This book collects eleven papers read at a conference in Copenhagen in 2017 and is intended as a sequel to T. Kaizer's The Religious Life of Palmyra (2002). Kaizer's book, based on his Ph.D. thesis of 2000, earned fifteen reviews in various scholarly journals and can be safely said twenty years later to be a milestone in this field of research. The conference opened with a paper by Kaizer, offering a summary of his own book with updates. While admitting some omissions and imperfections, the author stands by his original work.
Indeed, one should agree that there was no such thing as a Palmyrene religion, if by religion we understand a fixed system of beliefs based on accepted dogma. As our sources are mostly limited to figural representations, the natural attitude of scholars was to attempt to organise the gods and goddesses into groups according to their historical origins: some deities came from Babylonia, some from Western Syria, some from Arabia and some belonged to local lore since time immemorial. Some of them remained attached to particular tribes, others became common to all the inhabitants of the oasis. They formed no coherent ‘pantheon’. Hence Kaizer speaks not about religion but about religious life. His main idea was, and still is, to look for social patterns of religious behaviour. He is mainly interested in worshippers and not in the gods they worshipped. And the worshippers apparently did not care much about the origins of the deities they were attached to.
M. Sartre's paper on ‘Dieux grecs à Palmyre’ comes to the point. These gods, once adopted, joined the crowd without reservation. Some were identified with local figures, such as Nabu-Apollo or Allat-Athena. These are not mere ‘translations’. Their iconography followed Greek models, and perhaps Greek myths were adopted in their wake. Sartre shows that some deities were accepted wholesale, such as Nemesis or Heracles, the latter also identified with the Babylonian underworld god Nergal, but on other occasions he was the same naked hero with his club and the lion's hide as in the Greek world. As Sartre has demonstrated elsewhere, the political constitution in Palmyra was based on that of contemporary Greek cities of the Empire. No wonder that Tyche of Palmyra should take up the aspect of the famous Tyche of Antioch by Eutychides, even if called in Aramaic with the masculine name Gad, being a generic term for various native tutelary deities. The Hellenistic heritage became part and parcel of the religious imagination of the Palmyrenes and not a superficial disguise of their ancestral tradition.
L. Dirven considers the images of gods as ‘windows’ on the religious life of Palmyra, otherwise hardly lit by the stereotyped and laconic inscriptions at our disposal. She is resolutely against the idea of the ubiquitous cult reliefs being the ‘Oriental forerunners of Byzantine painting’, as first formulated by J.H. Breasted in connection with the wall paintings in Dura-Europos. She thinks that the cult images were predominantly statues and that no fundamental change in the cult attitudes caused by the introduction of flat reliefs representing the gods in their temples should be supposed. There is of course no question of understanding these reliefs (or lost paintings for that matter) in the light of the Orthodox theology of icons. But the formal resemblance of both is in my view more than accidental: both express the actual presence of the depicted figures.
There existed full-size statues in Palmyra, especially imported marble ones, of which only fragments survive. Their function, however, was mostly decorative, enhancing public secular buildings. We know, indirectly, only one cult statue, viz. the seated goddess Allat in her late Hellenistic shrine, which can be reconstructed from mortises in the extant base and several small copies in relief (fig. 4.2). The marble Athena found on the spot was scavenged in the ruins in the fourth century to replace the destroyed old idol. Less assured is the existence of a statue of Bel in the great temple, suggested by a relief in Lyon (fig. 4.5) showing Bel in lamellar armour seated opposite Baalshamin (who had his own temple, where he sat enthroned on a bronze plate). True, there are some representations in relief showing gods standing on bases, but this is not enough to posit a general use of free-standing cult statues in Palmyra. Perhaps the limited means of archaic Palmyra shaped this tradition alive in more affluent times. The village shrines in the Palmyrene area always contained cult reliefs, cheaper and easier to make.
The extant reliefs are windows onto the divine world as it was imagined, and not on the reality of temples. It is enough to compare the reliefs on figs 4.6 and 4.7, showing the same handshake of gods Aglibol and Malakbel, one in Palmyra and the other in Rome.
The editor of the volume, Raja, is the leader of the Palmyra Portrait Project, collecting the funerary monuments from Palmyra worldwide, over 4,000 by now. This undertaking already allows various detailed studies using the Copenhagen database. A sample is given in the book: Raja has treated the sculptures featuring the dorsalium, a cloth pinned up behind the back of a person to signify most probably that he or she has already passed away. This ‘curtain of death’ appears on 246 funerary reliefs, all catalogued and illustrated.
The following, much shorter, contribution by M. Heyn tackles the gesture of extended open hands on some altars, evidently in prayer. Less obvious is the upturned right hand of some early female portraits, 25 altogether. Linking it to a form of ancestor worship seems problematic. Why not a simple farewell?
To some extent the same monuments serve to illustrate the contribution of E. Cussini on ‘Images of Individual Devotion’. Cussini, however, is more concerned with inscriptions on votive altars and the ways in which the text variants and even the script (monumental or cursive) could express the shades of pious attitudes of the dedicants towards their gods.
Another case of epigraphic approach is presented by A. Kubiak-Schneider who, following on from her Ph.D. thesis on the so-called anonymous god, where she proposed that several gods could be called ‘He whose name is blessed forever’ (Des dédicaces sans théonyme de Palmyre [2021]), posits here that the altars dedicated to Rahmana (Merciful) were offered to Bel.
T. Gnoli's paper treats a distinct category of armed gods, divine figures carrying shields and spears as the desert dwellers used to do or else clad in armour and equipped with long swords. This subject was introduced by Henri Seyrig, who proposed to see in this attire a reflection of the garb of the nomads, identified as the Arabs from Arabia gaining new ground in Syria. Gnoli rightly observes that there are no traces of the use of Arabic in Palmyra and its territory in spite of some personal names of Arabic etymology. However, it is not correct to say that the gods armed in the traditional way were common mostly in the countryside, while the armour would be popular in the city. While it is likely that the body armour imitates the legionary outfit, the early kind of lamellar armour was not Roman at all and survived for instance in the iconography of Bel (see fig. 4.5 in Dirven, p. 44). And if no gods appear in the cataphract armour covering the whole body of rider and horse, it does not follow that no cataphracti served in the Palmyrene army of Odainat and Zenobia (p. 167).
The two following papers concern the Palmyrene diaspora. J.-B. Yon, a leading authority in the field of Palmyrene epigraphy and especially onomastics, analyses the data mostly from Dacia and Numidia generated by the soldiers and veterans from the Palmyrene units stationed in these provinces. He concludes that they are mainly interested in their ancestral gods, but apparently not all of them. The Latin inscriptions most often address Malachbelus (Malakbel, 23 times) and Ierhabolus/Hierobolus (Iarhibol, 15 dedications), while there is no trace of Bel or Baalshamin. Manawat, Belhammon and the Phoenician-looking Benefal (for Fenebal) do appear instead in the record. On the face of it, these soldiers and their descendants, and also the Palmyrenes settled in Rome, appear to have remained faithful to their Palmyrene identity, but treated their religious heritage rather selectively.
E. Seland, who is well known for his studies on the overseas trade of the oasis, looks for something he calls, after W. McNeill, ‘portable religions’, that is cults detached from traditional sanctuaries. Accordingly, most of the paper deals with Judaism, Christianity and Manichaeism. While there exists well-known evidence for a Jewish community in Palmyra, there is nothing to hint at the presence of Christians before the fourth century. It is quite unnecessary to take at face value the disparaging remarks of Athanasius of Alexandria about Zenobia and her alleged protégé Paul of Samosata, a heretic bishop of Antioch whom Athanasius accused of ‘judaising’. Nor can a legendary flavour of a story reported in a Manichaean source about ‘Queen Tadamor’ inspire much confidence. We should rather think of Zenobia as a pious worshipper of the host of Palmyrene gods.
Finally, N. Andrade tries to link the maritime ventures of the Palmyrenes between the Gulf and India to the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, which mention the conversion of King Gondophares by the apostle. Neither the historical Gondophares (an Indo-Parthian king, c. 20–46 ce) nor his legendary figure in this apocryphal text of the later third century are related to Palmyra in any way. The Palmyrene merchants who owned sea-going ships in the Indian Ocean were certainly not alone in making the trip, and the text probably written in Edessa and mentioning Jerusalem does not make it necessary to suppose that the route between the two ran through Palmyra.
The volume will be eminently useful by supplying a fresh update about the gods and beliefs of Palmyra. It is a welcome guide to the latest ideas inspired by more general work on religious identities in the light of current anthropological theories.
