). ( 1976a). 50 Lipiriski (1981). 51 Teixidor (1980a). Mainly building on Teixidor's theories (although not actually quoting the above-mentioned article), are the recent efforts by Feldtkeller (1996) to explain the development of Palmyra's religious history as "der Weg von der Stammesreligion zur religios pluralen Gesellschaft" (p.21 ). 52 Gawlikowski ( 1990a). 53 Dijkstra ( 1995), p.81-170 on Palmyra. 49 Drijvers

44

Du Mesnil du Buisson (1962). There are some other tesserae published by Dunant (1959). Starcky, Palmyre, L'Orient Ancien Illustre 7 (Paris: Librairie A. Maisonneuve, 1952), p.85-106, which is updated in Starcky and Gawlikowski (1985); Starcky (1956a). 46 Hoftijzer ( 1968), p.1-2, with ch.4 (p.25-50) on Palmyra. 47 Milik (1972). It is interesting to note that the original list of these 'dedication inscriptions' is still numbered as such in the eventual text, although trivialities such as introduction or conclusion are lacking. 45 J.

e>(_.

O

24

Introduction

Problems of approach

theories upon epigraphic, archaeological but especially iconographical sources, she gave many new insights, proposed various new interpretations of the relevant material, and put forward a number of interesting hypotheses. 54 G. Garbini's recent interpretation of the core of the divine world of Palmyra, as originating in Phoenician religion, seems to be one-sided and far-fetched, and there is certainly no good evidence to support his claim that the Phoenicians had colonized Palmyra at some point between the seventh and the third century BC. 55 It might be asked why a new work on the religious life of Palmyra is necessary. In other words, what is the difference between the above-mentioned scholarly works on the topic and the present contribution? It will become clear that I am not writing as an archaeologist, nor as a Semitist, nor as an art-historian. Since each scholarly discipline has its own perspective from which to view the relevant material and to pose questions to that material, I may be excused for embarking on the field of Palmyrene religion as an ancient (Roman) historian with a particular interest in ancient religions, but also with sufficient knowledge of a number of Semitic languages. If my questions to the evidence for Palmyrene religion are different from those posed in preceding studies, and directed more towards social aspects of religious life, it is obvious that they are built on our knowledge of Palmyrene religion as it is constituted by the works of many others. Hence my greatest debts will be clear from the footnotes. This study of the social patterns of worship in Palmyra in the Roman period re-evaluates the relevant epigraphic, sculptural and archaeological sources methodically. If my approach tends to be very sceptical, it may serve as a counterbalance to the tendency towards generalisation. In a field which is not only highly complex, but also dependent on sources which are often difficult to interpret, any overall conclusion will be virtually impossible, and a number of generalisations may be more problematic than is sometimes assumed. I would therefore not dare to claim to give final answers in this book, but I rather intend to give some new directions for future research.

within the context of a cultural continuum? Although it now seems to be certain that there had been occupation at Palmyra of some sort in more ancient times, neither finds from the third and second millennium BC, nor random allusions to the oasis in scattered literary sources, are sufficient to prove a cultural continuum from the Bronze Age until the Classical period. 56 As we will see below, the process of urbanization seems to escape us. An en masse settlement of nomads is, as far as I am concerned, not very plausible, and the evidence does not suggest great migrations from far away (e.g. from the zones around the Orontes or the Euphrates). It is possible, but not certain, that gradual settlement took place in the context of ecological circumstances under which a more intensive interaction between Palmyra and the surrounding villages developed. 57 It will be obvious from the above that it remains uncertain if any 'indigenous substratum' was recognizable in the religious life of Palmyra. The evidence from the Roman period reveals the outcome at a particular moment of various historical, social and religious processes, and it must have been quite different from the world in which it originally developed. But in a world which is both developing and traditional, a number of cultural elements will always be recognizable over the course of three centuries. And this is strengthened by the fact that people could ascribe the notion of authenticity to their religious traditions. It is not important if traditions are historically 'true' and original, or if they are only recently invented. Thus the label 1tmptj'>o~, 'ancestral', is regularly attached to Palmyrene deities in Greek inscriptions, not so much to stress that the deity is literally inherited from one's father, but rather to assert a special claim on the deity who in this way becomes tutelary. 58 But the notions of the deity as 'ancestral god' and as 'lord of the land where he is now worshipped' are of course not mutually exclusive. 59 So-called 'new' traditions, once introduced alongside the 'native traditions', in a way become 'native' as well: elements can cease to be regarded

PROBLEMS OF APPROACH The evidence for the distinctive local culture and religion of Palmyra seems to emerge out of the blue in the second half of the first century BC. Soon after the city's capture by Aurelian in AD 272 (although not immediately afterwards) it disappeared. It is unclear how this sudden appearance of Palmyra's material culture ought to be understood, since it is unclear whether there ever was a time when no-one lived at the oasis. Did 'proper' settlement and construction begin only in the second half of the first century BC, or is the evidence for Palmyra's civilisation to be explained in terms of a so-called epigraphic and sculptural habit 54 Dirven ( 1999). The book includes an invaluable catalogue of the archaeological remains of Palmyrene culture in Dura-Europos, p.196-334. 55 Garbini ( 1998). For the hypothesis of Phoenician presence at Palmyra in the Persian period, see idem (1996a). I have not been able to consult the section on Palmyra in H. Niehr, Religionen in Israels Umwelt (Wiirzburg: Echter, 1998), p.170-86.

56

25

See now Bieliriska (1997), with further references. The mention in Polybius (V,79.8) of a commander over 'the Arabs and neighbouring tribes' in the Seleucid army of Antiochus III in 217 BC with the typically Palmyrene name 'Zabdibelus', on which see Stark (1971), p.85, cannot be taken as positive evidence for any importance of Palmyra in the Hellenistic period. It is to be hoped that the excavations which are presently being conducted in the area south of the wall of Diocletian, which is believed to have been the site of Hellenistic and in any case earlyRoman Palmyra, will cast some new light on the problem. See now Schmidt-Colinet and alAs'ad (2000), and below, p.41 with n.40. 57 See below, p.51-2. On these problems see now also Savino (1999), p.47-93, who assumed a continuous settlement at Palmyra throughout the centuries, and who argued (p.61) that "senza ii sostegno interessato di Roma e senza la conseguente integrazione de facto e de iure nell'Impero, Palmira sarebbe con ogni probabilita rimasta ii centro marginale che era stata per secoli." 58 See MacMullen (1981), p.3-4, on the possible uses of rrmpqioi; (and PATRIUS). The word can both be attached to a deity "for remembrance's sake and from a sense of being a stranger abroad" and to "him who watches over us here at home". An equivalent in Palmyrene Aramaic can be found in PAT 0324 (AD 85), where Shamash is called 'the god of the house of their fathers' ('lh byt 'bwhn), but in a bilingual from AD 140 (PAT 0273), the phrase rrmpc(ioti; 0Eoii; is rendered into Palmyrene by 'lhy' tby', 'the good gods'. 59 See Teixidor (1988).

Introduction

The phenomenon of bilingualism at Palmyra

as imported while simultaneously being subject to a continuous perception of importation. Equally, elements which are among the most traditional ones can still function as 'coming from abroad' .60 Generalisations turn out to be very problematic when one tries to analyse and describe religious features in terms of interaction between an indigenous, oriental substratum and structures which were introduced from the Graeco-Roman world. The various aspects of Greek culture were transmitted into the Near Eastern world in such a way as not only to become a medium by which local culture could find renewed expression, but also to open up a completely new world of historical and cultural knowledge to the Near East. In neither way should Greek culture, 'Hellenism', be seen automatically as opposed to the local traditions. 61 Conditioned by continuously changing historical and cultural circumstances, "it provided the means for a more articulate and a more universally comprehensible expression of local traditions."62 But if it was a vigorous new way for the indigenous population to make their cultural traditions be intelligible, it also made it possible for the Graeco-Romans to recognise their own gods in the appearance of the local deities of the East.63 The representations of divinities in Greek or Graeco-Roman style, which appear alongside the sculptures produced in the local style, have sometimes been classified as 'decorative', although with the new 'iconographic repertoire' other religious experiences, which were originally represented by this repertoire in the Graeco-Roman world, could also enter upon the Near Eastern divine world. 64 It goes without saying that it remains unclear to what degree these experiences maintained their Classical character or became newly interpreted in the East. The process by which cultural elements from one sphere of influence are taken over and reinterpreted in another is often referred to as 'syncretism', an old term which in recent years has enjoyed some more attention again. 65 But the formulation by Drijvers that "a culture assimilates other elements to its own tradition and pattern, but does not mingle or mix everything together" is more satisfactory. 66 Once 'syncretistic forms' are established, they cease to be 'syncretistic' and become part of the culture's 'original' tradition and pattern to which further elements are assimilated. 67 Indeed, it is only natural that those cultural

elements which may already have coexisted for ages and those which were introduced more recently, were constantly renegotiated and kept on influencing each other. Admittedly, a model which emphasises the notion of continuous renegotiation of old and new elements is very dynamic, while the limited nature of the evidence does not help to express that notion. And the religious world of Palmyra may have been more dependent on tradition than the model seems to take into account. But in order to explain the developing nature of a culture, and the way in which the development of a system of beliefs was perceived by the worshippers, the model of an 'additive extension of an open system' will be helpful. 68

26

60 See

e.g. Aijmer ( 1995), p.12, on the cultural process of "generating faked traditions out of a constantly ongoing bricolage". See also Hobsbawm (1983). This paragraph and the following ones form a summary of the more detailed discussion in Kaizer (2000a), esp. p.221-6, with numerous examples to illustrate the argument. 61 Bowersock (1990), p.7; Gawlikowski (1991); Millar (1993a), p.326 and p.523. See now also Sartre (2001), p.851-83. 62 Bowersock (1990), p.9. 63 Thus Sartre (1991), p.491, in his discussion of interpretatio graeca, which he saw, p.496, as nothing more than a superficial veneer. See now idem (2001), p.287-9, for a more balanced view. 64 See also Beard,North and Price (1998), p.164. 65 Aijmer (1995); Stewart (1995). 66 Drijvers ( 1980), p.17. 67 See also Aijmer ( 1995), p.12.

27

THE PHENOMENON OF BILINGUALISM AT PALMYRA Out of ea 3000 inscriptions from Palmyra, mainly written in the local dialect of Aramaic, over 200 are bilingual, consisting of a Greek and a Palmyrene text. 69 Of those bilingual inscriptions, almost half are honorific texts, ea 80 have a funerary character (being either foundation and cession texts, or merely giving the name of the deceased person) and ea 35 are dedications of various kinds. Although Latin only played a minor role in the inscriptions from Palmyra, as it did elsewhere in the Near East (with two exceptions, one being the colonia of Berytus on the Phoe11ician coast, and the other one being the military sector), it should not be completely overlooked here.7° The few trilingual inscriptions, dating between AD 52 and 176, show that, in principle, Latin could be used alongside Greek and Aramaic both in the 'civic' and in the funerary sector. But when the city obtained the formal status of a colonia in the early third century, with which came a whole set of new 'colonial' institutions, Latin inscriptions, as far as the evidence is concerned, disappeared completely. 71 Nevertheless, studies of the terminology of 68 As

formulated by Bendlin (1997), p.52--4, with regard to religious communication in the Roman empire. 69 All inscriptions in the local dialect, including the bilingual and trilingual ones, are now collected in one volume, PAT, by Hillers and Cussini (1996), which lists 2832 texts. This number includes the more than 600 inscribed tesserae, which sometimes only mention a name. The volume, which also includes Palmyrene inscriptions from outside Palmyra (e.g. from the villages northwest of Palmyra, from Dura-Europos and from Rome), by nature leaves out those texts from Palmyra itself or written by Palmyrenes abroad which do not contain any Palmyrene and are drawn up either in Greek, Latin, or Safaitic. See now, as an addition to PAT, the annotated index of dated Palmyrene inscriptions in Taylor (2001). The non-Palmyrene texts from Palmyra remain scattered over the series Inventaire des inscriptions de Palmyre (1930-75, various editors) and various articles and books. A volume dedicated to Palmyra in the series /GLS is in preparation by Dr. Jean-Baptiste Yon (IFAPO, Damascus). 70 See for an overview Millar (1995). 71 As stressed by Millar (1990), p.43; idem (1993a), p.327; idem (1995), p.409. An exception are the two milestones which refer in Latin to the colonia of Palmyra, see idem ( 1990), p.43 n.157. The trilingual inscriptions from Palmyra are set out in full in idem (1995), p.409-12. In addition to this list (PAT0591, 1413, 2801 and 2824, and Cantineau (1933), p.174, n°2B (not in PAT)), two texts should now be added. Firstly, PAT 1350, which gives two lines in Palmyrene

28

Introduction

The phenomenon of bilingualism at Palmyra

the Roman concepts from the time that Palmyra was officially a colonia show a continuation of the complicated interplay between the three languages. 72 In what follows, I will concentrate on the bilingual aspects. If Palmyra was not the only city in the Near East with an Aramaic dialect and Greek koine coexisting, and possibly influencing each other, and thus not the only 'bilingual city' in the region, it still was the only "publicly bilingual city", with its long list of (partly) matching Greek-Aramaic texts. 73 Above all, this becomes clear in what is by far the longest inscription from the oasis, the famous tariff from AD 137, discovered in 1881 by the Russian prince Abamalek Lazarew and now in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.74 As we will see below, a number of offices which were typical of a 'Greek city' appear in the tax law with the Greek names transliterated in Palmyrene.7 5 But if such issues of terminology have convinced many scholars "that Greek influenced Palmyrene in its diction rather more than Palmyrene Greek" 76 , bilingualism at Palmyra is even more important because it provides us with a long list of texts in which the 'indigenous' Oriental deities are formally equated with Greek ones. Even more important indeed, as some modern theories want to see 'syncretism' between all kinds of Near Eastern deities and Graeco-Roman gods without any textual evidence or other factual basis. But the explicit juxtaposition of names coming from different divine worlds also raises questions when it is compared with those Palmyrene inscriptions in which the 'formal syncretism' is either incomplete or not present at all. As we have seen, the religion of Palmyra is usually viewed as almost completely Semitic, and identification of a Palmyrene deity with a Greek one is believed to have been regarded as secondary in Roman times. 77 But it ought to be stressed that a homogeneous approach to the way in which deities appear in bilingual inscriptions does not seem to have existed in Palmyra. Indeed, in a number of texts we do have an explicit identification of an 'Oriental' deity with a 'Greek' one, e.g. the famous equation of Elqonera ('El the creator'?) with Poseidon. 78 But a bilingual inscription from AD 131, on a column from the temple of Baal-Shamin,

is inconsistent with regard to the rendering of the divine names. The text records how the council and the assembly had erected a statue, on a pedestal on one of the columns of the pronaos, for Male Agrippa, 'who had become secretary for the second time', and who had built the sanctuary, the pronaos and the complete portico for Baal-Shamin and Durahlun (and maybe for a third divinity) according to the Palmyrene text, but for Zeus only according to the Greek counterpart (Palmyrene 1.5-7; Greek 1.10-2):79

only, is actually part of a trilingual memento on the top surface of a column drum from the temple of Bel. The original publisher, Cantineau in Inv. IX,5, had read five Greek characters but had missed the Latin. See now Fiema (1986), who gives the following texts: Aounc; Hpac; Za~ou/MNEST LUCIUS ERAS SA[B]UO/dkyryn zbd' ws 'dlt w[--- b ]ny pyf/r'. Secondly, a new trilingual from AD 56/7 has been published by Gawlikowski (1998a) and as Catalogue, n°113. 72 Swain (1993); Millar (1995), p.414-9. 73 Quotation from Millar (1993), p.470 (my italics), and compare Drijvers (1995a), p.31-2. See also Will ( 1992), p.105-6, who argued that, situated in between two worlds, "etre bilingue etait une necessite pour Jes Palmyreniens et rien ne prouve que cette necessite leur parut pesante." 74 For the text of the tariff, see PAT 0259, and in general Matthews (1984), Zahrnt (1986) and Brodersen (1987) with further references. 75 See Bertinelli Angeli (1970), and for some examples below, p.38-9. 76 Bowersock ( 1990), p. 7. I will come back on the question of influence below. 77 In general, see Gawlikowski (1990a), esp. p.2652-3, and idem (1991). 78 PAT 2779 (AD 39): l'lqwnr' - Ilocretorovt. There are many other examples, e.g. Arsu Ares; Baal-Shamin - Zeus; Allat - Athena.

29

bn' hykl' wprn' [wkl mtl]th k[l]h mn kysh lb' lsmn wldr!J[lwn wlgd]h d[hw J mn bny ydy'bl

Translation: ... and he built the temple and the pronaos and the complete portico, from his own purse, for Baal-Shamin, for Durahlun, and for his Gad(?), he being of the Bene Yedibel. 'tOV vaov 'tOV ['tOU] Llto~ cr[u]v 't(\l n:[po]vat(J) [1mt O'UV 't]al~ llAAa[t~ aU'tO'U cr'tOai~]

Translation: ... and (he built) the temple of Zeus with the pronaos and the other columns at his own expense.

*** ' We will return to this important text and its implications below. For the moment, it should be stressed that Baal-Shamin was not the only god at Palmyra whose name was equated with that of Zeus: a number of inscriptions identify the most important deity of the city, Bel, also with the Greek god. The gods Yarhibol and Aglibol always have their names transliterated in Greek, but Greek divine names could also appear in Semitic transliteration, e.g. Nemesis who appears as nmsys in an inscription from Wadi 'Arafa in the Palmyrene from AD 153 (PAT 1568), and in a bilingual one from Dura-Europos from AD 244 (PAT 1078).80 The coexistence and interplay between the various languages and dialects in the Near East raise more questions than can be answered at present. In what follows, I will briefly touch upon a number of issues which deserve much more attention than given here. The mosaic of languages attested in the region ought to be interpreted within a complex web of causes and influences, of which ethnic division and distribution forms only one factor, alongside political, social, economic, cultural and religious aspects. 81 In modern socio-linguistic theories, language plays the main part in establishing and maintaining social identity and 19 PAT 0305 (AD 131). See also CIS II 3959; Inv. 1,2; Dunant (1971), n°44; Milik (1972), p.10-1; Teixidor (1979), p.20-1. See also below, p.79 with n.72-3. 80 On Nemesis see Kaizer (2001). Compare the transliteration of Graeco-Roman divine names in the euhemeristic account in the Syriac Oration of Meliton the Philosopher, see Cureton (1855), with further discussion in Kaizer (forthcoming 2). 8 1 Briquel-Chatonnet (1996), p.9. For an overview of the whole region, see Schmitt (1980).

31

Introduction

The phenomenon of bilingualism at Palmyra

ethnicity. 82 Societal pluralism (on ethnic grounds) is believed to complicate various aspects of communication and negotiation between the various groups of the population, and the important role of language has been further emphasized by its ability to interact with other aspects of ethnicity. Thus "relevant cultural items ... find their expression in the language, and it is often thought that they cannot be expressed in another language." 83 With regard to Palmyra, the question remains whether or how far societal complexity should be connected with linguistic variety. It will be accepted that "culture is acquired, socially transmitted, and communicated in large part by language."84 But it ought to be stressed that social and other senses of identity are not necessarily dependent upon or even linked with any particular form of language. 85 It will be argued below that the combination of the city's religious topography and the divine inhabitants of the various temples and their iconography points towards the coexistence of, and the interplay between, two main cultural spheres of influence. As we will see, it is highly problematic to attach labels to these strata, but a similar distinction is made in onomastic research, which recognises an 'Aramaic' and an 'Arabian' linguistic-cultural world. 86 It has to be stressed, however, that there is nothing in the grammar of the epigraphic material which suggests any spoken 'Arabic' .87 As there are a number of cults in Palmyra which seem to have their origins in the Mesopotamian world, it may be worth pointing to the fact that there is no evidence at all for cuneiform writing at the oasis. 88 If any subdivision of the population of Palmyra, in accordance both with onomastics and with divine names and representations, cannot be based upon linguistic aspects, we are still faced with a public bilingualism, Palmyrene Aramaic vs Greek, and we will have to ask different questions with regard to this

unique linguistic situation. Does the fact that the society of Palmyra as a whole was publicly and thus officially bilingual have any consequences for the individuals within that society? Is it not more likely that within such a 'societal' bilingualism one group was monolingual, while the other was bilingual ?89 The question of whether bilingualism was the norm or the exception within the society cannot be automatically answered from the fact that both honorific and dedicatory inscriptions and funerary texts could be drawn up in both Aramaic and Greek, for it is to be connected with the whole issue of the spread of literacy. But there is no need to be too sceptical, and it seems clear that at least a part of the population of Palmyra can be referred to as 'bilingual'. With regard to Late Antique Syria, Brock has recently argued that "the demarcation between spoken Greek and spoken Aramaic is essentially provided by the distinction between polis and chora'', and that "even in the polis ... Aramaic was clearly the normal language of the lower classes". 90 He continues by saying that "it is in fact likely that large numbers of people, especially in the towns, will have been bilingual, with in most cases Aramaic as the mother tongue", a situation of which Palmyra is believed to be the main example.91 It is therefore striking that a great number of the bilingual inscriptions from that city seem to indicate, quoting Drijvers, "that the Aramaic is translated from the Greek and only understandable in the light of the Greek version." 92 And if the receptor language was the mother tongue of the person who translated the Aramaic from the Greek, rather than the source language93 , this further raises the questions whether the two languages at Palmyra enjoyed equal status, and - considering that the form of at least a number of the bilingual texts seems to be following Graeco-Roman traditions - whether what we see in Palmyra is the imitation of prestige patterns. Nevertheless, the socio-political changes in the period from which our evidence dates, the gradual integration of Palmyra within the framework of the Roman empire with its culmination in the obtaining of the status of colonia and the claim to the Roman throne by members of the leading family within that colonial context, do not seem to have caused basic shifts in the usage of language. And it is equally difficult to deduce any structures of power from 'the language authorized by the Palmyrene state', which theoretically could have been used as a symbol of prestige. Rather than explaining the bilingualism of Palmyra in terms of a clash between an 'Oriental culture' and a 'Graeco-Roman culture', both the Greek language and the Aramaic dialect should be viewed as possible ways in which 'Palmyrene culture' could find expression.94

30

82 See

e.g. Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz (1982) and Appel and Muysken (1987), p.12-6. Appel and Muysken (1987), p.13. 84 Grosjean (1982), p.157. 85 Sachdev and Bourhis (1990), p.228. 86 Piersimoni ( 1994 ), p.96. See below, p.56-60. 87 As Millar (1993a), p.332-3, stresses, the use of the term 'Arabs' to describe the Palmyrenes is entirely ours, see e.g. Dussaud (1955), p.71-117. Compare Gawlikowski (1995a), p.84-5, on the linguistic element at Palmyra within personal and divine names which is called 'Arab', and especially idem ( l 995b ), p.107: "les Palmyreniens n 'ont pas laisse d'indices propres a suggerer que leur idiome de tous Jes jours n' etait pas de l' arameen, meme si beaucoup portaient des noms a consonance arabe. Le critere onomastique ne suffit pas, en bonne methode, a etablir l'origine ethnique des interesses." But not everybody seems to be convinced, see e.g. Maraqten (1995), p.90, who still believes that Arabic was spoken at Palmyra alongside Palmyrene Aramaic, an idea for which I know of no supporting evidence. 88 On the lack of cuneiform at Palmyra, see Dalley ( 1995), p.139. Recently, the hypothesis has been put forward that, since it has been proved that cuneiform continued into the first centuries AD, temples in which Babylonian deities were worshipped preserved their liturgy and regulations "in cuneiform script as it had been for millennia", see Geller (1997), p.47. Whether this can or should be connected to the 'Babylonian' cults at Palmyra remains doubtful. But if Babylonian culture had lost its leading position in the region, its influence had of course not died out. See now Dalley ( 1998), p.116-24. 83

89

Which is, according to modern research, a common situation with regard to 'societal bilingualism'. See Appel and Muysken (1987), p. 1-2. 90 Brock (1994), p.150, referring to the writings of John Chrysostom and Libanius. 91 Brock (I 994 ), p. I 50. Compare the remarks made by J. Teixidor in Briquel-Chatonnet ( 1996), p.20. 92 Drijvers (1995a), p.33. 93 Brock (1979), p.80, quoted by Drijvers (1995a), p.33. 94 Compare Cardona ( 1988), p.11.

32

Introduction

"Although nothing is more common in the world than diglottic situations, it is a fact that bilingualism is by nature a perfectly unstable state of affairs. It is obvious that life would be much easier for everybody if he or she could, in all circumstances, make use of the same phonological, grammatical, and lexical units and resources. This necessarily determines a permanent tendency toward linguistic convergence on all levels. The ultimate outcome of convergence is unilingualism resulting from either merger or elimination .... Yet there may be potent factors which delay, if not stop, this convergence." 95

Whatever these 'potent factors' were in the case of Palmyra, the bilingual inscriptions in Greek and Aramaic continued until after the capture of the city in AD 272. Before the Latin inscriptions from the Tetrarchic period took over, a heavily damaged bilingual from the Central Colonnade records how in AD 279/ 80 a benefactor was honoured because he had made a major contribution to the temple of Arsu/Ares. 96 It is now time to take a brief look at the various scholarly opinions which have been expressed on the relation between Greek and Palmyrene Aramaic. The Aramaic inscriptions from Palmyra can be labelled as 'Middle Aramaic' within the classification of the Aramaic language as proposed by Fitzmyer. Since the time of Alexander the Great, and especially during the Seleucid dynasty, Greek became the official language in the Near East, and that is why command of the official style of Aramaic writing faded gradually. It is this so-called 'development' of Standard Aramaic that Fitzmyer has tried to clarify by identifying a phase labelled Middle Aramaic, in which he noted "the emergence of 'real local dialects'". 97 According to a recent theory, the Palmyrene dialect, as it is known to us through the inscriptions, took over certain features from the Greek which were "fundamentally alien to the Aramaic language" and became, with its lexicological and syntactical peculiarities, rather 'hellenized' .98 In the past, Cantineau had argued that in the first century AD in most of the bilingual inscriptions Greek was secondary, but that in the third century Aramaic was. 99 Teixidor took the opposite point of view: "occasionellement les textes palmyreniennes sont accompagnes d'une traduction grecque, mais en aucun cas le texte grec ne l'emporte sur la partie palmyrenienne." 100 Recently, the same author admitted that often the Greek had been the 'point of departure' in bilingual texts because the honorific inscriptions were modelled on dedications from the Greek world, but he still criticized Drijvers: "il n'hesite pas a considerer comme neologismes des termes non attestes en arameen, comme si cette langue nous etait aussi connue que l'anglais." 101 Cussini, in a study of the funerary cession texts from Palmyra (in which the property of a burial space or of a part of a tomb was transferred), 95

Martinet (1986), p.248. al-As'ad and Gawlikowski (1986/7), n°'7-8 (not in PAT). See below, p.123. 97 Fitzmyer (1979). 98 Drijvers (1995a), esp. at p.33. 99 Cantineau ( 1935), p.5. 100 Teixidor (1981 b ), p.259. 101 Teixidor in Briquel-Chatonnet (1996), p.22. He is supported by Briquel-Chatonnet (1996), p.13: "le risque est alors grand ... de voir )'influence d'une langue etrangere mieux connue dans tout hapax decouvert dans un idiome faiblement atteste."

The phenomenon of bilingualism at Palmyra

33

concluded that "the structural analysis of the extant documents shows the persistence of formulae and legal language already known from earlier Aramaic legal documents" . 102 :he concl_usions of her case study of the transfer of funerary property_ thus differ considerably from the picture drawn by Drijvers. Brock argued, m the late 7Os, that "it is often not possible to say whether the Greek or ~he P_almyrene is the translation: the essential content of the message is indeed identical but the phraseology quite different, each language following its own formulae." 103 And now Taylor has argued that there is no need for one text to be translated from the other in truly bilingual societies, and that therefore both Palmy:ene Aramaic and Greek could have been constructed independently.104 ~ut ~his lea~s. us back t~ the, above-mentioned problems, and to the question what is a truly bilmgual society . Unfortunately, at present a systematic study of the phenome~on of bilingualism at Palmyra does not exist, and since examples can be_ found m support of most of the varying theories, it may not be necessary to thmk of them as mutually exclusive. In any case, when concentrating on the linguistic influences from one language on another, one should not overlook the creative and adaptive aspects of the receptor language. 105 Thus it has been argued that "since vocabulary ... is perha~s the most visible part of a language, lexical borrowing is perceived as affectmg the language in its very being", and the various possible ways in which vocabulary can be transmitted - not only as loan words and loan blends or hybrids, but a~so as loan shifts, in which the meaning of a word is imported but the forms which represent that meaning are native - show a flexibility which makes it unlikely that it is only the donor or source language that determines what is borrowed. 106 Es~ecially with regard to those inscriptions of which it is hardly possible to say which one served as the source language and which one as the receptor, it will be helpful to apply Cardona's exposition of possible ways in which correspondence between the two parts of a bilingual text can be lacking, with each of them containing "singole cellule di informazione": e.g. differences in determination of time or place, in titles of rulers, or in epithets of deities. 107 Finally, one has to take int~ account the possibility that the languages which are in use in a bilingual society can be connected each to different cultural experiences. !OS The unique linguistic situation at Palmyra raises further questions concerning sources in Semitic languages in general. Where relevant, I will compare the religious terminology of Palmyra with vocabulary for religious practice from elsewhere in the Near East. Although Bowersock has argued that the various local Aramaic dialects were too different from each other, and that Greek was

96

102

Cussini (1995), p.248. Brock (1979), p.73. 104 Taylor (forthcoming). 105 Appel and Muysken (1987), p.153-4. 106 Appel and Muysken (1987), p.164-5. 107 Cardona (1988), p.11-2. 108 Appel and Muysken (1987), p.81. 103

Introduction

34

needed to provide a common link for the pagan cult centres, 109 it is more likely that a consistent terminology for religious practices existed which could be understood in the various Aramaic dialects. But in either case a detailed study would be needed to assess any claim. 110

OUTLINE As regards the structure of this book, I have opted to integrate the epigraphic sources, often accompanied by a brief commentary, within the main text, rather than cataloging them in a separate appendix. Occasionally, this may seem somewhat disruptive within the body of argument, but I believe that the inscriptions fulfil a specific function at the locations where they are quoted, in that they reveal more clearly any important terminological characteristics which are relevant to the argument and to the direct context of the respective document. In chapter I, 'Palmyrene society and Palmyrene religion', I will first draw a brief sketch of the internal and external development of the society in which religion was embedded. I will then turn in some detail to the sociopolitical structure of 'the four tribes of the city', which has led scholars to divide the various temples and shrines in the city into 'civic' and 'tribal' ones. Via a discussion of the difficulties concerning the process of urbanization of Palmyra, the validity of the model of 'civic' versus 'tribal' forms of worship will be reconsidered, and a slightly revised classification of the divine world of the city will be proposed, based on the coexistence and interaction of two main spheres of influence. In chapter II, 'Sanctuaries and cults', a framework for the religious world will be constructed in which the epigraphic and iconographic evidence is embedded. Attention will be paid to the religious topography of the city, the architectural forms of the sanctuaries, the iconography of the deities worshipped, and the spread of the cults. In chapter III, 'The rhythm of religious life', I will look in detail at the evidence for cultic regulations, sacrificial practices, festivals and other activities on the religious calendar. In contrast to the prevailing opinion that the ritual activities in Palmyra represented different levels of religious awareness in the same way as the divine world did, I will argue that those ritual activities contributed to the integration of communities into Palmyrene society as a whole. Chapter IV, 'Groups of worshippers, priests and benefactors', will focus on the various elements which all contributed to the religious stratification of Palmyrene society. Finally, after summarising the main points made in this book and seeing where they have led to, I will briefly consider the wider implications that the reflexions expressed in this study of the local religious world of Palmyra may have for the possibility to reshape questions and approaches with regard to the wider Roman Near East. J09Bowersock (1990), p.15-6. Compare Sawyer ( 1999) on the relationship in general between 'sacred' languages and those texts which fulfil particular religious functions. 11

°

I PALMYRENE SOCIETY AND PALMYRENE RELIGION As the continuing progress of Roman rule over the Near East, from the establishment of the provincia Syria by Pompey in the rnid-60s BC onwards, forms the background of this study, it is legitimate to pose the question of whether the various aspects of religious life in Palmyra could have been influenced by the changes which the city's society underwent and by its position within the empire. The building history of the most important temple at Palmyra, the temple of Bel, is roughly contemporaneous with traces in our evidence of growing Roman influence on the city's civic institutions. 1 But Graeco-Roman culture is often taken as not having affected Palmyrene religion further than the facade, and the underlying assumption that the cults remained fully oriental has kept scholars from pursuing questions concerning the relationship between the developing society of the city and the functioning of particular aspects of religious life within society. As we have seen above, it is unlikely that the variety of Palmyrene cults, which came from different cultural backgrounds, ceased to have reciprocal effects and to develop any further during the three hundred years to which the evidence dates. On the other hand, our sources are scanty, sometimes undated, and generally difficult to interpret, and it has to be admitted that internal developments in the religious life of Palmyra are hardly traceable. 2 But if the deficient state of our knowledge about Palmyrene religion does not allow many conclusions as to its internal changes, it is at least certain that the city's society in the 30s BC was different from that in the second half of the third century AD. Considering the important role which religion played in the societies and communities of the Near East, it might be expected that the functioning of at least some features of the religious life of Palmyra developed within the city's gradually changing society. Since these changes took place within the wider framework of Rome's exercise of power over the Near East, we will first take a closer look at the changing relationship between Palmyra and the Roman empire. 3 Whether the 1 See

also Millar (1993a), p.324. The exception is the cult of the so-called Anonymous God, 'He whose name is blessed for ever' (bryk smh l'lm '), who is taken to be, in the words of Drijvers (1976a), p.15, "a development in a more spiritual direction" from the second century onwards. See in general Gawlikowski (1990a), p. 2632-4, with further references, and contra Teixidor (1977), p.122-30 and idem ( 1979), p.115-9. The bilingual text on three or four identical altars from AD 114 (PAT 0340), which were dedicated to the Anonymous God by the city (ri no'),,,i(jmdynt') from treasury funds (mn ksp 'nwst'), ought to restrain us from jumping to conclusions about the functioning of this cult within Palmyrene society. See also below, p.160. 3 On Rome's policy concerning her empire's provinces, see Goodman (1997), p.100-12, with p.247 on Palmyra. See in general the classic studies by Rostovtzeff (1935) and ReyCoquais (1978), and now also Kennedy (1996) and especially Sartre (2001), p.435-527, p.60937 and p.959-90. 2

36

I Palmyrene society and Palmyrene religion

Palmyra and the Roman Empire

effects on the constitution and formal structures of the city, and on the transformation of her outward appearance, were deliberate or not is of course another matter. In any case, the development 'towards Rome' is only part of the story, and produces an arbitrary view. The circumstances under which the religious life of Palmyra kept on flourishing within the city's society in Roman times were subject to a complicated interplay of conservative and innovative elements.

point to either existing or newly established relations between Rome and some small Parthian 'satellite states'. The sections which are still legible mention a certain Alexandros ('lksndrws), explicitly named a Palmyrene ([td]mry'), who was sent by Germanicus (grmnqs) to Mesene, a region near the Persian Gulf, to a certain 'rbz (possibly a local dynast in the same area), and to Sampsigeramus, king of Emesa. 7 Seyrig remarked that it would have been hard for Germanicus to find a better delegate to send on this diplomatic tour than a Palmyrene merchant.8 Although it should be stressed that the inscription does not state explicitly that our man was a merchant, nor that diplomatic activities were concerned, it is known that (slightly later) Palmyrene traders and merchants had various connections in the Gulf area and were sometimes settled there. 9 It is possible that the Roman crown prince visited Palmyra in person during his stay in the Near East, although this hypothesis cannot be confirmed. But the famous tariff of Palmyra from AD 137 refers to some previous pronouncement made by Germanicus, written in a letter to a certain Statilius, obviously during his own stay in Syria. 10 Finally, in the cella of the temple of Bel a Latin inscription was found with a dedication by Minucius Rufus, legatus of the legion X Fretensis, to Drusus, Tiberius Augustus, and Germanicus, IMPERATORIBUS. 11 Their three statues must have been dedicated between Tiberius' accession in AD 14 and Germanicus' death five years later. 12 All this evidence implies that Palmyra had become part of the empire by now, but there is no reason to suppose a Roman military establishment at the oasis at this time. 13 A Roman garrison at Palmyra came into existence only later, probably not before Lucius Verus' Parthian war in the 60s of the second century . 14 The municipal taxes at Palmyra, so it seems, were farmed

PALMYRA AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE A well-known literary reference to Palmyra is the passage in Appian's books on the civil wars, written in the second century AD, in which he described how in 41 BC Mark Antony had ordered his troops to raid the city, ostensibly to punish the Palmyrenes for their trading contacts with the Parthians which gave them an independent position in between the two empires, but in reality (that is, according to Appian) to provide his troops with booty. 4 Appian further records that the Palmyrenes fled with all their belongings to the other side of the Euphrates, leaving a deserted oasis to Antony' s troops. One of the main implications of the story would be that the resources at Palmyra were still such that they could easily be carried away, although one has to realise that Appian' s account is not necessarily entirely correct: the historian also seems to have underestimated the distance from Palmyra to the river. Equally important may be the inference that Pompey's annexation of the provincia Syria in 64 BC seems not to have made much impact on Palmyra. It is therefore implausible that the city was subject to tribute from Pompey onwards, but at least Appian's story implies that Rome always intended Palmyra to be part of her empire. This seems to have certainly become the case by the 20s of the first century AD, when a boundary-stone at ea 75 km northwest of Palmyra marks the limits of the 'regio Palmyrena' as it had been established by the legatus of Syria in AD 11-17, Creticus Silanus. 5 The course of events during Germanicus' stay in the eastern provinces, between AD 17 and his premature death under suspicuous circumstances two years later, will make this clearer. During this period, in which the adopted son of Tiberius put Artaxias III on the Armenian throne, added Commagene to the existing provincia Syria, made Cappadocia into a separate provincia, and received a heavier golden crown from the Nabataean king than the one simultaneously presented to Piso, he also received ambassadors from the Parthian king Artabanus III. 6 It is to these events that an undated and heavily damaged inscription in Palmyrene script should be connected, which seems to

4 Appian, BCV 9. In the seventies of the first century, Pliny's Natural History (V 88) refers to the same advantageous position of the city in beween the Roman and the Parthian empire. 5 Schlumberger (1939), p.61. As Savino (1999), p.56, has stated recently, ''l'eta tiberiana costitui ii punto di svolta nei rapporti tra Palmira e Roma, indipendentemente dalla controversa questione della formale annessione della citta all'Impero." 6 Tacitus, Ann. II 56-8.

7

37

PAT2754. See especially Seyrig (1932c), p.267-8. See Millar (1993a), p.34 n.25, on the reading of 1.6, and now also Schuol (2000), p.47-8. 8 Seyrig (1932c ), p.267. 9 See e.g. PAT 1584 (AD 70?) and 1376 (AD 81?), and the inscriptions from the second century, e.g. PAT 0262, 0274, 0294. On the Palmyrenes and the Gulf region, see Will (1992), p.66-81, and now above all Schuol (2000), p.47-90 and p.380-7, and Young (2001), p.139-48. 10 The pronouncement is referred to in that part of the text which recalls an old edict from the 70s of the first century of the legatus pro praetore C. Licinius Mucianus, see PAT 0259, l.181f in Greek and l.102f in Palmyrene. On the tariff, see above all Matthews (1984), with further references and a translation of the Greek text. Compare Zahrnt ( 1986). 11 Inv. IX,2. 12 They can therefore not originally have been placed in the cella, the first part of which was consecrated only in AD 32 (see below). Seyrig (1932c), p.267 n.6., and appendix I with fig. 23, raised the possibility that Minucius Rufus accompanied Germanicus on his possible visit to Palmyra, referring to a passage in Tacitus, Ann. II,57, where Germanicus is said to have met Piso at the winter camp of the legion X Fretensis at Cyrrhus. 13 See Millar (1993a), p.35. Richmond (1963), p.44, calls the city "a Roman protectorate" due to the policy of Tiberius and Germanicus. 14 For the evidence see Rey-Coquais (1978), p.68-9, and now also Savino (1999), p.59 n.64. See also Millar (1993a), p. 108 and p.135. For the hypothetical presence of Roman troops at the oasis from the Flavians onwards, see Seyrig (1933a), p.155-8. We can only be sure, though, that under Vespasian Palmyra was firmly integrated in the Roman road-system, which is known from a milestone from the mid-70s in the first century, erected at a road which must have led from

38

I Palmyrene society and Palmyrene religion

Palmyra and the Roman Empire

out to foreign Roman freedmen after the incorporation of the city into the empire. 15 Although many details with regard to the city's organisation remain unclear, from a trilingual text it is certain that at least by AD 74 Palmyra had become a 'Greek city', with both an assembly and a council. 16 The Greek word for assembly (of\µoc;) is first attested at Palmyra in a bilingual inscription from AD 24, on a pedestal in the temple of Bel, honouring a certain Malku. 17 His statue was dedicated by the assembly of the Palmyrenes, at least according to the Greek text. For the longer Palmyrene part of the inscription, which may later have been reinscribed as a whole, mentions 'all the merchants who are in the city of Babylon' (t[g]ry' klhwn dy bmdynt bbl). One year later, another statue of the same man was set up, by the treasurers and the assembly of the Palmyrenes (ot apyupo'toµim 1cat IlaAµupllv&v 6 of\µoc;/'nws 'nwst' wgbl tdmry' ). 18 The council (~ouAii) first appears in a trilingual text from AD 74. 19 However, even if the double structure of Palmyra's organisation was based upon that of the standard 'Greek city' in other parts of the empire, it remains uncertain if Roman influences were taken over spontaneously or ordered from above. 20 It is not until the reign of Hadrian that we get some more insight into the city's constitutional situation. From the famous tax law, which was decreed at a statutory meeting of the council in AD 137 ,21 a number of offices are known which were held at Palmyra and which were typical of a 'Greek city'. Most of the Greek terms were transliterated in Palmyrene: 1tpoeopoc;lplhdrwt', ypaµµa'teuc;/

grmtws (of the council and assembly), two apxov'tec;f'rkwny', cruvotKot/sdqy', OEKci1tponot/' srt'. 22 Whether these and other offices were simultaneously or rather gradually introduced cannot be known. A ypaµµa'teuc;/grmfws was honoured in AD 75, and, as we have just seen, the office of treasurer was attested even before the council appears in the inscriptions. 23 The tariff also gives us the new name of the city, officially renamed after the emperor, who had visited the oasis before the year 131, 'Hadriane Palmyra' .24 Although the tax law gives the name in Palmyrene only (hdryn' tdmr), the Greek part of an honorary inscription from the agora from AD 131 explicitly calls the honoured person [' Ao]pwvov IlaAµUp'!lvov. 25 Whether the city, apart from being renamed (and possibly refounded26) also became 'free', is another matter. 27 Of similar importance to Palmyra was the introduction of a new constitution as part of the status of Roman colonia, granted either by Septimius Severus or by Caracalla. 28 The city came to be headed by a pair of annual magistrates known as duumviri, and acquired aediles. Surprising as it might be, though, there are no Latin inscriptions from the time that Palmyra had become a colonia. 29 While the term colonia itself is transliterated in Palmyrene as qlny' (KOAroveia in Greek), the duumviri are referred to as cr'tpmmoi or 'sfrfg' 30 and the office of aedilis is called ayopavoµoc; in Greek and rb swq in Palmyrene. 31 The depiction of the satyr Marsyas on Palmyrene coins, a connection with colonial status, is certainly no proof of the possession of ius ltalicum. 32 The other political change in this

Palmyra to the Euphrates. See AE (1933), n°2O5, and Millar (1993a), p.83 n.15, for further references. The bilingual text from AD 135 (PAT 1397), which records how Marcus Ulpius Abgar and the members of a caravan which had arrived from Spasinou Charax set up a statue for Iulius Maxim us, 'centurion of the legion', in the agora, is usually not taken as indicating the regular presence of Roman troops in the Palmyrene region in this period. See Millar (1993a), p.333. 15 Thus Gawlikowski ( 1998a), p.148, who published the trilingual foundation inscription of the tomb of C. Virius Alcimus and T. Statilius Hermes, dated to AD 56/7 (see also Catalogue, n°113). Almost half a century earlier, in AD 10/1, the tax official on behalf of the Palmyrene community for the 'camel toll' was an important Palmyrene citizen. See PAT 2636, and for this interpretation of the text al-As'ad and Gawlikowski (1993). For a different reading of this inscription, see Aggoula (1994), who saw it as evidence for a separate cemetery for cameldrivers at Palmyra. 16Cantineau (1933), p.174, n°2b (not in PAT). 17 PAT 1352. The Palmyrene part gives as one of the reasons for the dedication the fact that Malku had given the greatest contribution ever towards the building works at the temple of Bel. 18 PAT 1353 (AD 25, not 35 as stated in PAT). The Palmyrene counterpart of ofjµ0t7t1tOV av[opta]v-ra EV o[e] 't(() 'tO'U BTJA.OU tEp(() avoptav'ta OVOµa[ n ~]ou[11,fic; Kat]

Problems with regard to the model of 'civic' vs 'tribal' forms of worship

oriµou Kat Ola 'l'TJtcrµa@v [M 'tEou u1tan1CCOV Kat 'U7t0 'tfic; 1ta'tpiooc; Kat 7tOA.A.T]V 0"7tO'UOT]V Kat avOpElav tvon~ciµevov Kat cr'tpa'tr]yricrav'ta 7tA.ElO"'tU1Ct "CEtµac; E'lf11lO"a't0 Eq>t7t7tOV avoptciv'ta Kat at 'tfocrapec; 4>u1..at tv \,oiotc; \,epoic; t~ ioirov avoptciv'tac; "CEO"O"apec; ©V "CO'U"COV XrovEt'tUA.rJ apE'tf\ciA.taV 1tapacrxov'ta EV 1tcicrmc; 5 cruvooiapximc; Kat 7t0A.A.a Kat Ota 'taU'ta E~ \,oirov avaA.rocrav'ta Kat 7t(lcrav 1tOA.Et'tiav 1..aµ1tp&c; Kat tvM~roc; EK'tE[Mcrav'ta] 'tEtµfic; xaptv fwuc;

[5] 10

Translation: At the command of the council and the assembly, the four tribes (set this up for) Ogelos, son of Makkaios, son of Ogelos, son of Agegos, son of Sevira, because of all his excellence and courage, and because he took part in frequent campaigns against the nomads and always provided security for the merchants and caravans, during all his terms as caravan-leader, and because he sp~n_t much on his own costs on these, and he accomplished all his public life bnlhantly and in high esteem, in his honour, the year 510 (AD 199).

btw!J.yt bwl' wdms $lmy' 'ln 'rb'tyhwn dy 'gylw br mqy 'gylw swyr' dy 'hd lh 'rb' p/J.zy' lyqrh bdyl dy spr 55 PAT I 378. See also Ingholt (I 932), p.289 (Greek part only); Inv. X,44; Gawlikowski (1973a), p.28-9; Matthews (1984), p.168.

48

I Palmyrene society and Palmyrene religion

lhwn b'strfgwn sgy'n wb~ryfJ,yn wsyryn dy slq bhn 'qly dy 'pq mn kysh npqn rbrbn wsy' tgry' bk[ ~bw klh w'bd pity' sbyfJ,yt wnhwryt byrfJ, tbt snt 510

Problems with regard to the model of 'civic' vs 'tribal' forms of worship

5

Translation: By decree of the council and the assembly, these are the four statues of Ogeilu, son of Makkai, (son of) Ogeilu, Shewira ('gylw br mqy 'gylw swyr'), which the four tribes made for him in his honour, because he did good to them in many campaigns and in enterprises(?) and (with regard to) caravans on which he accompanied them, because he spent, of his own funds, great sums, and he aided the merchants in every possible way and he conducted his public life in a praiseworthy and brilliant way. In the month Thebet, the year 510 (January, AD 199).

*** The main problem with regard to the 'four tribes' is that the number of Palmyrene groups which have been identified as tribes have been reckoned as much more than four, to be precise fourteen according to the most recent study of them. 56 If Rostovtzeff argued that the primacy of 'the four tribes' was due to the fact that they were "les plus aristocratiques" 57 , in a classic article Schlumberger showed that the four tribes together formed the civic body of Palmyra. 58 This thesis was modified by Gawlikowski, who denied the origin of 'the four tribes' in the historical or mythical tradition of the city, and stressed their official and artificial character instead. 59 Almost simultaneously, and like Gawlikowski, Van Berchem argued for the coexistence of two types of tribes at Palmyra. According to him the majority of the names formed by bny, 'the sons of', were traditional Arab clans, while the specifically named 'four tribes of the city' were necessarily territorial tribes. 60 Van Berchem also argued that this construction was already introduced under Roman influence in the early first century AD. 61 Recently, Sartre argued 56 Piersimoni (1995a), p.252-3. They are summed up in eadem (1995b ), II, p.532-41. Gawlikowski ( 1973a), p.31-41, had counted their number as seventeen. 57 Rostovtzeff ( 1935b), p.148, referring to lngholt ( 1932), p.288. 5 8 Schlumberger (1971). 59 Gawlikowski ( 1973a), p.26-52: "Les quatre tribus ont bien constitue la cite, mais seulement a une epoque plus recente que ne le pense D. Schlumberger" (p.31) and "celles-ci sont creees artificiellement pour Jes besoins du gouvernement municipal" (p.47). 60Van Berchem (1976), p.170-3. 61 Van Berchem (1976), p.172-3. He argued that the four treasurers which are mentioned together in a text from AD 114 (PAT 0340) were the first magistrates of the Palmyrene people and as such represented the four tribes already in the inscription from AD 25 (PAT 1353). See on these two texts above, p.39. Starcky and Gawlikowski (1985), p.41, proposed to connect the reformation of the tribal organisation with the introduction of the council instead, either in the Flavian period or already under Nero: "une nuee de clans fondes sur la parente, d'importance fort inegale, est remplacee dans la vie politique par quatre tribus territoriales qui partagent entre elles le corps civique."

49

that there is a priori no connection between former family structures and the new civic tribes: "La tribu civique est un mode de repartition des citoyens independant des structures familiales." 62 It is in any case implausible that each of the four tribes had its own assembly .63 As we have seen above, the council first appears alongside the assembly at Palmyra in a trilingual text from AD 74: ri [~ouA]ii 1rn1. 6 [ofiµoUAT] in bilingual inscriptions. The above-mentioned number of fourteen tribes at Palmyra is reached by counting only those groups which are introduced by either phd or (\>UAT], but the problems increase with the consideration that the common formula dy mn phd bny X, used to state that someone is 'from the p'1,d of the sons of X', is often abridged to dy mn bny X, 'who is from the sons of X'. Partly due to the amount of groups designated as 'the sons of X' which were revealed by the tesserae, Palmyrene 'tribes' were once believed to have numbered around fifty, a number which was in the first place reduced through studies of Gawlikowski and Milik. 97 Schlumberger had already drawn attention to the fact that there are only four Palmyrene tribes (and one with a Roman name) which are explicitly labelled UAT]. His hypothesis that this Greek term was only employed "pour designer les tribus constitutives de la Cite" did, however, not completely match the evidence of those groupings believed to have been one of 'the four tribes' .98 I will come back to those problems below.

90 Van de Mieroop ( 1997), p. l 08. He also argued that, both in the Babylonian and Assyrian societies, the same could be said in regard to priests and bureaucrats, p.110: "These were united by their affiliation to one of the public institutions, the palace or a temple." Compare Piersimoni (1995b), II, p.530. It may be worth referring here to some remarks on the "fluidity about the concept of the tribe" with regard to Saba, made by Bees ton ( 1979), p.117, where the author carefully raises the possibility that what are considered specific ethnic designations of Sabaean tribes might have evolved out of professional associations. 91 Will (1992), p.125. On associations elsewhere in the Roman empire, see briefly Matthews (1986), p.405-6. See also below, p.213-20. 92 Bourriot ( 1976), p.1392. 93 Collart and Vicari (1969), p.241. See now also Piersimoni (1995a), p.257, and (1995b), II, p.531-2. 94 Teixidor (1977), p.140, identified the caravan trade as the main reason for Palmyra's "ethnic cohesion". But see idem (1984), p.47, where he argued that Palmyrene commerce was not a civic affair but a tribal one instead, and idem (1987), p.54, where he stated that it was not "la ville" but "la tribu" that profited from the caravan trade, speculating that "Jes terres possedees par la tribu permettaient a celle-ci l'elevage de betes de somme necessaires au trafic caravanier." Recently, the role of the caravan trade in the "political unification of the tribes" has been again suggested by Dirven (1996), p.49. Gawlikowski ( 1994a), p.31, argued that most of the caravans were "manifestly of major public interest and supported by the municipal authori-

ties". For the coined term 'caravan city' see Rostovtzeff (1932) and now also Millar ( 1998a) and Savino (I 999), p.75-88. Savino put forward the hypothesis (p.86) that at Palmyra "la partecipazione dell a cittadinanza per finanziare le spedizioni doveva essere consistente e diffusa", by analogy with the caravans from Mecca in the sixth and seventh centuries AD. 95 Anbar (1991), p.77-8. 96 Piersimoni ( 1995a), p.252. 97 Gawlikowski ( 1973a), p.31-41, and Milik ( 1972), p.16-40. For the tesserae, see RTP and Dunant ( 1959). 98 Schlumberger ( 1971 ), esp. p.122-3 and p.132.

56

I Palmyrene society and Palmyrene religion

Classification of the divine world of Palmyra

CLASSIFICATION OF THE DIVINE WORLD OF PALMYRA

fact that he often appears in the Safaitic inscriptions does not necessarily make him a 'god of nomads'. Shamash at Palmyra was conceived as a male deity (e.g. sms 'lh byt 'bwhn in PAT 0324; sms 'lht] in PAT 0297), but according to the ancient Arabs the sun was a goddess. 101 As for Allat, the fact that she is known as 'Arab' is partly based upon later Islamic sources. 102 In any case, the majority of divine names in the Near East were not exclusively linked to one particular society only (even if deities such as Yarhibol and Malakbel seem to appear in a Palmyrene context only). 103 A similar distinction between two mutually affective spheres of influence has long been recognised in the study of onomastics: "The onomastics of Palmyra seems to show the presence of two linguistic-cultural worlds - the Aramaic and the Arabian one - that interact with each other; the former may be defined as a more archaic type and the latter as more innovative." 104 But it cannot be stressed enough that onomastic stratification, both on a human and on a divine level, is insufficient to reveal any ethnicity. In addition, as we have seen above, there is nothing in the grammar of the epigraphic material from Palmyra which suggests any spoken 'Arabic', just as there is no proof of the continuation of cuneiform writing with regard to the so-called 'Babylonian' cults in the city.105 As Gawlikowski has pointed out, throughout history the term 'Arab' has served to describe a particular (nomadic) way of life rather than to designate ethnic origin. 106 If it is right to distinguish two main religious traditions at work in Palmyrene society, it will be wrong to attempt to stick similar labels onto the inhabitants of the city, and to divide them into 'Arabs' and 'non-Arabs'. For what it is worth, in contrast to the royal house of Hatra, where the ruler is identified as 'king of Arab' (mlk' dy 'rb or mlk' d'rb), Zenobia's son Vaballathus is rather

So far, I have tried to point out the difficulties concerning 'the four tribes' of Palmyra, an artificially constructed sociopolitical model which was probably introduced under Roman influence. A full understanding of the process of the urbanization of the city remains beyond our reach, and too often the mere use of the term 'tribe' seems to implicate certain presuppositions concerning a social grouping's make-up and how a society came into existence which are deceptive in themselves. It follows that, when applied to the Palmyrene temples, the designation 'tribal', with its connotations of worship of 'ancestral deities' by genealogically based clans and families, is likely to cause problems when confronted with the evidence. It is true that epigraphic research has shown that most of the sanctuaries are connected with particular groups of people, but to explain this phenomenon by making use of a model based upon the concept of 'the four tribes of the city and their respective sanctuaries' is methodologically incorrect. The religious world of Palmyra, including the sacred places of worship, has roots which are older than the Roman period to which almost all our evidence dates. A classification of the various temples and shrines at the oasis therefore asks for a different approach, which should not be based upon later sociopolitical concepts. The temple of Bel was by far the most important temple of Palmyra in the Roman period and also performed certain municipal functions. But from this it does not automatically follow that all other sanctuaries were 'tribal' in any sense. Instead, the combination of the city's religious topography and the divine inhabitants of the various temples and their iconography points towards the coexistence of, and the interplay between, two main cultural spheres of influence, resulting in the worship of a group of deities centred around Bel on the one hand and of Baal-Shamin, Allat, Shamash and their associates on the other. As we will see, if different groups of the population had different religious traditions, they could still share conceptions of how to visualise the divine world. The main problem is how to define the two main strata. The group of Bel, including 'indigenous' Palmyrene gods such as Yarhibol and Aglibol, points to an Aramaean layer which had undergone Mesopotamian influences. The deities centred around Baal-Shamin, Allat and Shamash seem to have entered the divine world of Palmyra much later in history, as is suggested by the religious topography of the city: the two excavated sanctuaries of these deities were situated in the northern and the western part of Palmyra, in what once had been the outskirts of the city. This second group of deities is often assumed to have been the focus of worship of a semi-nomadic, Arab group of the Palmyrene population, which arrived at the city via the south of Syria. 99 But any such definition carries its own contradictions. Baal-Shamin was of course not an 'Arab' deity, but was of Phoenician descent instead and soon gained in popularity in South Syria. too The 99 Thus, most recently, Dirven ( 1999), p.78-81: "The Bene Ma 'zin ... were at least partly of Arab descent" and "the nomadic origin of members of the Bene Ma 'zin is apparent from the predominantly Arab character of the deities venerated in both sanctuaries." 100 As acknowledged by Dirven ( 1999), p.80, who still argued that "in all likelihood nomads

57

coming from the west of Syria introduced his cult to Palmyra." For further references see Gawlikowski (1990a), p.2626. 101 See Gese, Hofner and Rudolph (1970), p.272-7, on the Sun goddess in Ancient South Arabia, who is (p.273) "meistens mit dem allgemeinen sams und als 'Herrin von .. .' bezeichnet." 102 See for a comprehensive overview of Allat throughout the ancient world Krone ( 1992). It has now been argued, by Rosenthal (1996), p.261-2, that "Allat goes back to a personalized feminine plural of /l", the latter "being no doubt the prehistoric Semitic term to express the idea of divine being." It may be of some interest that there was also an Akkadian deity Allatum. 103 Influenced by Macdonald (1998), p.188, on personal names in the Nabataean or Safaitic inscriptions. Macdonald wisely pointed out the dangerous belief in "names which were exclusive to a particular community and which can be used to identify its members wherever they are found." 104 See, most recently, Piersimoni (1994), esp. at p.96. 105 See above, p.30. See also Gawlikowski (1995a), p.85, who contrasted "la presence d'un clement linguistique arabe" with a much older layer at Palmyra: "Autour de ce noyau, des populations arabes se sont progressivement agglutinees et bient6t assimilees." Compare idem (1995b),p.107. 106 Gawlikowski (1995a), p.87. See also Eph'al ( 1982), who argues that 'Arab' designated desert dwellers, and that the term originated in the Fertile Crescent and only later could be used for the peoples from the Arabian peninsula as well. Compare, in contrast, the way in which Dussaud ( 1955), p.71, referred to the Palmyrenes, whom he saw as one of the prime examples of Arabs penetrating Syria: "cc groupe cthniquc".

I Palmyrene society and Palmyrene religion

Classification of the divine world of Palmyra

placed in contrast to any notion of 'Arabness', when he received the following Imperial victory titles in a Latin inscription: PERSICUS MAX/MUS, ARABICUS MAX/MUS, ADIABENICUS MAXJMUS. 107 But one should certainly not forget that "ethnicity, as always, is an ascription, or self-ascription, rather than a mere fact." 108 In any case this tentative and rough division of the divine world into two main strata is only a first and preliminary step taken towards a better understanding of the way in which the religious life of Palmyra functioned. The two groups do not form closed systems and some of the divine names do not seem to fit in either category. As we have seen above, one will have to take into account those notions of continuous renegotiation and reinterpretation which the limited nature of the evidence does not help to express. 109 And since worship did not take place only in a 'purely religious' context, attention needs to be paid also to the various groupings that made up the city's local society and that combined certain socioeconomic and political functions with their religious concerns. Furthermore, as we will see throughout this book, the conventional names given to the various temples (and which I will necessarily employ myself) present a misleading picture of a clear-cut organisation of the divine world, a phenomenon which can be found elsewhere in the Near East as well. Even if it is possible at Palmyra, in contrast such as Duraos or Hatra, to identify the building in ..,_ hich e i raphic and sculptural material was foun , an its surroun 1 , as the sanctuary 'of' a partlc~L oes n eem o e su 1c1ently stressed that in most of t h ~ more than one deity was worshipped. II0 --Ttleilivision of the divine world ofPalmyra into two-inain strata which come from different religious traditions is most dramatically visible in the coexistence of two so-called 'supreme' gods, Bel and Baal-Shamin, both of whom were rendered with 'Zeus' in bilingual inscriptions. Naturally, this "paradox in the religion of Palmyra" has attracted a lot of interest amongst scholars. 111 Both deities had their own sphere of influence, and there is now enough evidence to suggest that their simultaneous appearance in the city was not considered problematic or ambiguous at all. There is certainly no reason to follow Feldtkeller's recent effort to reinforce the old theory of rivalry between Bel and Baal-Shamin. 112 In a way, it is inherent to a polytheistic religious system that many so-called supreme deities were available for worshippers. Bel, 'the Lord', and BaalShamin, 'the Lord of the Heavens', are not incompatible, and it has been argued that, as some aspects of their iconography and epithets elsewhere in the Near East

indeed show, they had different 'fields of interest', one being a 'cosmic' deity, the other a provider of 'fertility' . 113 As we will see below, groups of the population with different religious traditions could still share conceptions of how to visualise the divine world, and a multiplicity of forms does not automatically imply the creation of potential conflicts. A Palmyrene inscription from AD 137 from the temple of Allat records how a benefactor had dedicated valuable objects to deities of both religious traditions. The gift was made in gold and silver to Allat, who is specifically labelled 'his goddess' (l'lt 'str' 'lhth), in gold to Bel, Yarhibol, Aglibol and Astarte (lb! wlyr!J,bwl wl'glbwl wl'strt), and in silver to Baal-Shamin, Durahlun and Belti (lb'lsmn wdr!J,lwn wlblty). 114 On the one hand this invaluable text clearly distinguishes between the most important deities worshipped in the temple of Bel and those whose cult was practised in the first place in the temple ofBaal-Shamin. On the other hand it also makes clear beyond doubt that the worship of various supreme gods and goddesses, coming from different religious traditions, was not mutually exclusive. To this inscription can be added an inscribed relief from AD 121, now in Lyon [PLATE III], which will strengthen the argument. II5 The surprisingly symmetrical relief shows four deities, two bearded ones sitting on a throne on the sides, and two smaller ones with a nimbus and wearing military costume in the middle. The accompanying inscription records that the sculpture (msby' 'ln, 'these images') was made 'for Bel and for Baal-Shamin and for Yarhibol and for Aglibol' (lb! wlb'lsmn wlyr!J,bwl wl'glbwl). The figures in the middle are almost identical, but for the fact that the one on the left has a crescent behind his shoulders. The senior god enthroned on the left is carrying a stick with an ear of corn on top, and is accompanied by a small bull. His colleague on the right is carrying a stick with a small globe on top, and is accompanied by a griffin. With our present knowledge of Palmyrene religion, it is of course clear who is who: seated on the left is Baal-Shamin, with Aglibol (with crescent and nimbus) and Yarhibol (with nimbus only) standing in the middle, which means that Bel is seated on the right. Taking into account that Bel, when depicted at all, appears beardless and armed, it is clear that his appearance on the relief from Lyon was determined by a desire to create an image which was parallel to the standard looks of Baal-Shamin. As the name of the dedicant of the relief seems to hint at a connection with the group of worshippers associated with the temple of BaalShamin, Briquel-Chatonnet and Lozachmeur have argued that it may be "dans le milieu des devots de Ba'alsamin que s'est ressenti le besoin d'organiser ces representations dispersees de la divinite supreme." II6 But it remains unexplained why Yarhibol and Aglibol, the two gods mentioned in the inscription which

58

/LS 8924. For Hatra see Beyer (1998), e.g. H193-9. Millar (1987b), p.157. 10 9 See above, p.25-7, and, in more detail, Kaizer (2000a). 11 For the material from Dura-Europos, see Millar (1998b ). With regard to Hatra, the names given to the various shrines seem to be even more arbitrary, see Kaizer (2000b). 111 See, most recently, Dirven (1999), p.75-8, with all further references. The quotation is from p.76. 112 Feldtkeller (1996), esp. p.27-8 and p.34. At p.27: "Zwischen Baalshamin und Bel bestand ein Verhaltnis der Konkurrenz um den Anspruch des hiichsten Gottes von Palmyra." 107

59

10s

°

113

See e.g. Gawlikowski ( 1990a), p.2611-3 and p.2626. Drijvers (1995b), p.111. See for the text below, p.249. 115 The relief had already been published by Briquel-Chatonnet and Lozachmeur ( 1993 ), but seems to have escaped notice. It is to be expected that the new publication in a memorial volume for E. Will, by the same authors ( 1998), will attract more attention. For the best photographs, however, see the earlier publication. The relief's provenance is unknown. 116 Briquel-Chatonnet and Lozachmeur ( 1998), p.143. 114

60

I Palmyrene society and Palmyrene religion

'The four tribal sanctuaries'

records the dedication of the temple of Bel in AD 32, are depicted here as well. The relief may serve as another warning that the divine world of Palmyra does not answer to any logical modern descriptions.

'THE FOUR TRIBAL SANCTUARIES' We have seen above how 'the four tribes of the city' set up statues for individuals which were honoured by the city, 'each in their own sanctuary' (pf/z plJ,z bt 'lhyhl eKacr['tll] Ev i[oiqi lepq>] or nwyt s'wr plJ,z' bt 'lhyhwnl£v ioioti:; lepoii:;). 117 The respective sanctuaries are believed to be listed in two bilingual inscriptions which record how statues were erected in honour of Soados by the members of the caravans whom he had helped. It ought to be stressed, however, that the texts themselves do not refer to the four tribes or to any tribal status of the sanctuaries which are mentioned. Moreover, they are dated to AD 132 and 144 respectively, which means that the youngest of those texts which list the four temples is still almost thirty years earlier than the first attestation of 'the four tribes'. The inscription from AD 132 was found in the temple of Baal-Shamin. The members of a caravan which had arrived at Palmyra from Vologasias (near Seleucia on the Tigris) set up four statues of Soados: one in the 'Sacred Garden', one in the temple of Arsu/Ares, one in the temple of Atargatis (the Palmyrene is damaged but must have read 'tr'th, in analogy with the second text which is quoted below), and one "here" (Ev'ta-u0a/tnn). Unfortunately both the Greek and the Palmyrene are damaged at this point, but with regard to the provenance of the large inscription the gaps can be filled in with reasonable certainty: EV lepq> Lltoi:; (in the temple of Zeus) and (b)bt b'lsmn (in the house of Baal-Shamin): 118 Loaoov ~ro11,wooui:; 'toi:i Loaoou [eucre~fi Kat] qnM1tmptv Kat Ev 1to11,11,01i:; Kat [µeya11,oti:;] Katpoii:; yv11criroi:; K[at tAo'teiµroi:;] 1tapacr'tav'ta wii:; £µ1t6[poti:; Kat 'tati:;] cruvooi[a]ti:; Kat wii:; EV Ouo11,oyacrta[ot] 1t0Ael,'tatc; Kat 1t[ a]V'tO'te aetOl]O"UV'ta ['I']uxfii:; Kat oucriai:; u1ti::p 't&v 't1J 1ta'tpi01 Ota[e]pov[ 't]rov Kat Ota 'tO'U'tO Myµacrt Kat [ 11icr]µacrt Kat civoptticrt 011µocrioti:; Kat t[mcrw11,]aii:; Kat otmayµan no~AtKiou MapK[£A,A,OU 'tO'U Otacr]riµo'ta'tOU Kupiou U1tU'ttK[ OU 'tE'tEtµri]µtvov Otacrrocravm OE Kal 'tT]V [1tpocr]ci'troi:; ci1to Ouo11,oyatcrta[ooi:;] 1tapayevoµtv[riv cruv]ooiav EK 'tOU

5

10

1teptO"'t Lltoi:;] eva OE [e]v iepq> a11,cret eva M [e]v ie[p0] "Apeoi:; Kat 'tov 'tE'tap'tov tv iep4> 'Ampya'tetoi:; ota Ayeyou lapt~ro11,eoui:; Kat 0mµapcrou 'tO'U 0atµapcrou cruvootapxrov E'toui:; 44[3] µ11voc; TTept'ttOU

61

15

20

Translation: (For) Soados, son of Boliados, son of Soados, pious and lover of the fatherland, who had been sincere and generous in many [and great] opportunities to the merchants and to the caravans and to the citizens at Vologasias, and who had always been generous in spirit and concerning tihe vital interests of his hometown, and because of this he was honoured with decrees and with positive proposals and with public statues and with letters and edicts from Publicius Marcellus, the most distinguished lord consular governor, and because recently he saved the caravan which came down from Vologasias from the great danger threatening it. This caravan, because of his excellence and his 'greatness of mind' and his piety, erected four statues of him, one here [in the temple of Zeus], one in the Sacred Garden, one in the temple of Ares, and the fourth in the temple of Atargatis, under the caravan leaders Agegos son of Iariboleos and Thaimarsos son of Thaimarsos. Year 443, month Peritios (February, AD 132).

w[---1 bdlrm[---1 wb[---1 wf'[--:J m~bt bsm bwl' [wdm]s' [---] wyqryn sgy'yn w'[p pw]blwqyws mrql[ws] hgmn' mrn b'g[rt'J wbdy[!g]m' shd lh wsbf/h wbd[y] s[y'} syr[t'J dy [sl]qt mn 'lgsy' bmd'm [w]swzbh mn qdns rb d[y] hwt bh [h}nwn bny syrt' dh 'bdw lh ~lm[y' 'ln 'rb']' lyqrh 'IJ,d tnn bt [b'lsmn w'IJ,d bt 'r}~w w'IJ,d bgnt' 'lym w'rb't' [bt 'tr'th brb]nwt syrt' t/[ggw b]r [yrf/bwl' wtymr]~w br tymr~w [byrlJ sb!] [§nt 4)43

5

10

15

Translation:[--- --- ---] statues in the name of the boule and demos [------]and PAT2769 (AD 171) and 1063 (AD 198), Sec above, p.44-7. 11s PAT0I97. See also Dunant (1971), n°45; Gawlikowski (1973a), p,30; Teixidor (1979),

111

p.36-9; Matthews (1984), p,167,

many honours and also Publicius Marcellus the consular governor, our lord, gave testimony to him and praised him by let[ters] and by a de[cr]ee, and because he helped the caravan that came down from Vologasias in every way and saved it

I Palmyrene society and Palmyrene religion

'The four tribal sanctuaries'

from great danger in wh[ich] it found itself. They, the members of the caravan, made for him these four statues in his honour, one here in the house [of BaalShamin and one in the house of] Arsu, and one in the Sacred Garden and the fourth one [in the house of Atar'ate], during the term as caravan leader of Hagegu son ofYarhibola (J,{ggw b]r [yrlJ,bwl']) and Taimarsu son ofTaimarsu ([tymr]:fw br tymr$W), in the month Shebat, the year 443 (February, AD 132).

Translation: [The four bronze statues], this one in [the temple of Athen]a, one in the Sacred Garden, one [in the temple of Are]s and one in the temple of Atargatis [which] have been erected next to the first four statues that were erected by the first caravan for Soados, son of Boliades, son of Soados, son of Thaimisamsos, who is pious and patriotic, through his benevolence and magnanimity towards the citizens in every way adorned with distinctions and very great honours the caravan of all Palmyrenes which came back from Vologasias erected, because he advanced in a distinguished manner taking with him a large force and he protected (them) against Abdallathos, a man from Eeithe and the [robbers] that were brought together by him from [---] who for a long time were lying in wait in order to harm the (caravan)[---] he preserved them. Therefore they erected for him [--] (these statues) to honour him, when Male, son of Sumonos [--- and] Ennibelos, son of Sumonos, Bazekes, were caravan leaders in the year 455 in the month of Daisios (June, AD 144).

62

1.7: wbdy[fg]m', 'and by a decree'. See Hillers and Cussini (1992), p.35-6. 1.9-1 O: mn qdns rb d[y J hwt bh: word division after Hillers and Cussini (1992), p.36-7. 1.11-3: On the dissimilatory loss of the preposition -b- in this and the following text, see Hillers (1995b), p.74-6.

*** The second text which lists four sanctuaries is dated to AD 144 and was found in the temple of Allat. The same Soados is honoured with four statues, which are set up 'next to the first four statues that were erected by the first caravan'. However, despite some lacunae, only three of the sanctuaries from the text from AD 132 reappear: the 'Sacred Garden', the temple of Arsu/Ares and the temple of Atar?atis/Atar'ate. But the first of the sanctuaries listed, where the statue accompanymg this inscription was set up, is a different one. The Greek part is damaged, but the Palmyrene counterpart reads (b)bt 'lt, and as we will see below, the restoration ev [iEpq> 'A01w ]fo; is certain: 119 [-raUATJ •Proµavci and the q>UATJ ~toi;, which are known to us thanks to the discovery of a papyrus from Egyptian Oxyrhynchus, were amongst the civic tribes of Bostra, as "leur nom seul suffit a le prouver." 135 We have already seen that Sartre argued that newly installed civic tribes were never based on earlier

Schlumberger (1971 ), p.132. This q)\);\,11 MayEpT]vciiv is only once attested at Palmyra, in a foundation inscription from a tomb which dates to April, AD 59 (PAT 0469). However, Schlumberger certainly has a point when he argued that the case of the Bene Komare shows that "une tribu pouvait etre connue, en palmyrenien et en grec, sous deux noms differents." 129 Piersimoni (1995a), p.253. The same is argued for the Fabia and the Sergia tribes, who are never designated by the Palmyrene or Greek term. 130 Sartre ( 1996), p.387. 131 Thus van Berchem (1976), p.172-3. Sartre (1996), p.399 n.36, makes the connection only between the four tribes and the four treasurers from AD 114. The relevant texts are PAT 0340; C/S II 3994 (AD 114) and PAT 1353; Inv. IX,12 (AD 25). See on the text from AD 114 also below, p.199-200 n.144. 132 PAT 1067, with Dirven (1999), p.199-202 (dedication of temple, from Dura-Europos) and PAT0461 (funerary text) respectively. 133 PAT0190 (honorary text, AD 32). The inscriptions from the foundations of the temple of Bel are PAT 1512 and 1516. See also Gawlikowski (1973a), p.58. 134 Sartre ( 1982), p.87: "Cela est nature! puisque, !ors de la creation des nouvelles cites dans le Hawran, certaines tribus bien representees dans la population de telle ou telle cite ont du donner leur nom a une tribu civique." See also idem ( 1996), p.386. 135 Sartre ( I 982), p.84. 128

120 PAT 1062. See also Milik (1972), p.13-4; Gawlikowski (1973a), p.29-30; Matthews (1984), p.166-7. See also below, p.150-1. 121 The tetradeion is believed to have been the agora, see e.g. Matthews (1984), p.167. It cannot have been the now reconstructed Tetrapylon, as this structure was built to hide a slight deflection of the line of the Central Colonnade only in the third century. See now Baranski (1995), p.45 and fig. I. 122 PAT 1063. See above, p.46-7. 123 Gawlikowski (1973a), p.28; Milik (1972), p.37. 124 For this proposed identification and the ones which follow, see in the first place Gawlikowski (1973a), p.48-52, upon whom all students of the topic built. On the 'Sacred Garden', see below, p.124-43. 125 Thus, most recently, Dirven (1999), p.78. See also Drijvers (1995a), p.33, who argued that both were religious centres of the same 'tribe'. See on these two temples below, p. 79-88 and p.99-108. 126 On which see below, p.116-24. 127 Already proposed by Schlumberger ( 1971 ), p.132, and most recently by Dirven ( 1999), p.50 n.43, p.74 and p.234. Contra Milik ( 1972), p.30. See also below, p.153-4 and p.253-5.

65

I Palmyrene society and Palmyrene religion

66

familial structures. 136 But this has recently been questioned by Gawlikowski, who argued that it is difficult to see how an older familial or tribal name was reused for groups who had had no relation whatsoever with the original grouping named as such. He also put forward the hypothesis that the Bene Komare, the Bene Mattabol and the Bene Ma 'ziyan from the Roman period were the same as the traditional groupings with those names, and that, under Claudius, all others were grouped together in the newly installed q>UATJ KAauoiai;. Indeed, a fragment from the agora, from a later period but probably re-inscribed from an older inscription, refers to 'the three tribes' ([t]lt pf/zy'). 137 But the context is completely unknown, and the process by which the system of civic organisation at Palmyra developed must remain a hypothesis. 138 The groups and subgroups which played a role in this process will be encountered continuously as we take a detailed look at the different aspects of the religious life of the city. It is time to turn to the various sanctuaries and cults.

Sartre (1996), p.386.-See above, p.48-9. Gawlikowski (forthcoming). The possibility was already accepted by Sartre (1996), p.399 n.35: "Cette unique mention des trois tribus, s'il agissait de tribus civiques, pourrait nous renvoyer a la periode precedant la creation de la Claudias." The inscription from the agora is PAT 1385 (Inv. X,61). Unfortunately, the dating formula is almost completely damaged. 138 In any case, the very recent statement by Ball (2000), p.74, that "Palmyra was founded as a confederation of four Arab tribes: the Komare, Battabol (sic!), Maazin, and the 'Amlaqi or •Amalaqi", can be disregarded. Ball argues that the 'Amlaqi or 'Amalaqi was the tribe to which Odenathus and Zenobia belonged, and wants to substantiate this claim (p.462 n.165) by referring to a passage in the 'History of prophets and kings', the universal 'Islamic' history written by alTabari, who lived from 839 until 923. See The History of al-Tabarf IV: The Ancient Kingdoms, Translated by M. Perlmann, SUNY Series in Near Eastern Studies (I 987), p. 139 (section 757), which records how "al-Zabba', daughter of 'Amr al-'AmlaqI, ruler of the Arabs in the Jazirah and the fringes of Syria ... built herself a fortress on the western bank of the Euphrates", and how she would go to Palmyra from her spring resort: "When her power was well-established and she was well-entrenched in her reign, she wanted to avenge her father's death." However, as Perlmann, p.131 n.335, pointed out, "the 'Amaliq are a mythical tribe of Arabs, the designation of whom is derived from the biblical Amalek, to which many further legends and elaborate stories were added by Arab story-tellers." The passage can certainly not be taken as good evidence to identify any of the Palmyrene tribes. 136 13 7

II SANCTUARIES AND CULTS THE TEMPLE OF BEL There can be no doubt that the monumental temple of Bel formed the centre of the religious life of Palmyra. Hordes of tourists still stand in awe nowadays of the massive temenos, a paved court surrounded by an enormous wall with a propylaeum, with the actual temple building, the cella, on a podium in its middle. This cella is surrounded by a prostyle of Corinthian columns, ~.!:ikbls-i.nt~[!~~ on !~1Ql!K. side by entrc1nc:e gate. to which large steps lead fromJhe..-£Q!!f!.- The JJ.nim!~!1~§s of the cella lies in the fact that it ha.£.JJYQ..~ one inner ~clncJU_llrie~he .nort)l c1nd SC>l!tQ.Jl.d)'lQ~ In the court, before the cella, ~re ~ remains of a basin, an altar, a dining hall, and a building with niches, and in the northwest corner a ramp is visible along which sacrificial animals were led into the temple area. 1 The temple is built upon a tell whose stratification goes back to the third millennium and which had been occupied in the pre-Roman period by what is usually referred to as 'the first temple of Bel' or 'the Hellenistic temple' .2 The walls of the temenos and the propylaea were constructed in the late first and the first half of the second century AD. Most of the Corinthian columns of the colonnades on the inner sides of the walls still show the pedestals on which statues of benefactors stood, and the accompanying honorary inscriptions reveal a surprising lack of a religious dimension. It has long been known that the construction of the cella took place long before the temenos as it stands today was finished. But it was not until very recently that the many inconsistent building features and apparent architectural 'failures' of the cella itself were made sense of in a hypothesis which combined archaeology with the scanty epigraphic material concerning the construction of the building. 3 Tbe.hlstory9fthe 1::)11iJ~ing_(){Jhe temple had J2f5 'A-rapyci-retoc; in Greek, (b)bt 'tr'th in Palmyrene). 441 It is very tempting to connect this 'tribal' temple with the Bene Mita, as has also been suggested by Dirven. 442 A bilingual inscription from AD 140 records how the council of Palmyra honoured a member of the Bene Mita because he had established a series of sacrifices on the council's behalf to Malakbel, the Tyche/Gad ofTaimi and Atargatis. 443 Very recently, Dirven has put forward the hypothesis that at Palmyra Atargatis is identical to Astarte. Her theory is based upon the assumption that those gods and goddesses associated with Bel outside Palmyra are the tutelary deities of the respective sanctuaries of 'the four tribes of the city', but for Atargatis whose place is occupied by Astarte. According to Dirven, Astarte functioned as the Gad of Palmyra and in this function she had strong iconographical similarities with Atargatis. 444 But - although Dirven is right in that the various groups of deities centred around Bel outside Palmyra do not mirror the cultic organisation of the temple of Bel at the oasis itself, but should rather be seen as a 'sociological formation' 445 - the evidence for her theory is more scanty than she assumes. Not only does it remain doubtful how much one can base on a few reliefs from the Palmyrene which represent only partly, or at best indirectly, the deities of the four and Tanabe (1986), pl.81-2. It shows a deity in military dress and Parthian trousers standing in between two lions on leash with eagles above their heads. Below the central figure is the bust of a figure carrying a spear and a shield and wearing a helmet, in between griffins and cypresses. Drijvers ( 1976a), p.18, calls the identification of the central figure with Rabaseire "uncertain". Gawlikowski (1990a), p.2646, states that this god is "sans doute represente" on the relief, and proposes a further identification with Nergal. Drijvers ( 1976a), p.18, interprets the bust between the griffins as Malakbel. However, the helmet would rather point to Arsu, although this must remain a hypothesis as well. 441 PAT 0197 (AD 132) and Drijvers (1995a), p.34-8 (AD 144). In the first text, the Palmyrene is damaged and restored in analogy with the second text. 442 Dirven (I 999), p.50 n.43, p.74 and p.234. That the Bene Mita were one of the four official tribes of the city had been proposed already by Schlumberger (1971 ), p.132. The evidence for the Bene Mita is assembled by Gawlikowski ( 1973a), p.37-8. See also Teixidor ( 1987), p.50-2. 443 PAT 0273. See below, p.253-4, for a discussion of this text and further references. The benefactor's membership of the Bene Mita had been stressed already by Teixidor ( 1979), p. 90. See now also Picrsimoni (1995b), II, p.570. 444 Dirven (1999), p.75 and p.105-10. 445 Dirven ( 1999), p.69-74.

154

II Sanctuaries and cults

The cult of the Sun

'tribal' sanctuaries at Palmyra, but the assumed equation of Allat with Nemesis (who appears on the relevant reliefs instead of Allat) cannot be maintained in view of a relief, of unknown provenance but in Palmyrene style, which shows that the two goddesses were believed to have had separate identities. 446 In any case one should stick to the divine names actually given by the worshippers. The inscriptions clearly distinguish between 'Atargatis', after whom one of the official 'tribal' sanctuaries is named, and 'Astarte', who sometimes accompanied Bel on sculptures and inscriptions. Any precision with regard to the 'nature' or 'identity' of these goddesses remains beyond our reach. They are very complex figures, and it is certainly worth keeping in mind that, according to one theory, "Atargatis still retains the attributes of' Aserah, 'Astart and 'Anat, as her name still comprehends all of theirs."447 A member of the Bene Mita is also recorded to have dedicated a portico in the temple of Bel to Bolastor, and it is possible that this deity was worshipped in the temple of Atargatis together alongside the goddess. 448 The dedication of the Bene . \\ Mita, 'the archers' (qst'), to Yarhibol in the temple of the Gadde at Dura-Europos ~ 1'( can be explained as typical for the worship of Yarhibol by Palmyrene soldiers. 44;'. ~ :)·

"

THE CULT OF THE SUN The Historia Augusta claims to transmit a letter in which Aurelian ordered the rebuilding of the 'temple of the Sun' at Palmyra after his capture of the city: 450

446 Briquel-Chatonnet (1990). This relief, which shows a dedicant sacrificing before two goddesses, is accompanied by a Palmyrene inscription (PAT 2825) which identifies them as Allat ('It) and Nemesis (nmsys). Allat, depicted with helmet, spear and oval shield, is assimilated with Athena. Nemesis is pulling her veil downwards with her right hand and is holding a measuring rod in the other. A wheel of fortune is standing next to her. 44 7Thus Oden (1977), p.107. See ibidem, p.58-73, on the identity of Atargatis, and p.73105 on her connection with the three named Canaanite goddesses. Compare Horig (1984), p.1539--40. 44 s PAT 2749 (AD 49), and above, p.77. Bolastor is lumped together with Belastor (known from one of the 'sacred laws', PAT 0991 and below, p. 168-9) by Teixidor (1979), p.8-9, and Gawlikowski (1990a), p.2624. The latter proposed that "le parallelisme 'Ast6r-'Astart corresponde a un etat ancien du pantheon palmyrenien", which according to Dirven (1999), p.50 n.43, supports her theory that Astarte should be equated with Atargatis. 449Thus Dirven (1999), p.50 n.44. See also eadem (1998b), p.91-3. The inscription is PAT 1099, with Dirven (1999), p.233-5. 450 SHA, 'Divus Aurelianus', XXXI, 7-9: TEMPLUM SANE SOLIS, QUOD APUD PALMYRAM AQUIL/FER/ LEGIONIS TERTIAE CUM VEXILLIFERIS ET DRACONAR/0 ET CORNJC/NIBUS ATQUE LITICINIBUS DIR/PUERUNT, AD EAM FORMAM VOLO, QUAE FUIT, REDD!. HABES TRECENTAS AURI LIBRAS DE ZENOBIA£ CAPSULIS, HABES ARGENTI MILLE OCTINGENTA PONDO DE PALMYRENORUM BONIS, HABES GEMMAS REG/AS. EX HIS OMNIBUS FAC COHONESTARI TEMPLUM: MIHI ET DIS INMORTALIBUS GRAT/SS/MUM FECERIS. The translation is taken from Stoneman ( 1992), p.183.

155

Now as to the Temple of the Sun at Palmyra, which has been pillaged by the eagle bearers of the Third Legion, along with the standard-bearers, the dragon-bearer and the buglers and trumpeters, I wish it restored to the condition in which it formerly was. You have 300 pounds of gold from Zenobia's coffers, you have 1800 pounds of silver from the property of the Palmyrenes, and you have the royal jewels. Use all these to embellish the temple; thus both to me and to the immortal gods you will do a most pleasing service.

The notorious unreliability of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae is well-known, but so are the enthusiastic worship of Sol Invictus by Aurelian and the privileges he gave to the cult of the Sun. In short, we cannot know for sure whether the passage is based on any historicity, in which case we ought to look for a 'temple of Helios', or whether it resulted from a misconception that the temple of Bel actually accommodated the Sun cult. 451 Such a misconception would have been understandable, as we have seen how Y arhibol, who was in the first place the 'Lord of the Spring' at Palmyra, came to act as an accompanying 'Sun god' for Bel and was depicted with a solar nimbus. 452 Indeed, Zosimus recorded how Aurelian brought the statues of Helios and Bel from Palmyra over to Rome. 45 3 As for the Palmyrenes themselves, they identified the Greek Helios with the god Shamash, who received a cult alongside Allat. 454 The identification is made in a bilingual inscription on an altar with a relief that actually shows a dedicant sacrificing to another deity, who is identified in Palmyrene as Malakbel (mlkbl):455 451 Seyrig (1971b) has shown that the Sun god became the main manifestation of the supreme deity in the local religions of the Roman Near East without ever being confused with him. The ancient Romans may nevertheless have been confused, as were generations of modern scholars. Seyrig's classic article corrected the widely spread believe that the Syrian cults in the Hellenistic period had en masse undergone a process of 'solarisation' by which the supreme deity of any locality was transformed in a Sun god. See also Millar (1993a), p.522, who is even more sceptical about a characteristically 'Syrian' Sun cult. 452 It is worth noting here that the Palmyrene name yr!Jy, an abbreviated form of yrl)bwl', seems to be rendered with · HAtooropos in a bilingual from Trastevere in Rome from AD 236 (PAT 0247). Compare Stark (1971), p.91. As was the case with Malakbel, the solar aspects of Yarhibol should first and foremost be interpreted as a process of 'solarisation' due to the influence of patterns of worship by the imperial army on its Palmyrene soldiers. See Dirven (1998b), esp. p.91-3. However, the inscription from Trastevere is a difficult case in point as the full Aramaic and Greek nomenclature of the dedicant does not correspond in the expected fashion. 453 Zosimus, Historia nova, I 61,2: ev wv,:qi 1ml 1:0 ,:ou 'H),,i.ou onµci.µEvos tEpov µqaA01tprnros 'tOlS ci.1to Ila),,µvpas EKOO'µT]O'EV ava011µacrtv'HU0-u 'tE Kai. BT\AO'\J Ka0topvcras ayci.),,µma, 'and he (Aurelian) built there (in Rome) the temple of the Sun and he decorated it magnificently with sacred objects from Palmyra and he installed (in that temple) the statues of Helios and of Bel. On Yarhibol see above, p.145. 454 See above, p.99-100 and p. I 07. 455 PAT 0325 (C/S II 3979), which does not give the name of Malakbel. As Seyrig (1937a), p.202-3, has shown, this is the same altar as the one on which Cantineau ( 1930), n°60, had read the name mlkbl above the deity depicted on the relief. The latter publication has been incorporated separately in PAT, which does not give cross-references and seems not to have realised that the two different readings are of one and the same text! See PAT 1590. For a drawing of the relief sec Drijvers ( I 976a), pl.LX, I.

II Sanctuaries and cults

156

Translation: To Helios, the ancestral and listening god. [---

--- ---]

[--- ]sw br [--- --- z]bdbwl [--- ]s' lsms 'lh' tb['J

Concluding remarks

157

of how to visualise the divine world, but they could also have the divine name of one of their most important deities in common. 461 But how little at present can be understood of Palmyrene religion is revealed by a highly enigmatic formula which is employed on three funerary reliefs: wh' nps' dh mwly' bsms, which has been translated with both 'and here is this monument accompanying (him?) in the Sun' and 'this soul is close to the Sun' .462

Translation: [--- ---] son of [--- --- Z]abdibol [--- ---] to Shamash, the good god. CONCLUDING REMARKS

*** In any case, this example of religious complexity, with a relief of one deity dedicated to another, can be quoted in support of Dirven's theory that the solar aspects of Malakbel were of secondary importance only and ought to be interpreted within the context of Palmyrene soldiers being influenced outside Palmyra by the army religion with its growing importance of solar deities. 456 Two inscriptions from the western section of Palmyra refer to a different sort of shrine to the Sun god. 457 A brief text from 31/30 BC, reemployed in a later wall at the temple of Allat, records the dedication of 'this hamana to Shamash' (!Jmn' dnh lsmf), 458 and a text on an altar from the Camp of Diocletian, dated to AD 85, describes how 'this hamana and this altar' (!Jmn' dnh w'lt' dh) are dedicated 'to Shamash, the god of the house of their fathers' (Isms 'lh byt 'bwhn). 459 It is unlikely that the passage in the Historia Augusta refers to either of those shrines. If there ever was a 'temple of the Sun' which could be compared to the wellpreserved sanctuaries of Bel, Nebu, Baal-Shamin or Allat, it is_ now lost. T~e fact that a number of Palmyrene deities could be represented with a solar mmbus ought not to confuse us. 460 However, the case of Shamash reveals an interesting problem concerning religious life in the Roman Near East which has been greatly overlooked: not only could the different groups of people, which together formed the societies that produced the fundamentally polytheistic religious systems that appear in the material sources from the Roman period, share similar conceptions Thus Dirven (1998b), p.91-3, and eadem (1999), p. I 70-89. See also above, p.140. In addition, it could be argued that a passage in a Greek inscription (---]ov naptvov · HA.iou nm:p0ou [0£ou ---) refers to a temple of Helios rather than to a marble statue of t~e god. See above, p. 149. See also Gawlikowski (1990a), p.2643. In a text from AD 179 an emgmatJc qlstr', which may be interpreted as a basket, as a bar for closing a gate and even as a place for horses at the end of the Transversal Colonnade, was offered either to Shamash or from his temple treasures. See PAT0297, and above, p.100 with n. I 82. From the temple of Baal-Shamin comes a very fragmentary inscription which may refer to a hykl' dedicated to Shamash, see PAT 0185 and above, p.85. . 458 Gawlikowski (1976), p.198. See also Teixidor (1979), p.66. Not rn PAT. 459 PAT0324. 460 It is worth referring in this context to a partly preserved octagonal block, found in the Camp of Diocletian, which has been reported to show three deities with solar_ nimbus. OnlY, one of the sides is still recognisable. See Michalowski ( 1962), p. l 34-6 with hg. l 50-l; DnJvers ( 1976a). pl.LX,2; Tanabe ( 1986). pl. l 50.

The ongoing process of constructing, adjusting, enlarging and restoring sanctuaries and shrines played a vital role in the society of Palmyra. The epigraphic evidence shows continuing building works at sacred places in the city, even into the years immediately after its capture by Aurelian. Both institutionally and architecturally Palmyra had by then changed, to most outward appearances, into a Graeco-Roman city. However, the 'new' temple architecture not only revealed a great number of 'oriental' or 'indigenous' peculiarities, but a strong belief in the importance of religious traditions lay at the root of a conservative attitude towards former religious structures built on the same site. According to Drijvers, Palmyrene sanctuaries originally consisted of one or more small shrines or 'chapels', the so-called !Jamanaya, situated within an enclosure: "When from the beginning of our era extensive building programmes in the Graeco-Roman style were started, the existing !Jamanaya were incorporated into the new temples or demolished and rebuilt in such a way that they fitted into the new architecture while preserving the form of the previous religious building." 463 It is the inner chapel, the adyton (so famously described with regard to the temple in Hierapolis as a 0ci1caµoc; in the De Dea Syria), which presented the final result of the transformation of the indigenous shrine. 464 At the temple ofBaal-Shamin, materials from the preceding chapel were used, and its dimensions were copied, for the construction of the new adyton. 465 A classical va6c; (transcribed in Palmyrene as nws') was built over the original shrine of Allat, and "in fact nothing was fundamentally changed." 466 It is possible that at least the north adyton of the

456 457

4 6 1 See e.g. the extensive discussion in Tubach (1986), throughout, about the question of whether the Sun god at Hatra and other places actually 'was' the ancient Mesopotamian Shamash or the so-called Arab Sun god of the same name. 4 6 2 PAT 1166, I I 68 and 1198. See DNWSI, s.v. yly, and see on the grammar also Rosenthal (1936), p.50 n.2 and p.66 n.2. On some other aspects of funerary cults at Palmyra see Drijvers (1982b). 463 Drijvers ( 1988), p.176. See also Freyberger ( 1997). 464 See also Will ( 1959), who classified the adyta in three different types. Lucian, De Dea Svria, § 31, refers to the 0a;\,aµoaA.aot0v), and possibly a bed-covering (1tE[picr)'t[p]roµ[a]), for a couch. 137 Taking into account the importance of the temple, its gods and the newly offered ritual devices for the city as a whole, which is clear from the text, and considering the inscription's provenance, the couch must have stood in the temple of Bel. If the restoration de; "CTIV 't'ii 6

Translation: --- --- --- --- --- --- of fruit --- --- and --- --- --- a burnt offering, every year on the good day, for ever, the year 474, on the sixth (day) in the month Xandikos (6 April, AD 163). I. I: Sobernheim (1905), p.54-5, n° 31, argued that the traces of -~T- indicate a dedication [Lni U\Jft]cn:[qi Kat e1t11K6qi]. 1.2: Cantineau, in Inv. VI,13, read---] Kapnou [Kat] trov Ka[p]nrov our; h [---, not following the suggestion by Sobernheim, o.c., to read [e]K [taut]11r; [ti\r; xoopar;].

***

5

Translation: To Zeus the Highest and Listeni[ng --- ---] has been set up by Zabdibo[los son of lariboleos] son of Lisamsaios son of Hai[ranos, for his health and (the health) of his children and brothers, the year 444, in Hyperberetaios (October, AD 132). [qrb ldk]rn qdm bryk smh l'l[m'J [zbdbwl b]r yrf]hwl' br lsmsy [l]yrn 'l h]ywhy wl]yy bnwhy w'l]why [byrl] tsr Jy snt 444 [lbryk smh] l'lm' mr' kl ['lm'J mwd' zbdbwl br

10

Translation: [(This) offered as memor]ial, before Him whose name is blessed forev[er, Zabdibol s]on of Yarhibola son of Lishamshay [Hairan] ([zbdbwl b]r yrl]bwl' br lsmsy [l]yrn]) [for his l]ife and the life of his sons and his brothers, in the month Tishri, the year 444 (October, AD 132). To Him whose name is blessed forever, the Lord of the whole [world], in thanksgiving, Zabdibol (zbdbwl) son of[--- the burnt-]offering of his people (?) [every year, on the good day, in Ni]san (?)forever. [---] Zabdibol son of Zabdibol (zbdbwl br zbdbwl) [---] this inscription.

***

The phrase 'every year on the good day for ever', which seemed to follow the dedication of a burnt-offering, has been used by Gawlikowski to restore a Palmyrene inscription on an altar as well. He argued convincingly that the text on the altar actually consists of three separately inscribed parts: a bilingual from AD 132, a dedication to the Anonymous Deity of a burnt-offering (which is reconstructed after the above-mentioned Greek inscription), and two lines at the end: 192 ~lt 'U'lflcov E'tOU~ [4]44 'Y1t[eppepe'taiou]

209

5

192 PAT 0344 (AD 132). Published as C/S II 3998. For the interpretation, see Gawlikowski, RIP, n° 130, and idem (I 973a), p.94. On the family of the benefactors, see Piersimoni (I 995b), II, p.641, n° 106.

It ought to be added, though, that the worship of the three gods to whom the temple was consecrated in Nisan in AD 32 was not restricted to this month only, for a Palmyrene inscription from AD 204, which records restoration works on a temple, is set up in the month Siwan (June). 193 The evidence for sacrificial structures at Palmyra thus remains highly ambiguous. Both in the Temple at Jerusalem and in the temple of Atargatis at Hierapolis fixed sets of sacrifices had to be performed twice each day. The more fully documented evidence from the Jewish Temple shows that these two public sacrifices took place in the morning and in the evening, and it is possible that the same holds true for Hierapolis. 194 All rituals connected with, and ceremonies set in, these temples were thus enclosed within the broader framework of fixed offerings, both at dawn and at sunset. Whether this same sacrificial structure is also applicable for the Palmyrene temples is, unfortunately, unknown. And if it took place, we do not know whether it was a regular feature in all the various temples, or whether there were important differences between e.g. the temple of Bel and the temple of Baal-Shamin. In the next chapter, I will touch upon the problems of who performed and provided the various rituals, and of to whom were they directed. Here, I will briefly list the more religious functions which the rituals were supposed to fulfil. Many rituals seem to have been connected with certain festivals, and possibly also with building enterprises. Many dedications were made as thanksgiving, as is clear from the abundant use of the active participle of the verb ydy, 'to thank' or 'to acknowledge', in this context. This term is often used within the context of worship of the Anonymous God, but not 193 PAT 1066. Published by Milik (1972), p.217. L.4-6 read as follows, with the name of Bel restored by Milik: [lb/] yr!Jbwl 'glbwl [byr!J] sywn snt 515, '[to Bel], Yarhibol, Aglibol, [in the month] Siwan, the year 515 (June, AD 204). 194 On Jerusalem, sec Schiirer, HJP II, p.292-308. According to De Dea Syria (§44), worshippers at Hierapolis sacrificed to 'Zeus' in silence, but to 'Hera' while singing, playing flutes and shaking rattles. Sec also Lightfoot (forthcoming), ad foe.

210

III The rhythm of religious life

An Akitu festival at Palmyra?

exclusively. Taking into account the above-mentioned installation for ritual baths, it is safe to say that sacrifice will have fulfilled certain purificatory functions. It will equally have served to transmit the notion of atonement. Naturally, these various functions should not be viewed as mutually exclusive. Finally, a word should be said about the seemingly prolific use in the various cults of bas-reliefs. The reliefs as such are of course difficult (or at least in a different way) to combine with the notion of sacrifice as feeding the gods. In the words of Drijvers, they rather gave "way to contemplation" and their setting functioned "like a window looking out on the cosmos". 195 How far this implies a decrease of the use of statues is difficult to say, since they certainly would not exclude each other. A brief comparison with some evidence from Dura-Europo may be useful. At this stronghold on the Euphrates river, both bas-reliefs an statues are attested in the various temples, but in some cases the reliefs seem t have fulfilled a role in acts of worship by a restricted group only, rather tha having been intended for the clientele of the temple as a whole. 196 But from th temple of Zeus (formerly the temple of the Palmyrene gods) comes a meticulou description of how to dress divine statues. This fascinating text seems to hav served as an aid to memory for those priests or other temple functionaries wh had the task of decorating the statues of Yarhibol and Aglibol ('Iape~COAC\) an · Ay1..t~COAC\)), two gods only known from Palmyrene contexts. 197 But althoug statues certainly played their part in Palmyrene religion, the importance of relie s in Palmyra is striking. Similarly, monuments both in the temple of Bel and t e temple of Nebu, in each case in a very prominent position, also point to 'cul ic acts of reflection' . 198 Nevertheless, in the same way as statues could receive he 'contemplation' of the worshipper, so reliefs could be the object of many wa:x of sacrifice (above all the burning of incense) which one would usually asso iate with statues. There were certainly different modes of use, but these diffe nces should not be overstressed. As far as we can tell from the present evidence, any differences in cultic practices at Palmyra did not serve to give expression to contrasting group identities. This is of course not to deny the possibility that each deity could have its own set of rites. But the members of the various groups which constituted Palmyrene society (and who could, as we will see in the next chapter, belong to different social groupings simultaneously) did not seem to have employed ritual ceremonies in order to transmit their opposing group identities. Instead, it could be argued that they shared a communal set of ritual actions which transcended any remaining differences (which were made visible via other channels of trans-

mission). Although this formulation must remain a hypothesis, in this way the 'rhythm of religious life' may have helped to integrate different communities into Palmyrene society as a whole. It goes without saying that certain ways of sacrificing at Palmyra were more 'original', more indigenous, than others. The important question is how one should perceive the gradual introduction of sacrificial and other rites in the city: as mere changes in the material aspect of ritual only? Or did they also constitute alterations in the concepts which were communicated by the symbolism of these new ways of offering?

19 ,

Drijvers (1990), p.73-5. See Downey ( 1998). 197 Cumont ( 1926), n° 12. See also Downey ( 1988), p. l 09-10. It may even have been the case that the text specifies that the statues needed to he decorated differently in particular months. 198 The so-called 'monument aux niches' at the temple of Bel. for which see Seyrig, Amy and Will ( 1968), pl. I, and the block in front of the cella of the temple of Nehu, for which sec Collart ( 1976), and now also Bounni, Seigne and Salihy ( 1992), pl. I00-1. 196

211

IV GROUPS OF WORSHIPPERS, PRIESTS AND BENEFACTORS This chapter will focus on several important aspects of groups of worshippers and on the role of the priesthood within Palmyrene society. The relevant evidence will be studied within the framework which I have sketched above. Attention will be paid to the place and functioning of the various groups of worshippers both in a social and in a religious and political context. In this way, it is to be hoped, a better understanding will be gained of the complex way in which Palmyrene society, in which religion played so important a role, was built up and worked during the first three centuries of Roman rule over the Near East. The various sections of this chapter will concentrate on the main 'forces' at work: those groups of the population which are identified by means of genealogical terminology, the various cultic associations, members of the clergy and others performing sacerdotal functions, and the benefactors who provided religious life with the financial means to run and further develop. Naturally, they cannot be separated completely, and it was not only their interaction, but also the overlap between them, which helped to create the unique heterogeneous society whose 'Palmyrene' culture cannot, as has been stressed throughout the earlier chapters, be described in unambiguous terms. Taking into account the very limited nature of our evidence, special attention will be paid to those issues which may serve, firstly, to reveal some of the mechanics of the system in which 'religious authority', or at least control in matters touching on the religious life of Palmyra, brought about both conscious and unconscious aspects of the stratification of the city's society, and, secondly, to build up a more complete picture of the way in which these 'mechanics' developed, and the way in which the variety of overlapping subgroups accordingly renegotiated their position in relation to each other.

THE APPLICATION OF GENEALOGICAL TERMINOLOGY TO DEFINE GROUPS With regard to the huge majority of our epigraphic evidence from Palmyra, kinship terminology is applied both to identify individuals and hence to mark their standing in society, and to refer to groups of people in the context of political and - above all - religious affairs. This is an important fact since it gives much information about the way in which members of Palmyrene society intended to present themselves officially, and as such cannot be stressed enough. It would be wrong, however, to interpret all the groups introduced by bny, 'the sons of', as tribes, and it is now commonly accepted to consider as 'real' tribes only

214

IV Groups of worshippers, priests and benefactors

The application of genealogical terminology to define groups

those groups which are introduced by pf]d. 1 As we have seen above, these 'real' tribes are not to be confused with the later artificially constructed socio-political model of 'the four tribes of the city'. A number of the groups introduced by bny, 'the sons of', were connected with particular sanctuaries or with particular deities, and it is clear that members of the same family sometimes acted as benefactors with regard to the same cult. The implications of this for our understanding of Palmyrene religion, however, are less clear. As I hope to have shown above, the entirely static concept of 'tribal religion', with its inherent notion of ancestral gods worshipped in clan-owned sanctuaries, may be considered bankrupt when confronted with the naturally developing and accordingly highly dynamic nature of those groups that can be identified as 'tribes'. It is of course more than likely that certain groups of worshippers will have visited a certain temple more regularly than others. But the freedom, and maybe even the necessity, for a worshipper to enter numerous shrines and sacred places for the performance of religious acts is inherent in a religious system which is fundamentally polytheistic. One should stick to the ancient terminology itself, but it cannot be stressed enough that not all the Palmyrene groups designated by kinship terminology necessarily consisted of members of the same family, or in some other way matched their connotations of real genealogical connections. One could indeed approach the problem from the other side, and argue that some groups had developed from, or were organised around, different forms of community, and accordingly that their use of kinship terminology was only secondary. Once the trend was set, individuals and the various groups to which they belonged would naturally and often unconsciously stick to those elements of labelling which had in time become traditional and in a way unquestionable. 2 As we have seen above, it has been argued by some scholars that professional associations in the Ancient Near East employed kinship terminology or certain ethnic designations and accordingly organised themselves as 'tribes' or extended families. 3 It is worth taking this into account when approaching the numerous groups introduced by bny, 'the sons of', whose names are inscribed on the more than one thousand tesserae, the small clay or bronze tokens which were mainly found in the temple of Bel. 4 It is generally accepted that these tesserae served as

tickets of admission or membership and gave access to sacred banquets. 5 But to whom? Dijkstra, e.g., has argued that the character of the banquets was private, and that accordingly some of the names on the tesserae introduced by bny, 'the sons of', "refer to a number of children of the same father who jointly bore the expenses of the feast". 6 It is also possible to raise the hypothesis that some of those groups known from the tesserae were named after the person who paid for the banquet. In any case, one ought to take into account not only that in general the tesserae apply the shortest grammatical forms possible (although there are, admittedly, tesserae with many words on them), but also that it is possible, with regard to their religious function, that we are faced with certain standard formulae. Due to the still limited knowledge of Palmyrene terminology, one cannot exclude either that some of the names of groups which are known only from the tesserae, and which have too readily been explained as family names, actually denote professional associations. 7 In any case, genealogical terminology was not the only possible frame of reference for groups of people within the society of Palmyra, and it should not come as a surprise that in a few texts from the city certain groups explicitly identify themselves as professional associations. It has now been shown, in a recent study by Van Nijf, that the guild avant la lettre, a form of collegium which could be referred to in various ways, not only played an important role in the building-up of societies in the western part of the Roman world but also in the eastern provinces. 8 We do not know anything about the place of the professional associations within the society of Palmyra. It is of course natural to suppose that those Palmyrenes who worked in the same craft or trade organised themselves along similar lines as their colleagues elsewhere, and that they acted as regulators and protectors for those involved in their trade. And one would equally expect that, in addition to these economic functions, these Palmyrene collegia fulfilled certain socio-religious functions. 9 But it has to be admitted that - unless one accepts that each form of community amongst human beings is in the end based on certain 'experiences of totality' which are emotional by nature and hence, by definition, religious 10 - there is no direct evidence for the participation of profes5

1

Gawlikowski (1973a), p.31-41; Piersimoni (1995a), p.252-3, and eadem (1995b), II, p.530-41, counted their number as fourteen. 2 Garbini (1968), p.78, described many of the Palmyrene groups as "associazioni legate particolarmente a determinate divinita, che sotto un'etichetta apparentemente tribale costituivano in realta gruppi ben definiti sul piano politico, sul piano sociale e sul piano religioso." 3 See above, p.53-4. On the Babylonian and Assyrian societies, see Van de Mieroop (1997), p.l 08-10. On South-Arabia, see Beeston (1979), p.117. Piersimoni (1995b ), II, p.530 n.4, referred to a passage in Philo ofByblos' Phoenician History, as preserved in Eusebius, Praep.Ev. I 10,11, in which Philo wrote that all hunters (aypEiitm) and fishermen (at.tEl~) were named after their eponymous ancestors' AypEa and' At.tEa, who are credited with the invention of the respective crafts. 4 The essential tool is still RTP, the collection by Ingholt, Seyrig and Starcky (1955), with a few additions by Dun ant ( 1959). Some of the interpretations postulated by du Mesnil du Buisson ( 1962) are highly controversial.

215

Seyrig (1940a). See also Gawlikowski (1990a), p.2651-2. (1995), p.90. 7 See e.g. the unique mentions on tesserae of the Bene "ly (RTP 98, 109 and 503; PAT 2104, 2115 and 2379, with Piersimoni (1995b), I, p.62), the Bene gwg' (RTP 80 and 100; PAT2086 and 2106, with Piersimoni (1995b), I, p.126), and the Bene sz' (RTP 977; PAT2604, with Piersimoni, (1995b), I, p.465). I am not able to give any suggestions with regard to the etymology of those enigmatic terms. 8 Van Nijf ( 1997). As one of the main types of sociability, the professional association was an important element within the plural societies of the Roman world. See also MacMullen (197 4 ), throughout. 9 Similarly, Will (1992), p.125, argued that it is plausible that many of the professional groups were, like associations elsewhere in the Ancient world, internally unified by religious links as well. "Malheureusement l'epigraphie ne vient pas a notre sccours pour nous eclairer." 1 Following the 'religious' interpretation of collectivity based on a natural bond between people. The example is taken from a study of the future of religion by the Dutch novelist S. 6 Dijkstra

°

216

IV Groups of worshippers, priests and benefactors

The application of genealogical terminology to define groups

sional associations as such in the religious life of Palmyra. 11 If the official and artificially constructed four tribes of the city had their respective sanctuaries, if some of the Palmyrene temples can be connected with some of the 'real' tribes, and if members of the same family are recorded to lavish expenditure upon a particular cult, the lack of epigraphic sources recording the involvement of the professional associations in ritual ceremonies and religious occasions seems to be striking. Before we go on, it will be worth to look in detail at a group of four very similar texts, which all date from AD 258/9, and which all record relationships of patronage with the Palmyrene leader Odenathus or his son. 12 The first is a bilingual inscribed on a console from the Central Colonnade, a dedication by the gold- and silversmiths from the city: 13

The second text is again inscribed on a console from the Central Colonnade. It records a dedication, in honour of Odenathus' son this time, by the city's leather-workers and constructors of rafts: 14 [I:rn'tiµtov] AipcivT]v 'tOV Aaµ1tpO'ta'tOV uiov 'Ooatvci0ou wu Aaµrrpo'tawv U7ta'ttK:OU 'tO cruµrrocrtov crK:u't(E)cov K:at UO'K:OVaU't07tOtWV 'tOV 1tci'tpcova ihoui; 569

217

5

Translation: To [Septimius] Hairan the most splendid son of Odenathus, the most splendid consul, the symposium of the leather-cutters and 'makers of rafts supported on inflated skins', to the(ir) patron, the year 569 (AD 257/8).

LE1t[ 'ttµtov 'Ooai va0ov] 'tOV 11,aµ[1tpO'ta'tOV urranK]ov O'UV'tc[xvia 'tffiV XPUcrox]ocov K:at apyu[pOK:07tCOV 't]OV 0£0'7t0'tllV 'tctµf\i; xaptv 569 µTJVEl 2.avotKq>

***

5

Translation: To Septimius Odenathus, the most splendid consul, the guild of the goldsmiths and silversmiths, to the(ir) master, the year 569, in the month Xandikos (April, AD 258). 1.3: cruv1:E[Xvia]: after Gawlikowski (1985), and Milik (1972), p.161. C/S II 3945, Inv. III,17, and PAT 0291 read cruv1:e[t..Eta], 'company' or 'unity', which is also possible.

~Im spfmyws 'dynt nhyr' hpfyq' mrn dy 'qym lh tgm' dy qyny' 'bd' dhb' wksp' lyqrh byrlJ, nysn snt 569

The third text comes from one of the porticoes at the temple of Baal-Shamin. The name of the responsible grouping is highly problematic: 15 I:rn'tiµtov 'Ooaiva0ov 'tOV Aaµrrpomwv urranKov 'to cruµ1t6crtov 't&v KONETQN 'tOV rrci( 't)pcova €wui; 569

5

Translation: To Septimius Odenathus, the most splendid consul, the symposium of the KOV€'t0t, to the(ir) patron, the year 569 (AD 257 /8).

***

5

Translation: This is the statue of Septimius Odenathus, the illustrious consul, our lord, which set up for him the corporation of the gold- and silversmiths, in his honour, in the month Nisan, the year 569 (April, AD 258).

*** Vestdijk, written in 1943 during his imprisonment in a Dutch camp, De toekomst der religie (orig.1947, new ed. 1975), p.222. 11 There is, to my knowledge, no evidence for the involvement of Palmyrene professional associations in burial practices with regard to their members either. 12 They have been presented together by Gawlikowski (1985), p.254-5. See for discussion also Milik (1972), p.159-60, and Millar (1995), p.416-7. 13 PAT0291. See also CIS II 3945; Inv. III,17; Gawlikowski (1985), n° 9.

The fourth text, which was reemployed and found close to the Tetrapylon, contains an equally unexplained term: 16 [I:rn'ti.µt]ov 'Ooai.va0ov ['tOV] Aaµrrpo'tmov [U7t]a'ttKOV ['tO] cruµrromov ['t&v] OYANNQN 'tov [1t]ci'tpcova trnui; 569 14

15

Seyrig (1963), p.161; Gawlikowski ( 1985), n° 5; Catalogue, n° 25. Dunant ( 1971 ), n° 52; Milik ( 1972), p.160; Gawlikowksi (I 985), n° 7.

5

219

IV Groups of worshippers, priests and benefactors

The application of genealogical terminology to define groups

Translation: To Septimius Odenathus, the most splendid consul, the symposium of the ouavvot, to the(ir) patron, the year 569 (AD 257 /8).

and the etymology of their names, remains even more difficult. Since there is no such word in Greek, it is likely that the term KOV£'t0t is the transliteration of an Aramaic word. Milik proposed qnyt', which he translated as 'first-class players on the lyre', but Gawlikowski's interpretation of this term (or of qynt') as 'metalworker' makes more sense in this context. 22 It is certainly plausible that the solution is to be found in an etymological explanation of KOVE'tot as a transliteration of a Semitic denotation of a professional association, but for the moment the problem must remain unsolved. The same may be said with regard to the cruµ1t6crtov 'tffiv OYANNON. The reading of the -'A,- on the photograph is clear, but since this produces an unpronounceable word, it may well be a scribal error for a (still unknown) word ouavvrov. Most likely, an explanation ought, again, to be sought in terms of transliterating a Semitic word. 23 The proposition that the terms KOV£'tOt and ouavvot are to be interpreted as Greek transliterations of Semitic words which denote professional associations, could affect the interpretation of the above-mentioned unknown Palmyrene words on the tesserae which have too readily been explained as family names. As Will suggested, it would be only normal that the members of professional associations at Palmyra also gathered for cultic meals. 24 In support of this view one could refer to two types of tessera which possibly mention, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere, the god Bel in his function of protective deity of the oil merchants. 25

218

*** These four inscriptions, each of which records how a certain group honours either Odenathus or his son Hairan as its patron, stand out amongst the epigraphic material from Palmyra. Obviously, they are to be interpreted within the context of the spectacular rise to power of Odenathus and his family, or rather of those years when they played a leading role as a senatorial family in a Roman colonia. 17 The four associations, three of which are referred to as cruµ1t6cnov and the other one probably as cruv't£XVia, 18 are otherwise unknown at Palmyra. Since two of these groups are professional associations, one would expect that the other two, unfortunately denoted by enigmatic Greek words, are comparable organisations of craftsmen. If that is correct, they all provide a brief glimpse of an unknown world, and as such are a reminder of how much we do not know. The corporation of the gold- and silversmiths, tgm' dy qyny' 'bd' dhb' wksp' in Palmyrene, naturally calls to mind the famous riot in the theatre of Ephesus where St. Paul's preaching in the city was believed to threaten the income of those who produced miniature shrines of the great city goddess Artemis. 19 The second group which can safely be described as a professional association is the cruµ1t6crtov O'KU'terov Kat acrKova-u'to1tot&v. Nevertheless, both terms are problematic. The Greek word O'KU'tt::ui; is best to be translated as 'leather-cutter' or 'shoemaker' .20 acrKovauw1tot6i;, on the other hand, is a hapax, and means something like 'maker of rafts supported on inflated skins', devices to be used for crossing the Euphrates. 21 The identification of the groups which are recorded as honouring Odenathus in the other two texts, XII,37; Dunant (1971), p.66 n.2, with fig.2; Gawlikowski (1985), n° 8. Gawlikowski (1985); Millar (1993a), p.159-73; idem (1995), p.414--9. See now also Hartmann (2001), esp. p.102-8. 18 The Palmyrene counterpart of cruv'te[xvw] is tgm', itself a transliteration of 'tayµa, a term usually applied to denote a 'body of soldiers' but which can also have the meaning of 'club'. 19 Interestingly, the restorations of the Greek terms denoting the craftsmen ( cruvte[xvw tciiv xpucmx]ocov Kat cipyu[poK61tcov]) both follow a different account of the same story. The attestation of cipyupoK01toc; in Acts 19,24 is well-known, but the appearance of xpucroxooc; in the apocryphal Acts of Paul, where the goldsmiths (who got the apostle thrown before the wild animals, a passage which not just reflects but takes literally Paul's remark in 1 Car. 15,32) replaced the silversmiths of the Authorized Version, is more obscure. See Ilp