Palmyrene inscriptions

Palmyrene inscriptions are a large corpus of Aramaic inscriptions discovered primarily in the ancient caravan city of Palmyra in central Syria. The texts date mainly from the 1st century BCE to the 3rd century CE and are written in the Palmyrene Aramaic dialect using the Palmyrene script.[1][2]

The decipherment of Palmyrene was the first decipherment of a dead language in modern times.[3] The first published and translated of the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions was a Palmyrene inscription, and today the longest known Canaanite or Aramaic inscription – the Palmyra Tariff – is also Palmyrene.[4] Peter T. Daniels described the ultimate decipherment by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy as straightforward, since: "the copies were (finally) reliable; there were obviously-paired bilinguals; they contained proper names; there were one-to-one correspondences between letters in the two versions; the unknown was in a familiar language; the identity of that language was known; the script was closely related to and resembled known ones".[5]

Approximately 3,200 such inscriptions are known; the Palmyrene Aramaic Texts (PAT) corpus includes 2,832 inscriptions,[2] and Jean-Baptiste Yon’s subsequent L’épigraphie Palmyrénienne Depuis PAT, 1996–2011 added an extra 185 inscriptions.[6] This compares with over c.500 in Greek and c.50 in Latin found in the region of Palmyra. Most of the known inscriptions were found in Palmyra and its surrounding necropoleis during archaeological excavations at Palmyra in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Others were discovered at sites connected with Palmyrene trade networks across the Near East and the Mediterranean, including Dura-Europos and Egypt. The texts are typically carved on stone monuments, funerary busts, tomb architecture, altars, and building blocks.

Most of the inscriptions are undated, with exact provenance unknown.[7] The earliest dated Palmyrene inscription is a dedication by the priests of Bel from 44 BC, and none are known following the defeat of Zenobia by Aurelian in 272 CE. After this, Greek inscriptions in Palmyra continued in reduced numbers until 562 CE, Latin disappeared after the early fourth century, and a small number of Hebrew inscriptions are known from the fourth century.[8]

A number of multilingual inscriptions are known – many Greek inscriptions are bilingual with an Aramaic version, and some are trilingual with the addition of Latin. The inscriptions are crucial to scholarly knowledge of Palymra, as classical texts are limited to excerpts from Pliny the Elder (Natural History 5.88) and Appian (Civil Wars 5.9), and later narratives such as Zosimus describing the rise and fall of Palmyra under Odaenathus and Zenobia. [9]

Today, many inscriptions are preserved in museums such as the National Museum of Damascus, the Louvre, the British Museum, and other international collections. A number of inscriptions in situ or at the Palmyra Museum were subject to the destruction of cultural heritage by the Islamic State between 2015-17.[10]

Discovery and decipherment

The first published Palmyrene inscription was the altar inscription from Rome now catalogued as CIS II 3902 (Rome 1), published by Jan Gruter in 1616.[11] A second inscription, also from Rome, CIS II 3903 (Rome 2), was later published by Jacob Spon in 1683.[12] These inscriptions, preserved in the Capitoline Museums, were recognised as belonging to an unknown script associated with the ancient city of Palmyra. About a decade later, following the first modern European expedition to Palmyra in 1691, William Hallifax published an account in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1695, including a copy of an inscription from a lintel from the entrance gate to the modern village later catalogued as CIS II 4202.[13] Halifax observed that the unfamiliar script frequently appeared beneath Greek inscriptions and likely represented the same text in the local language. Shortly afterward, Edward Bernard and Thomas Smith published a collection of Palmyrene inscriptions in 1698, including what later became known as CIS II 3944, CIS II 4214, and CIS II 3943.[14] However, all these copies were inaccurate, making decipherment challenging.[15][16]

The decisive breakthrough occurred after the visit of Robert Wood and James Dawkins to Palmyra in 1751. Their illustrated work The Ruins of Palmyra (1753) provided more accurate copies of numerous inscriptions, including the important Greek–Palmyrene bilingual inscription which became known as CIS II 3940.[17] Using this material together with the previously published inscriptions (CIS II 3902, 3903, 4202, 3944, 4214, and 3943), the French scholar Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and the English antiquarian John Swinton independently deciphered the script in 1754.[18][19][15]

Barthélemy’s method relied on comparing the Greek and Palmyrene texts of the bilingual inscriptions. By identifying repeated proper names and chronological formulas in inscriptions such as CIS II 3940, he was able to assign phonetic values to the Palmyrene letters and reconstruct the alphabet. Within a short time he produced a working reading of the inscriptions and demonstrated that the language was a dialect of Aramaic. The decipherment of Palmyrene thus became the first successful decipherment of a previously "dead" ancient script in modern scholarship.[15][20]

Earliest published Palmyrene inscriptions, used in the first decipherment[21]
Image Identification Location First published Hallifax (1890) Bernard (1698)[14] Hyde (1700) Wood (1753) Barthélemy (1759) de Vogüé (1868) NE (1898) CIS II (1926)
Rom. I (Gruter) Capitoline Museums 1616 2 3 477,1 3902
Rom. II (Spon) 1683 1 4 477,2 3903
Hallifax Lintel of the entrance gate to the modern village[22] 1691 p. 280 XII 3 21 480,10 4202
Bernard’s 2nd Great Colonnade column 1698 p. 287 XIV 5 V 22 460,9 3944
Bernard’s 3rd Three architrave fragments found on the ground near Temple of Baalshamin[23] 1698 p. 292 XVII 71 4214
Bernard’s 4th p. 293 XVIII
Bernard’s 5th Great Colonnade column 1698 p. 286 XIX 4 IX 2 27 3943
Wood VIII 1753 VIII 1 26 461,12 3940

Corpora

The first significant and accurate group of inscriptions was published by Robert Wood and James Dawkins following their visit to Palmyra in 1751; their book (1753) included copies of 11 Greek-Palmyrene bilingual inscriptions, 15 Greek-only and two Palmyrene-only inscriptions.[16] The next significant publication of new inscriptions came a century later following the expedition of William Henry Waddington in 1861, organized on the advice of Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé. Waddington's records of 144 Palmyrene inscriptions were published by de Vogüé in 1868.[16] At the beginning of the twentieth century selections of inscriptions were published George Albert Cooke and Mark Lidzbarski, and comprehensive corpus of Palmyrene Aramaic inscriptions was produced in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum (1926–1949), edited by Jean-Baptiste Chabot. The next phase of significant publications were made by Jean Cantineau, who initiated the series Inventaire des inscriptions de Palmyre (1930–1939), later continued by Jean Starcky, Javier Teixidor, and Adnan Bounni.[16] In 1996 a consolidated collection of the Aramaic inscriptions was published as Palmyrene Aramaic Texts (PAT) by Delbert R. Hillers and Eleonora Cussini as part of the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon project. The work assembled approximately 2,830 inscriptions and remains the principal reference for Palmyrene Aramaic epigraphy.[16]

These major scholarly corpora and catalogues are listed below:

  • CIS – Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, an early comprehensive collection of Semitic inscriptions. The first Palmyrene volume (II t.3 f.1) was edited by Jean-Baptiste Chabot in 1926.[24]
  • NE - Handbuch der Nordsemitischen Epigraphik, 1898
  • IIP / Inv – Inventaire des inscriptions de Palmyre, 1930-75 in twelve fascicules, a catalogue of Palmyrene inscriptions not included in CIS.
  • IP - Jean Cantineau's Inscriptions palmyréniennes, 1930
  • Tad - Jean Cantineau's Tadmorea in Syria, 1931-38
  • RTP – Recueil Des Tessères de Palmyre, 1955
  • BS III – Dunant, Christiane (1971). Le sanctuaire de Baalshamin à Palmyre: Les inscriptions. Vol. 3. Institut Suisse.
  • RSP – Michał Gawlikowski's Recueil d'inscriptions palmyréniennes provenant de fouilles syriennes et polonaises récentes à Palmyre, 1974
  • PAT – Palmyrene Aramaic Texts, a modern concordance and synthesis of earlier publications. In the reference system used in Palmyrene Aramaic Texts, the ID numbers ("sigla") follow a priority order beginning with CIS

A selected concordance is shown below:

Type CIS IP IIP Tad NE RTP/RSP Vogue NSI TSSI Other
Honorary inscriptions 3915 9 13 457 a.1 XXXVII, 1
3930 2 2 458 a.2 XXXIX, 4 1 110 32
3952 5 3 458 a.3 XXXVII, 2 11 119
3948 3 28 458 a.4 XXXIX, 5 6 115
3932 3 22 459 a.5 XXXVII, 3 15 121 33
3933 3 21 459 a.6 XXXVII, 4 4 113
3934 3 14 460 a.7 XXXVII, 5 17 123
3936 3 13 460 a.8 XXXVII, 6 7 116
3944 3 16 460 a.9 XXXVII, 7 22 125
3939 3 10 461 a.10 XXXVII, 8 24 127
3938 3 11 461 a.11 XXXVII, 9 25 128
3940 3 9 461 a.12 XXXVIII, 2 26 129
3945 3 17 462 a.13 XXXVIII, 1 23 126
3946 3 19 462 a.14 XXXVIII, 3 28 130 35
3947 3 20 462 a.15 XXXVIII, 4 29 131 36
3927 3 112
3928 5 114
3931 2 3 2 111
3937 3 12 20 124
3954 5 5 13 120
3959 1 2 16 122 BS III 44
11 100 28
17 29
3917 9 15 30
10 81 31
3971 34
The customs and tax tariff 3913 10 143 463–73 b XXXIX, 3 147 37
Votive inscriptions 3983 1 4 473 c.1 XXXVIII, 5 133 Eut 4
3978 474 c.2 XXXVIII, 6 136 Oxford 1751
3994 474 c.3 XXXVIII, 8 124
3986 474 c.4 XL, 2 73 134
3996 474 c.5 XXXVIII, 8 75 135
4014 475 c.6 XL, 3 Eut 6
4027 475 c.7 XXXVIII, 10 84
4029 475 c.8 XXXVIII, 9 82
3981 475 c.9 XXXVIII, 7 93 139
4030 476 c.10 XL, 8 90
3976 476 c.11 XL, 5 95
4051 476 c.12 XL, 4 92
4046 476 c.13 XL, 6 116
3912 477 c.14 XL, 1 Brit Mus
3902 477 (Rome) 1 XLII, 9 Capitol Mus
3903 477 (Rome) 2 XLII, 10 Capitol Mus
38 BS III 1-2
39 BS III 24
12 48 40
3974 41
3973 140B 42
Funerary inscriptions 4109 4 28 478 d.α1 XL, 11 30a 141
4113 8 56 478 d.α2 XL
4116 478 d.α3 XL, 10 32
4122 7 6a 478 d.α4 XXXIX, 1 34
4130 478 d.α5
4164 4 19 479 d.α6 XL, 12 31
4194 479 d.α7
4195 479 d.α8 XL Constantinople
4199 479 d.α9 143 44 Nold
4202 8 55 480 d.α10 XXXIX, 2 14
4218 480 d.α11 XLII, 2 Louvre
4403 480 d.β1 XLII, 8 Berlin
4357 481 d.β2 XLII, 3 Copenhagen
4281 481 d.β3 XLII, 6 Copenhagen
4283 481 d.β4 XLII, 43 Copenhagen
4384 481 d.β5 XLII, 5 Copenhagen
4394 481 d.β6 XLII, 7 Copenhagen
4502 481 d.β7 Louvre
4501 481 d.β8 XLII, 10 Louvre
4225 481 d.β9 XLII, 9 Eut 19
3905 481 d.γ1 XLII, 1 Capitol Mus
3908 482 d.γ2 XLII, 11 146 Constantine
3909 482 d.γ3 XLII, 12 Constantine
3906 482 d.γ4
3901 482 d.γ5 XLII, 13 South Sheilds
43 MelCol p.161
45 Ber 38, 119-140
Lychnarion inscription 483 e.1–6 RTP
Inscriptions on clay tablets 67 483 f XLII, 1
3914 9 25
3916 9 14a
3918 9 18
3919 9 19
3920 9 32
3921 9 31
3922 9 9
3923 9 8
3924 9 6a
3925 9 6b
3935 3 15
3941 3 8
3942 3 7
3943 3 6
3949 3 29
3950 5 1
3951 5 2
3953 5 4
3955 5 8
3956 5 7
3957 5 6
3958 1 3
3960 9 10 87–88
3961 10 89
3962 10 17
3963 10 47
3966 2 1
3967 6 7
3968 6 6
3969 11 84
3977 6 11
3984 5 9
3985 6 1
3988 6 3
3989 6 9
3993 13
3998 6 5
4010 11 23
4043 11 18
4075 11 29
4102 6 12
4114 4 4a
4115 4 18
4121 4 5
4123 4 6
4124 4 3
4125 8 160
4126 8 161a
4127a 8 161b
4127b 8 161c
4134-58 4 27
4162 65 7 1a
4163 8 61 39
4166 12 16
4168 4 9a
4170 4 23
4171-4186 27
4187 4 2
4192 4 22
4197 38 7 15a,b
4201 7 4
4206 4 1a
4207 4 1b
4208 4 1c
4212 39 7 13
4213 7 11
4214 7 2
4216 71 4 21
4231 8 194
4232 4 17
4235 8 57
4236 7 6b
4237 7 8
4239 8 193
4241 8 100
4483 1
4486 3
4613 4
4614 2
6 10 39
7 10 40
8 10 78
12 4 9b
13 4 9c
15 4 9d
17 4 9e
22 8 145
24 8 144
29 8 169
30 1 5
31 9 28
32 9 29
33 12 21
35 5 10
40 4 13
41 4 14
45 8 200
47 3 2
48 3 4
53 3 25
59 4 16
63 7 9
64 7 7
66 8 159
68 4 8
69 4 10
70 4 11
72 8 68
74 11 7
75 8 109
76 8 19
77 8 65
86 RTP 92
87 RTP 77
88 RTP 80
89 RTP 81
90 RTP 306
91 RTP 184
92 RTP 714
93 RTP 315
94 RTP 580
95 RTP 821
96 RTP 311
97 RTP 752
98 RTP 247
99 RTP 303
100 RTP 996
101 RTP 1
102 RTP 39
103 RTP 289
104 RTP 131
105 RTP 15
9 1 1
9 36 2
11 87 6
8 71 12b
14 RTP 125
10 105 30
10 107 28a
10 111 28b
12 17 RSP 105
12 14 RSP 51

Types of inscriptions

Palmyrene inscriptions covered a range of social and religious contexts:

  • Funerary inscriptions, among the most common, typically appear on tomb façades, loculi (burial niches), or funerary reliefs and record the name and lineage of the deceased. Many are accompanied by Palmyrene funerary reliefs. The inscriptions often follow formulaic patterns identifying the individual, their father, and sometimes their tribe or profession.
  • Temple and dedication inscriptions with dedications to gods (e.g. Bel, Baalshamin) or construction work in temples
  • Honorific inscriptions commemorated individuals who contributed to the city’s civic or religious life.
  • Tesserae are small inscribed tokens, understood to have served as admission tokens or ritual markers connected with temple banquets and religious festivals.

In situ

  • From the Great Colonnade at Palmyra: CIS II 3932, PAT 0278, NE p.459 a5, XXXVII, RES 841, IIP 3 22
  • From the Hypogeum of the Three Brothers: CIS II 4171-86, PAT 0523-0542, Tad 27, RES 1041

In museums

Funerary reliefs

  • British Museum, 102612, CIS II 4200[27]
  • Berlin
  • Damascus
  • Louvre AO1556, CIS II 4401
  • Louvre AO2200, CIS II 4250
  • Louvre AO2398, CIS II 4381
  • Louvre AO4085, CIS II 4465
  • Louvre AO4147, CIS II 4538, IIP 4 27o

Museum holdings

About 1,200 of the inscriptions in PAT are known from museum collections. Many of the others are still in situ.

References

  1. ^ Von Danckelman 2025, p. 55-76.
  2. ^ a b Hillers & Cussini 1996.
  3. ^ Daniels 1988, p. 419: "The first dead language to be recovered when its script was deciphered was not Egyptian (as might be supposed from popular and most technical accounts of decipherment), but Palmyrene; the year was 1754, and the scholar was Jean-Jacques Barthélemy"
  4. ^ Maraqten, Mohammad (1995-01-01). "The Arabic Words in Palmyrene Inscriptions". ARAM Periodical. 7 (1): 89. doi:10.2143/ARAM.7.1.2002221. ISSN 0959-4213. Retrieved 2026-03-14. The Palmyrene inscriptions have a unique position among Semitic epigraphy for two important reasons. Firstly, the first deciphered and published Semitic inscription was Palmyrene, and secondly the longest North West Semitic inscription which has been discovered until now is also a Palmyrene inscription. In fact the publishment of Palmyrene inscriptions in the early 17th century was the first step for studying the Semitic epigraphy. The earliest dated Palmyrene inscription is from the year 44 BC and the latest discovery has been dated to the year 274 AD.
  5. ^ Daniels 1988, p. 435-436: "…as decipherments go, nothing that Barthélemy did, especially Palmyrene, was much of an accomplishment, as he himself recognized. Aside from the fact that Palmyrene is not a language of major importance for cultural or linguistic history, [Footnote: Only a few texts of nonstereotypical content and any length are known, principally the so-called Tariff…] the copies were (finally) reliable; there were obviously-paired bilinguals; they contained proper names; there were one-to-one correspondences between letters in the two versions; the unknown was in a familiar language; the identity of that language was known; the script was closely related to and resembled known ones. Some combination of these seven qualities has proved necessary for every successful decipherment yet accomplished, along with, frequently, some degree of inspiration, perseverance, intellectual boldness, and lucky guesswork. But the presence of all seven, together with the acknowledged facility of the operation, conspired to make the achievement a not very interesting one. But, as so often seems to occur in cultural history, the first to accomplish something usually do it simply and successfully."
  6. ^ Von Danckelman 2025, p. 56: "Altogether, the Palmyrene corpus consists of approximately 3,200 inscriptions written in Palmyrene, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. These inscriptions record the names of around 8,300 individuals, primarily found in funerary, honorific, or dedicatory contexts."
  7. ^ Von Danckelman 2025, p. 64: "The vast majority of inscriptions from Palmyra are undated, and in many cases, the exact provenance is unknown."
  8. ^ Yon 2024, p. 197b: “The first dated inscription is a dedication by the priests of Bēl in the year 44 bc, not long before the construction of the temple of Bēl (PAT 1524)... after the downfall of Zenobia, the great period of Palmyra abruptly ceased... Greek inscriptions were still engraved until at least March ad 562 for the last dated example (IGLS XVII, 499), but much less than before, and, after the beginning of the fourth century, Latin is not seen. After the victory of Aurelian, Aramaic epigraphy came to a stop almost immediately. Only two or three Hebrew inscriptions (fourth century?) account for Semitic languages until the arrival of Arabic in the first centuries of the Hegira.”
  9. ^ Yon 2024, p. 197a: “The balance between Greek and Aramaic inscriptions in the Palmyrene epigraphic corpus is clear. More than 2,500 Aramaic inscriptions compare to over five hundred Greek texts and about fifty in Latin. A great part of the Greek inscriptions are bilingual and include an Aramaic version. These statistics have also to be seen in the light of the literary evidence on the history of the city, which amounts to some lines of Pliny (NH 5.88) and Appian (Bell. Civ. 5.9) and several late antique narratives of the rise and downfall of Palmyra under Odainathus and Zenobia (mostly Zosimus). In other words, the documentary evidence for Palmyra would be next to nothing were it not for the information given by archaeology and epigraphy… This public bilingualism, almost unique and sometimes extending (with the addition of Latin) into trilingualism, has to be explained if we are to better understand the Palmyrene society of the first three centuries of the era.”
  10. ^ Kamash, Zena (2024-06-25). Heritage and healing in Syria and Iraq. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-1-5261-4085-2.
  11. ^ Gruter 1616.
  12. ^ Spon 1683.
  13. ^ Halifax 1695.
  14. ^ a b Bernard & Smith 1698.
  15. ^ a b c Daniels 1988.
  16. ^ a b c d e Yon 2024, p. 197-200.
  17. ^ Wood & Dawkins 1753.
  18. ^ Barthélemy 1759.
  19. ^ Swinton 1755.
  20. ^ Pope 1975.
  21. ^ Daniels 1988, p. 427.
  22. ^ de Vogüé (1868), 21: “Linteau de la porte d'entrée du village moderne”
  23. ^ de Vogüé (1868), 71: “Sur trois fragments d'architrave, à terre, près du temple hexastyle”
  24. ^ Dussaud, René (2009-05-04). "Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum. Part, secunda, inscriptiones aramaicas continens. Tomus III, fasc. primus. Un vol. in-4°". Syria. Archéologie, Art et histoire (in French). 14 (1). Persée - Portail des revues scientifiques en SHS: 77–78. Retrieved 2026-03-12.
  25. ^ "Object : Tombstone of a Roman woman". BBC. 1970-01-01. Retrieved 2026-03-14.
  26. ^ "The Regina Tombstone". North East Museums Blog (Previously Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums). 2020-05-01. Retrieved 2026-03-14.
  27. ^ BM W_1908-0417-1

Bibliography

Early publications

Early corpora

Later publications

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