It is five years since the so-called Islamic State (IS) seized the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria, destroying temples and burial monuments in targeted acts of iconoclastic demolition. The destruction of so much archaeology at the site has not diminished research interest in the city, however, and this NBC considers three new volumes focusing on the archaeology of Palmyra that have recently arrived on the Antiquity shelves. These volumes offer fresh interpretations of life in Palmyra from the first century AD to the end of the Umayyad dominion in AD 750, addressing variously the religious life of the city, women, children and family in Roman Palmyra, and the lesser-studied phase of the site after the fall of the Palmyrene Empire in AD 273.
Based on a conference held in Copenhagen in 2017, Revisiting the religious life of Palmyra brings together prominent scholars from different disciplines, united by their research on the religious life of Palmyra. The book comprises 12 papers that deal with both text-based and material evidence. Raja's opening paper, as well as outlining the other contributions, argues that the volume makes a compelling case for concentrating on a single site to consider ancient religious life. Ted Kaizer (Chapter 2) revisits the subject of his doctoral dissertation, completed in 2000, to reflect on developments in the study of Palmyrene religion. In considering where future directions lie, he favours a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach, which shares datasets and is mutually informative. Maurice Sartre (Chapter 3) considers the Hellenisation of the city and presents a wide range of evidence to demonstrate the influence of early Greek deities on the pantheon of gods at Palmyra. Lucinda Dirven (Chapter 4) argues that divine and sacred representations of deities can offer an understanding of the “religious mentality of the Palmyrenes” (p. 39). Informed by cognitive approaches that view meaning as culturally and historically rooted, Dirven uses a comparative approach to consider material from other Syrian cities to contextualise the evidence from Palmyra. She concludes that the religious mentality in Palmyra was steeped in tradition and that society placed great importance on the sacred character of a place or object. Eleonora Cussini (Chapter 5) charts the personal stories of individual Palmyrenes in her study of individual devotion in Palmyra, and finds that although based on formulaic dedicatory texts, worshippers petitioned the gods in their own words.
Rubina Raja's own contribution (Chapter 6) focuses on a particular detail of funerary sculpture, the ‘curtain of death’. This feature takes the form of an image of a cloth, veil or curtain that is depicted on over 240 pieces of funerary sculpture in Palmyra. In assessing the meaning and symbolism of this object, Raja considers the diversity of representations of the image, and how it is used to separate individuals—perhaps suggesting the death of one of them. She concludes that the symbol is undoubtedly associated with death and may relate to mourning. A comprehensive illustrated catalogue of images featuring the cloth is included. Another motif seen commonly in Palmyran funerary imagery is investigated by Maura Heyn (Chapter 7). The orans pose, which depicts (almost always) women with both palms held up facing outward, appears on examples of funerary art from the late first to second centuries AD. Heyn explores how this gesture was related to gendered roles in ritual and worship and the position of women in Palmyra more generally. Chapters 8–9 deal with Palmyran deities. Tommasso Gnoli unravels the arguments surrounding whether the armed gods depicted in religious iconography in Palmyra should be seen to represent an ‘Arabization’ (p. 162); this is based on the long tradition in the Arabian peninsula of men who have come of age carrying a weapon. Aleksandra Kubiak-Schneider focuses on the patron god of the city, Bel the merciful. Representations of Bel in reliefs from the city draw on the iconography of Bel Marduk, a Mesopotamian deity. Kubiak-Schneider explores the connection between Palmyrene and Babylonian deities and considers concepts of mercy in Palmyran religion and theology to understand the association of Bel with mercy. She concludes that in Babylonian and Palmyran society, mercy was understood to be a positive response to prayers and petitions; Bel's prominence in the Palmyran pantheon was probably linked to a belief in his mercy.
Focusing on the multi-ethnic nature of late Roman society, outsiders, foreigners and the Palmyrene diaspora are explored in the next chapters, in which Jean-Baptiste Yon (Chapter 10) and Eivind Heldaas Seland (Chapter 11) consider respectively how Palmyrene religion functioned in mobile communities such as military units while maintaining a separateness, and how Palmyrene religion travelled and was practised by the diaspora communities. The final chapter of the volume revisits the debate surrounding how a Parthian king from northern India came to feature in the Acts of Thomas, a third-century manuscript that forms part of the New Testament apocrypha. In this chapter, Nathanael Andrade argues that it was the mobility of the Palmyrenes that provided the link between the Indo-Parthian king and the apocryphal script.
Continuing the approach of using sculpture and epigraphy to understand society, Krag and Raja's volume, Women, children and the family in Palmyra, aims to investigate representations of women and children to shed light on their participation in both the civic and religious spheres. Comprising nine illustrated chapters, the book addresses a variety of interpretations of the evidence for family life in Palmyra in the first three centuries AD. The volume is broadly divided into three parts, dealing with the funerary sphere (Part I), civic and religious spheres (Part II) and comparative examples from Rome (Part III).
Part I brings out the importance that Palmyran communities placed on belonging to a group or family and the act of claiming that identity publicly in tomb architecture and portraiture. Krag (Chapter 2) finds that burial patterns in Palmyra, from the hypogea at least, reflect a male bias, with men representing around 60 per cent of the individuals who could be identified in the tombs. Children represent only around 6 per cent, with only one of these children female; a similar pattern is reflected in the portraiture. Tracing the lineage of the tomb's occupants, Krag found that women were more likely to be buried in the tomb of their husband's family. The epigraphy revealed that, in many cases, women's funerary inscriptions or portraiture does not identify them as wives. It remains unclear whether this was because they were unmarried, because those who buried them chose not to represent this or that there was a reliance on family knowledge of marital unions that obviated their expression in this way.
Agnes Henning (Chapter 1) finds that, in tower tombs, marriage is signalled only on the interior of the tomb, with foundation inscriptions suggesting that tombs were exclusively owned by men, with no women or wives named on these inscription tabulae. While children of the founders are listed as permitted occupants of the tombs, which may imply a marriage, wives are not mentioned directly. Inscriptions mentioning wives, where they do appear, are limited to alcoves. Portraiture depictions of wives are sometimes included in the alcove reliefs of tower tombs, although evidently only until the first century AD, and then only in the background behind the husband and as part of a larger family group; there are no depictions of daughters, and only male family members were named. Within the tombs, portraits or relief busts of women do appear, but these are uniform and it remains unclear whether the women depicted were buried in the tomb; the portraits were almost certainly inserted into the tomb during construction and probably mark family relations rather than tomb occupants. Henning concludes that ‘symbols of marriage played no role in funerary representations in Palmyra […] no emotional ties can be observed’ (p. 36).
Part II reveals that women fared slightly better in civic and religious life. Despite evidence from these areas focusing largely on men, Sanne Klaver (Chapter 6) finds that women were active participants in religious life and are depicted involved in processions and sacrificial events. In Part III, Mary Boatwright compares the model of the family at Palmyra with that of Imperial Rome, finding that the role of women, particularly as mothers, was celebrated in portraiture in Rome in a way that is not apparent at Palmyra. Ville Vuolanto (Chapter 9) provides a similar comparison of the role of children, discovering that despite scarce evidence from Palmyra, it is possible to say that children may have had roles assisting in sacrifice and that some boys may have had priestly duties to undertake. Children certainly do not appear to have been excluded from religious life, and seem to have been protected by prayers, amulets and votive offerings. These studies add breadth and depth to our understanding of Palmyran society, bringing to the fore individual identities and sectors of society often unrepresented.
Picking up where the first two volumes leave off, Palmyra after Zenobia details Palmyra from the unsuccessful revolt of the Palmyrene queen, Zenobia, in AD 273 to the end of the Umayyad Dynasty in AD 750. Based on his PhD dissertation, Intagliata's book offers comprehensive coverage of the city during its Late Antique and Early Islamic phases, a period that is often neglected in favour of the Classical era. The volume provides a synthesis of archaeological and literary evidence for post-Roman Palmyra including detailed studies of the city's defences—Diocletian's military fortress and the city walls—the religious sphere and the urban life of the city.
Intagliata opens the volume with two chapters offering a contextualisation of Palmyra in the Late Antique period, finding it less isolated than often thought. Despite the contraction of the city in the typical Late Antique pattern, its position on the eastern frontier made it a strategic military stronghold. The road network across the region meant that people and goods continued to move through the city, and, as an early bishopric, Palmyra must have been a centre for Christian communities in the surrounding area. The adoption of Islam does not appear to have drastically changed the fabric of the city, which had already exchanged classical urbanism for a more contracted and pragmatic civic arrangement. Chapter 3 explains some of these changes with a detailed study of housing as a marker of social change. Intagliata finds that the changes in housing reflect a move from exotic and expensive architecture designed to reflect aristocratic ambition, to a more utilitarian domestic form that was chiefly designed to meet the needs of a garrison town.
In a final chapter, Intagliata neatly presents the significance of Palmyra from the third century AD to its eventual disuse in the eighth century. Well organised and richly illustrated, the volume provides an engaging reappraisal of the evidence for the adaptability and continued significance of this major provincial city through late antiquity.
Echoing the theme of the expression of identity that featured in the first two volumes on Palmyra, our second selection of volumes for this NBC explores methods of personal adornment. From the Palaeolithic of the Near East to the Maya city of Palenque, via the Greek and Roman worlds, these three books focus on the ways that bodies have been dressed and decorated to reflect beliefs and identities.
Baysal's goal in Personal ornaments in prehistory is “to re-write and re-understand the history of personal ornaments from a different perspective—a really long and really wide perspective” (p. 2). To do this she considers personal ornamentation from the Palaeolithic to the Bronze Age, taking a broad temporal perspective on South-eastern Europe. Beginning with a discussion of what personal ornamentation is, Baysal sensibly avoids a simplistic definition, instead outlining how aesthetic decoration is just one of a variety of purposes that personal ornamentation can have; she highlights the possible sensorial, temporal and social aspects, as well as arguing for their agency and relationship to belief, medicine, magic, status, identity (group and individual) and lifestyle—to list but a few.
Baysal goes on to consider the importance of these objects, both in terms of how they represent human engagement with technology and materials, and as indicators of relationships, mobility and trade and exchange in prehistoric societies. She explores the importance of excavation techniques and the recovery of artefacts in the subsequent interpretation of personal ornaments, and the problems with interpreting these artefacts within a social evolutionary narrative. Later chapters consider period-based case studies from the Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age from Turkey, the Near East and the Balkans. Each chapter includes a self-contained artefact biography that describes and illustrates a particular object, recounting its biography in terms of its creation, use and final deposition, and offering a discussion of its significance in our interpretation of, for example, the scale of dynamic cultural interactions. Collectively, these chapters build the case for viewing personal ornamentation as “material history with context and social importance” (p. 209).
The final chapter aims to contextualise personal ornamentation within periods of major change in prehistory and suggest how these artefacts can be read to identify and characterise social processes. Here Baysal outlines how economy, society and identity are reflected in personal ornamentation, and calls for archaeologists to push interpretation of these artefacts further and understand them as fundamental to prehistoric material culture.
As well as personal ornamentation, dress and physical markings on the body can also mediate identities, relationships and status. Fashioned selves: dress and identity in Antiquity, edited by Megan Cifarelli, explores these themes as they were expressed in the ancient past. Bringing together 19 contributors to explore the broadly grouped themes of ‘Funerary selves’, ‘Sacred fashions’, ‘Communal selves’ and ‘Beyond identity’, the volume considers archaeological examples of marked or dressed bodies from Iran, Mesopotamia, Syria and the Levant, the Aegean, Greece, the Roman world and Late Antique Central Asia. Cifarelli's introduction highlights that the aim of the volume and its contributors is to demonstrate that dress should be understood not simply as a static expression of identity but as “a dynamic component in the construction, embodiment, performance, and transformation of identities” (p. 1).
In an example of the ways that identity is reflected in funerary practice, Jennifer Swerida and Selin Nugent consider the burial of a Middle Bronze Age individual in Azerbaijan and examine the ways in which constructed mortuary identity could be used to negotiate social organisation and broader group identity. The occupant of kurgan CR8, a Middle Bronze Age tomb in a Qızqala community necropolis at Naxçıvan, was buried with 130 beads of different types (possibly originally forming a necklace or beaded garment) and a large collection of copper and bronze pins. The types of beads (carnelian, amber and faience) symbolise both regional affiliation and trade and exchange. The burial is described as elite and socially significant, not only because of the grave goods, but also because of the subsequent efforts of the descendant community to connect later burials to CR8 spatially, perhaps signifying familial relationships or defining the occupant of CR8 as a significant community figure or ancestor. Swerida and Nugent see the decoration of the body in death as a process of transitioning the individual from an important member of the living community to an idealised ancestor. This burial was a durable memorial that the community may have returned to because of its significance; it was dynamic in that the community's relationship with the individual interred was renegotiated as he embodied new roles in the collective memory and social history of the group.
In the ‘sacred fashions’ section, Nili Fox (Chapter 6) considers tattooing as a method of dressing the body with a mark of culture. Fox investigates the apparent conflict between the biblical ban on tattooing recorded in the Old Testament and what seems to have been the common practice of tattooing in the ancient Near East. Examining ancient Egyptian attitudes to tattooing and evidence for the significance of such markings, Fox finds that tattoos served a variety of functions, but were most commonly associated with religion, sometimes representing deities or their associated symbols. They could also signify servitude. She concludes that by controlling practices such as tattooing, proponents of biblical legislation were attempting to prevent the crossing of religious boundaries.
In an interesting inversion of the topic, Marina Haworth (Chapter 11) investigates the meaning embodied in representations of male nudity in Greek art, arguing that the ancient Greeks had specific notions about this topic that were tied to bronze anatomical armour, which was often viewed as a second skin. She considers the artistic repertoire of statuary and vase paintings depicting nude and armoured male forms to gain an understanding of the inclusion of armour in funerary markers. Haworth argues that armour “becomes a stand-in for the corporeality of the deceased, while serving as a comment on the mortality of the flesh” (p. 171).
Even more evident corporeal changes are explored in Vera Tiesler and María Cecilia Lozada's edited volume, Social skins of the head: body beliefs and ritual in ancient Mesoamerica and the Andes. The papers in this volume all focus on representations of, or changes to, the head, face or hair in Mesoamerican and Andean societies, and deal variously with cranial modification, face painting and facial treatment in portraiture, the use of human skulls, and representations of the hair in art.
The chapters all take as their foundation the premise that the head was imbued with ideological significance, as it was seen as the spiritual locus of the individual. In some contexts, the head represents “an anthropomorphic model for the spiritual universe” (p. 2). In both Mesoamerican and Andean societies, the head represented the individual and was viewed as the source of their power and identity; it is unsurprising then to find that these same societies concentrated the physical alterations of bodily appearance, designed to reflect personhood, on the head. The volume covers a vast range of practices; Deborah Blom and Nicole Couture (Chapter 13) investigate changes to the physical shape of the head in early infancy as a rite of passage to transition children from their ‘pre-social’ state to full members of their social group. The spiritual formation of the head and the person in this process is considered by William Duncan and Gabrielle Vail (Chapter 2), while Andrew Scherer (Chapter 4) views the process as an act of crafting the baby into a human. María Luisa Vásquez de Ágredos Pascual together with Cristina Vidal Lorenzo and Patricia Horcajada Campos (Chapter 6) consider face painting as a more temporary facial decoration or enhancement used for specific occasions. Similar, less permanent, changes to the head are discussed by Virginia Miller (Chapter 8), who considers how age, gender, status and occupation were expressed through hair, as reflected in artistic depictions at the Mayan city of Chichén Itzá.
The significance of the head in Andean society is reflected in the tradition of collecting heads, which is discussed by Andrea Vasquez de Arthur (Chapter 16). Disembodied heads had tremendous significance in this society, with decapitation serving as a way to limit or control the power of important individuals such as shamans, political leaders or social deviants, as is explored by Sara Becker and Sonia Alconini (Chapter 15). They find that even after the head was removed it was still considered a source of power. As Tiesler and Lozada reflect in their introduction, heads and skulls had important roles in group protection and spiritual strengthening, and they are linked to multiple symbolic themes including social interaction, veneration, profanation, sacrifice, power and humiliation. These themes all stem from the belief that the head was the home of human vitality and the physical focus for the display of identity and personhood.
Each of the books reviewed here reflects the varied ways in which communities and individuals came to terms with, and expressed, multiple identities. The importance of belonging to a group or place or culture is resonant throughout the volumes, as is the need to express that identity and affinity, whether bodily, in strings of beads, physically in the alteration of the bodily form, or iconographically, in the monuments, images and inscriptions of funerary architecture. These volumes demonstrate that archaeological evidence is far from static; as our understanding of the relationship between identity and materiality changes, we need to re-evaluate our interpretation of these identities and their visual representations.
This list includes all books received between 1 November 2019 and 31 December 2019. Those featuring at the beginning of New Book Chronicle have, however, not been duplicated in this list. The listing of a book in this chronicle does not preclude its subsequent review in Antiquity.
