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The Jewellery of Palmyra and its Significance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2016

D. Mackay
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Extract

It is a curious fact that though remarkably little has survived of the jewellery worn by the women of Palmyra in the first centuries of our era, we know enough from sculptured representations of it to hasard the statement that it provides important evidence of the wide-flung commercial relations of that city at the zenith of its activity. For several decades past there have been coming into the museums of Europe and America large numbers of sculptured busts from the ruins of the desert city, each standing out in high relief on a square or oblong slab of stone, which also bears, to right or left of the head, a brief inscription in Palmyrene. The details of clothing and jewellery represented on these busts, the dressing of the hair and of the men's beards, the objects held in the hands, all are well worth study for the light they throw on the life and fashions of the times, and particularly on the commercial relations of the caravan city with other lands to east and west.

The inscriptions, in whose incised characters traces of the red paint with which they were originally embellished often still remain, are remarkably uniform: a formal word of regret, best translated as ‘Alas !’, and the name and genealogy carried back through the male line for two, and occasionally three or more, generations. Typical inscriptions read: ‘Alas ! Jarḥai, son of Jedī‘bel, son of Simon, (son of) Argan’; ‘Alas ! Elahsā, son of Taimisā, son of Samsigeram, (son of) Ḥabbazi’. A considerable number of Jewish names occur, and a sprinkling of Persian, Nabataean, Phoenician and other names, There are yet others of Greek and Roman form, of which the latter would appear to have been freely adopted by Palmyrene citizens of the later periods, e.g., the brothers Narqaios and Qallistus, sons of Šalman Marcellus. Occasionally the date was added, reckoned from the official beginning of the Seleucid era, October 7, 312 B.C. The inscription on one such dated bust reads: ‘Alas ! ‘Aha, daughter of Ḥalaftā, son of Bar‘ā, (son of) Zabd'atā … Month of September, 473’ (=A.D. 161).

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , Autumn 1949 , pp. 160 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1949

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