Palmyrene

The script is a distinctive development of the Aramaic alphabet, used at Palmyra and, so far as the evidence goes, almost nowhere else except by Palmyrenes themselves. It exists in a formal monumental version cut into stone and a more rapid cursive form, and it appears on temple dedications, on the carved funerary portraits that sealed burial niches, and on the small tokens used to admit holders to religious banquets.

Because Palmyra was a trading city inside the Roman world, a large proportion of its inscriptions are bilingual, giving the same text in Palmyrene and in Greek, and occasionally in Latin as well. Those parallel texts are what make the corpus so useful: they supply not just a key to the script but a running commentary on how the city presented itself in two languages at once, and the versions are not always identical in what they claim. Palmyrene inscriptions also turn up a long way from Syria, wherever Palmyrenes settled, traded or served in the Roman army, including Dura Europos on the Euphrates, Rome itself, North Africa and the northern frontier of Britain.

One of the best known was cut near Hadrian's Wall by a Palmyrene commemorating his British wife, a freedwoman he had married, with the memorial given in Latin and then again in his own language and script. It is about as compact an illustration of the empire's reach, and of what people carried with them across it, as the epigraphic record offers.

Palmyrene was among the first ancient scripts recovered in the modern period, and it was recovered quickly. An eighteenth century expedition published accurate engravings of inscriptions from the ruins, and within a short time of that publication scholars working from the bilingual texts had established the values of the letters, one of them reportedly in a matter of days. The alphabet was small, the language was a known one, and the Greek stood beside it. What the inscriptions then revealed was a religious life that no literary source describes. They name Bel, Baalshamin, Malakbel, Yarhibol, Aglibol and others, record the dedication of altars and the endowment of banquets, and are the principal evidence for how the city's cults were organised and funded.

One feature has attracted particular attention. A large number of small altars are dedicated not to a named deity but to one described as he whose name is blessed for ever, with the dedicator's name and thanks recorded but the god left unnamed. Explanations offered include a taboo on the name, a deliberately inclusive formula, and a specific god known to everyone locally, and the question is not settled. The atlas records the formula and the range of explanations rather than adopting one.