PALMYRA IN CONTEXT CITY, EMPIRE, WORLD, DRY STEPPE VERSION 1.0 a working paper from the project Palmyrena: City, Hinterland and Caravan Trade between Orient and Occident Jørgen Christian Meyer and Eivind Heldaas Seland University of Bergen Feel free to cite this paper, but bear in mind that it represents work in progress. The working paper will be removed from the web-site when it appears in print. The authors welcome all comments and can be contacted for details on revisions and publication (e-mail). WORKING PAPER WORKING PAPER PALMYRA IN CONTEXT CITY, EMPIRE, WORLD, DRY STEPPE Jørgen Christian Meyer and Eivind Heldaas Seland University of Bergen From Hadrian’s Wall to Palmyra. Regina was only 30 years old, when she died near the easternmost fort of Hadrian’s Wall, Arbeia, at the mouth of the river Tyne around 200 AD. Her husband, Barates, erected a magnificent tombstone to his deceased wife, whom he had given the dignified name “Regina” (Salway 1965, 256-7). Regina is seated in an elaborate architectural niche with a work-basket, needle and balls of wool, and her right hand on a jewel case. At the bottom a panel carries two inscriptions. The first one reads: D M REGINA LIBERTA ET CONIVGE BARATES PALMYRENVS NATIONE CATVALLAVNA AN XXX (To the memory of Regina, freedwoman and wife of Barates of Palmyra, of the Catuallaunian tribe, who died aged 30). The second one is shorter and written in Aramaic characters: rgyn’ brtin bt hry’ hbl (Regina, freedwoman of Barates, alas!). Regina’s tombstone in northern England is an excellent starting point for an understanding of the Syrian city of Palmyra, its history, people and culture. Since European travellers in the 17th century discovered the impressive ruins of one of the most important cities at the eastern edge of the Roman Empire, the place has been wrapped in exoticism. The ruins lie in a green oasis, named Tadmor in Arabic, in harsh, arid environments, dominated by Bedouins with their herds, and Palmyra is often labelled “The Bride of the Desert”. The funerary towers west of the city contained mummies, some of them dressed in silk from China and cotton from India (Stauffer 1995). Sculptures of the deceased show a peculiar synthesis of Greco-Roman and Oriental style (Ingholt 1928; Colledge 1976). Inscriptions, both private and public, are frequently bilingual; Greek and Aramaic, and in some cases even trilingual, including Latin. Even if most of the architecture can be classified basically as Hellenistic/Roman with some Eastern elements, Palmyra leaves the impression of some WORKING PAPER 2 WORKING PAPER WORKING PAPER WORKING PAPER otherness and orientalism. No doubt, Palmyra was different from Rome, Pompeii, Athens or Eburacum (York) in Britannia. However, Rome also differed from Athens or the cities in North Africa, and how much importance should we attach to this otherness? This is where Barates may help us. As an officer in the 6th legion, stationed at Hadrian’s Wall, or a civilian contractor, negotiator, to the Roman army, he was far away from his native town about 3900 km as the crow flies, or at least 3-4 month’s travel, if he chose the right season for seafaring in the Mediterranean, considerably more if he chose to cover the whole distance on foot. A modern Syrian or Briton can cover the distance in a day or two, but still most travellers experience a huge cultural difference between what we call the Orient and the Occident. Also for Barates the encounter with Britannia and its people must have been a peculiar experience. He had to accustom himself to the damp, misty landscape and the cold, rainy summers of northern Europe (Tac. Agr. 12.3-5). Local customs, dress, housing, food and languages also differed from what he was used to. However, it is highly unlikely, that he experienced any larger cultural shock, when he settled in Britannia and married a local girl, who he had bought as a slave and later manumitted. Contrary to the modern world, family structures, social connections, friendship and basic values associated with a good and successful life were essentially the same in Syria and Britannia in antiquity. In Britannia he found cities with almost the same institutions he knew from Palmyra. They had a city council, annually elected magistrates, tax collectors, baths, a central market place with public buildings, a theatre or amphitheatre and an imperial cult (Kaizer 2002, 148-9). The temple for the Capitoline triad, Jupiter, Juno and Minerva was not identical to the Palmyrene triad, Bel, the master of the universe, Iarhibol (the sun) and Aglibol (the moon), but Jupiter could easily be identified with Bel or Zeus (Butcher 2003, 346-7). The local elite both in Britannia and Palmyra competed for prestige and political power by being generous to the community. Well-founded roads and rest-houses, very often with military presence, made travel relatively easy and safe between cities even in the rainy season, and milestones with basic geographical information made maps or guides superfluous. If Barates wanted to return to his native town, lists of names, the so-called itineraria, with cities, road stations and distances, functioned much in the same way as a subway map does today. Barates lived in a multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious and multilingual empire, which was not only bound together by loyalty to the emperor in Rome. The different regions shared some basic features, cutting across climatic, geographical and cultural divides. WORKING PAPER 3 WORKING PAPER WORKING PAPER WORKING PAPER He was a cosmopolitan and mastered several tongues; in Palmyra the two official languages, Greek and Aramaic, in Britain also Latin. This was not only the world of Barates, but the world of many of his fellow Palmyrenes, whether they sailed on the Indian Ocean, traded in Mesopotamian cities, did military service in Britannia or Dacia or even entered the Roman Senate. Palmyra in the centre of an old Hellenistic world. However, at one point there was a great difference between northern Britain and Palmyra. The frontier to the north was a visible line in the landscape, marked by Hadrian’s Wall. It was not only a military and political boundary line, but also a cultural one. Even if there was an extensive economic exchange across the border, and some parts of Roman Britain were still characterized by tribal organization, Hadrian’s Wall marked the borderline between a labile tribal society to the north, and a well-organized empire, based on a city-state culture to the south. The frontier in the East towards the Parthian Empire was not clearly defined (Whittaker 1994, 49-59). In the more arid regions nomadic tribal groups continued to move their herds long-distance from summer to winter pasture and control of oases and wells was essential. In other parts client kingdoms, bound by personal loyalty either to the Roman emperor or the Parthian king constituted an unstable buffer zone. Further, the frontier in the east was essentially a political border zone between two great empires, not a cultural one. The eastern part of the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia and the Iranian tableland had been part of large empires before, first the Persian Achaemenid Empire, later the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire (Sherwin-White & Kuhrt 1993, 40-71). Both empires stretched from the Mediterranean in the West as far as Afghanistan in the East. When the Parthians took over and pushed back the Seleucids to the Euphrates, they assimilated much of the Hellenistic culture and combined it with their own and other local traditions (Sellwood 1980; Brosius 2006, 126-8). There were differences in art and architecture, especially from the first century AD and onwards, when there was a reaction against the former Philhellenism, but this does not justify the conception of a sharp cultural dividing line between the Orient and the Occident. The more feudal and rural Parthians never attained the same degree of political cohesion as the Romans did within their sphere of influence, and the cities were still the centre of political power and social life. The old Hellenistic cities enjoyed a high degree of political autonomy (Wiesehöfer 2001, 141- WORKING PAPER 4 WORKING PAPER WORKING PAPER WORKING PAPER 3), they flourished and some of them became important strongholds on the overland trade route between the Far East and the Eastern Mediterranean. Palmyra is thus situated more or less in the centre of an old Hellenistic cultural sphere, and it makes sense to classify it as an Hellenistic city, if we by “Hellenism” mean a symbiosis of Greek (later Roman) and Oriental elements, not only a one-way Greek influence on the eastern societies (Briant 1990; Sherwin-White & Kuhrt 1993, 1-6, 141-87). The material culture in Palmyra shows all the characteristics of this symbiosis (Al-As’ad & Schmidt-Colinet 1995, 28-53). In architecture the Greco-Roman tradition dominated, even if mud bricks were widely used as building material, leaving columns and doorposts the only visible remains of the houses today. The Bel temple has a more Eastern ground plan, but otherwise the idiom is Greek. The large colonnaded street can be compared to similar ones in Apamea, Antioch, Damascus, Gadara, Philadelphia, just to mention a few (Butcher 2003, 105). The sepulchral culture, on the other hand, shows strong influence from the east (Ingholt 1928; Colledge 1976). It is an open question whether the Palmyrenes themselves were aware of this symbiosis or attached any importance to it. However, “culture” is not only art and architecture. It is also a question of social relations and institutions, irrespective of material culture. From a historical point of view there was no borderline at Euphrates, and, as we shall see, Palmyrene activities and presence were not only confined to different parts of the Roman Empire, like a Barates in Britannia, but also to the cities across the political frontier.