This French monograph published in the renowned RGRW series by Brill is a slightly reworked version of K.-S.'s doctoral dissertation of 2016. It is a substantial piece of scholarship on some crucial aspects of Palmyrene religion, which opens the field of Palmyrene religious inscriptions to a much broader field of religious studies, underlining the profound philology, history of religion and knowledge of Palmyra in general as well as the analytical skills of the author. The three main phrases around which the work evolves are those alluding to the divinities mentioned as: ‘The Merciful’, ‘Master of the Universe’ and ‘Blessed (be) his name forever’. K.-S. re-evaluates and interprets, within a new and solid analytical framework, earlier attempts at ascribing these phrases to specific deities. The analysis is undertaken through a careful and comprehensive analysis of other groups of evidence reaching far beyond Palmyra's religious sphere, drawing on evidence from other regions and sites, such as Edessa, Hatra and Mesopotamia in general. For the first time, the religious contexts of these phrases, as found in the Palmyrene epigraphic record, are set within the framework of a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the inscriptions in a broader religious context – but with a point of departure in the Palmyrene religious sphere. This framework helps K.-S. to come to entirely new conclusions about the three enigmatic phrases in question. Through a tight and detailed analysis, the basic conclusion is that the two phrases ‘the Merciful’ and ‘Master of the Universe’, respectively, can be connected to Bel (the Merciful) as well as Bel and Baalshamin (Master of the Universe). Furthermore, the third phrase ‘Blessed (be) his name forever’ is more generally connected with all (male) divinities who listen and respond to those (Palmyrenes) who give prayers/dedicants (p. 217). While at first sight these might seem like quite basic conclusions, these are not easy to arrive at, and K.-S. convincingly takes readers through the vast span of evidence and backs up her arguments solidly on all fronts, showing the quality of the research that has gone into this book.
The monograph consists of two major parts, a text part comprising 227 pages and a well-organised catalogue part comprising 150 pages with a total of 202 entries. The work, according to the back cover, revolves around 203 Palmyrene Aramaic votive inscriptions on altars, stemming from the second and the third centuries ce, which hold the formulaic content alluding to divinities. However, this reviewer could not track down the 203rd inscription in the main text of the book. The main text falls into three chapters. The first chapter is a substantial chapter on dedications to the gods in Palmyra, which concerns the altars, the inscriptions and their vocabularies, the dating of the objects and their inscriptions and the significance of these dates – both in terms of absolute/relative dating of the dedications and also of the festivals and/or religious events connected to the dedications as well as the dedicants. The second chapter concerns the iconography on the altars (pp. 101–10), and in the rest of the chapter denominations for deities in Palmyra are considered in detail as far as they are relevant for the three main phrases of the work. A final, and much shorter, chapter concerns the identification of the formulaic phrases with specific Palmyrene deities. This summing up of the evidence put forward in Chapters 1 and 2 provides convincing arguments for the ascriptions of the phrases to the deities mentioned in the review's first section. The ten-page conclusion sums up the main results of the work and points to the potential that it holds for future research. It underlines the necessity of a deep study of the material within its local religious setting followed by a broad and profound comparative study drawing on an immense amount of material from the Near East; only that way can we begin to understand, on the one hand, the particularities of the Palmyrene religious world and, on the other hand, its being embedded in a much broader koine of religious traditions with which the Palmyrene elite was well acquainted.
The catalogue holds datings, references, locations and good short descriptions of the altars as well as a commentary. K.-S. has (re)translated all the inscriptions and in some cases re-edited them on the basis of estampages (squeezes) and photos and, where possible, has read them directly from the objects (altars) in the collections and museums where they are held today. As a result, the catalogue is up to date on references to each object and its inscriptions. Inevitably, K.-S. was not able to see all the objects, since many of them are lost today, and at least since 2011 it has not been possible to travel to Palmyra and work in the museum or the storages there. One fault of the book is the complete lack of images. Apart from the cover image, there is not a single illustration. While acknowledging that this is first and foremost a philological piece of scholarship – and a substantial one –, the inscriptions cannot be wholly appreciated without the material upon which they were originally carved. Materiality does matter. It would have been helpful to provide at least images of the altars and other monuments, which are scattered around museums and collections. To have had these illustrated in this comprehensive work would have made it even more useful for researchers in the future and would have allowed, for example, for further discussions about readability and audience. Of course, images can be tracked down through the references in the catalogue.
As the 202 inscriptions show, the Palmyrene evidence is plentiful, and this, on the one hand, presents researchers with immense possibilities of conducting in-depth analysis of a variety of aspects of religious life, but also presents challenges, since the material often – held up against other locations – stands out for its local flair, its enigmatic nature or its overwhelming plentifulness. In the case of the three phrases under scrutiny in the book, K.-S. shows that even enigmatic phrases that have puzzled scholars for about a century can be deciphered by means of a strict analytical approach (for another such attempt based on iconographic symbolism see T. Kaizer and R. Raja, Syria 95 [2018]) and that no phrase would have been enigmatic to contemporary readers/audiences in a Palmyrene context. The brilliance of this monograph reflects K.-S.'s knowledge of the material and the broader contextualisation of it. There is no doubt that this work is a substantial contribution both to scholarship on Palmyrene religion and society as well as to the broader understanding of the religious life of the Near East in the first centuries ce.
