The Paradox of Palmyra: An Ancientanomalopolisin the Desert

Abstract

Palmyra, the UNESCO world heritage site that tragically made headlines following ISIS's destruction of several of its key monuments in 2015, was once a thriving city in the heart of the Syrian Desert. Settled from Neolithic through modern times, the documented urban history of the site spans a millennium, from the late centuries bc until the late first millennium ad. Palmyra has often been cast as 'the bride of the desert', and the apparent paradox of a sizeable city 150-200 km from major areas of cultivation has spurred considerable scholarly interest. In this article, we discuss the roles of climate change, geopolitical changes, and nomad-settled interaction in the urban bio graphy of Palmyra, drawing on published palaeoclimatological evidence and general evidence offered by urban development, epi graphy (inscriptions), and settlement size.

Alternative Urban Economies: The Case of Roman Palmyra

“…Or did professional bakers produce and distribute bread for purchase? We have already noted the discovery of ovens in houses at Palmyra, as at Dura-Europos (Ertel and Ployer 2013, 152-55;Raja and Steding 2021;Lapatin and Raja 2022;Raja and Seland 2022;Raja and Sindbaek 2022). To some degree, Palmyrene households must have produced their own bread and perhaps sold some of it for additional revenue.…”

“…These have been the topic of some classic and more recent treatments. 2 Yet, many aspects of Palmyra's economy and its environmental implications remain underexplored, whether we consider them in isolation or as part of an interconnected web (Raja and Seland 2022;Romanowska and others 2021). At a certain fundamental level, the materials that the Palmyrenes used routinely for professional or domestic labour and how they got them have not been widely examined until recently (Bobou, Raja, and Romanowska 2021;Raja, Bobou, and Romanowska 2021;Raja and Steding 2021).…”

“…wider range of other spheres, such as city-hinterland dynamics, non-monetary economies, and localregional dynamics, which would have played a role in the overall economic patterns of the city and its society (Lapatin and Raja 2022;Raja and Seland 2022;Raja and Sindbaek 2022;Raja and Steding 2021).…”

“…Scaling out from Palmyrene material to a broader picture of the relationship between Palmyrene society's local economies and that of the international caravan trade will in the future bring new insights on economic patterns and behaviours in Antiquity, and new projects are currently pushing this agenda through exploring a variety of approaches and angles of the Palmyrene economy (Romanowska and others 2021). While all of the perspectives we have been focusing on in recent years cannot be covered in detail here, we intend to bring some of them to the forefront of broader archaeo logical and historical research on urban societies, with a point of departure being a case study that in many ways departs from the ordinary (Lapatin and Raja 2022;Raja and Seland 2022;Raja and Sindbaek 2022) but that also puts emphasis on a set of economic patterns. Since these patterns may or may not have been in place in other urban societies as well, they provide a good comparative basis from which to open new discussions.…”

“…Useful starting points areMatthews 1984;Meyer 2017a;2017b; Smith 2013, 49-54, 107-09;Sommer 2005; 2018, 145-226;Raja and Seland 2022, along with other works cited in this article.…”