This book, edited by Sylvie Blétry, who is also the main author, presents the results of five field seasons devoted to the study of various aspects of Ḥalabiyya (ancient Zenobia), a Late Antique city in the middle Euphrates Valley in Syria. Due to the current civil war, fieldwork and other studies on the material were halted in 2010, lending an inherently unfinished character to the whole project. Ḥalabiyya was first investigated in the mid 1940s by Jean Lauffray, under the aegis of the Service des Antiquités de Syrie. This resulted in two monographs published almost half a century later, in Reference Lauffray1983 and Reference Lauffray1991, which remain of outstanding importance for understanding the history and the layout of this site.

The current volume is divided into four sections, devoted respectively to the excavations inside the city, to the study of different categories of finds, to the architecture, building techniques and materials, and to a survey of the necropolises. In the first section, six short chapters present the excavations or soundings on the early phases of the city's ramparts, on domestic buildings in three different sectors, on a colonnaded street and an adjacent public structure, and on the baptistery of the south-eastern church. The second section, devoted to the finds, comprises chapters on a seventh-century AD pottery assemblage and on the glass finds and a catalogue of the 22 coins found during the five field seasons. The third section, on architecture, is very technical and includes two separately authored chapters on related subjects. The first of these, in Spanish, expounds methodological issues relating to architectural analysis, describes building materials and provides some results of the analysis undertaken on parts of the ramparts and on the so-called praetorium attached to the northern rampart. The second of these two chapters is a thorough study of the building materials and techniques of the Byzantine ramparts. The section is supplemented by a description of the restoration work undertaken up to 2010.

The fourth section presents a survey of the city's two necropolises. It includes a list of all the tombs and funerary monuments, more detailed descriptions of a number of the best-preserved monuments (supplemented by photographs and plans on the accompanying CD-ROM), and a typological analysis. This section concludes with a discussion of the dates of the funerary monuments, with particular attention to the funerary towers. The latter, Blétry argues, were constructed at Ḥalabiyya in the late third and fourth centuries AD; this differs from most scholars, who usually consider these towers as being typical of the first to second centuries AD.

The volume as a whole is dominated by the idea that the description of the site by Procopius in his De Aedificiis is accurate, and that it therefore provides good sixth-century, presumably Justinianic, dating evidence for most of the monuments, as well as for the city's origins in the second half of the third century AD, at the time of the rule of Odeinath and Zenobia at Palmyra. This is rather unfortunate for an archaeological monograph where greater caution is to be expected if archaeology is not to be reduced to the status of a tool for the confirmation of textual sources.

With the exception of the chapters on the baptistery (6), the building materials and techniques (11), and to a lesser extent those dealing with the necropolises, inadequate attention has been given to the preparation and copy-editing of the text: there are many spelling mistakes and missing words; the style of the text is ponderous, and the syntax often erratic; transliterations of names are not standardised (e.g. Resafa/Résafé/Résafa, Khosroès/Chosroes/Chosrô); and a number of references cited in the text are missing in the bibliography. The illustrative material is also disappointing: many figures appear twice, and some up to three or four times; there are no figure captions; and on most of the plans, north is located inconsistently and certainly never according to the standard convention towards the top of the page, even when it would have been easy to do so.

Preparation of the volume has clearly been hampered by the abrupt end to work in 2010 as a result of the Syrian civil war. Nonetheless, there are a number of weaknesses that cannot be explained in this way; a few examples should suffice. For instance, the authors frequently refer to Umayyad and Abbasid occupation, but, apart from the seventh-century pottery assemblage presented in Chapter 7, they do not provide much early Islamic dating evidence. Conversely, the pottery assemblage presented, without comment, in figures 152–53 is said to date to between the seventh century and the Abbasid period, but includes two pieces of “friteware” (sic.), which, providing it has been properly identified, is not usually thought to have spread into the Syrian countryside before the late eleventh to early twelfth centuries. Similarly, it is stated repeatedly that the Byzantine copper coinage of the fifth to early sixth centuries remained in circulation for a very long time and therefore also accounts for the early Islamic occupation, up to the Abbasid period (pp. 152 & 157). This, however, contradicts most numismatic reports from early Islamic sites in Greater Syria, where Arab-Byzantine coinage and, from the 680s onward, post-reform fulūs largely dominate the spectrum of copper coinage. One also wonders about the nature of the “military role” that the site is claimed to have retained in the early Islamic period (pp. 89, 119, 472). Examples such as these give the impression of a hastily prepared volume, more akin to a series of preliminary field reports than a mature final synthesis. Regardless, one must praise the authors’ decision to produce this final report within only a few years of the abrupt interruption of the project and the closure of Syria to international research as a result of the ongoing civil war.