BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Latin Over Aramaic?

How the Ancient Palmyrenes Responded to Romanization

The ancient oasis city of Palmyra—located northeast of Damascus in present-day Syria—abounds with archaeological treasures of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Owing to its crucial location on the trade route connecting the Roman Empire with Persia, India, and China, Palmyra became one of the most important cultural centers of the ancient world. To this day—despite the recent sectarian vandalism—Palmyra boasts impressive ruins of temples and other public monuments.

But Palmyra offers also a much less conspicuous, yet historically significant, group of monuments. Written in the local dialect of the Aramaic language, called Palmyrene Aramaic, thousands of inscriptions remain—both in the city and throughout the Roman world. A particular group among these epigraphic sources represents inscriptions that provide a Latin text in addition to the native Aramaic. “These bilingual inscriptions provide a window into the lives and culture of ancient Palmyra, especially into how the Palmyrenes responded to Roman influence and power,” posits Catherine E. Bonesho of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Writing for the Summer 2020 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Bonesho claims that the physical appearance of these bilingual inscriptions can tell us which of the two inscriptions was meant as the visually primary one. A specialist in the imperial contexts of Judaism during the Second Temple and Rabbinic periods, Bonesho in her column “Maintaining Cultural Balance: Palmyrene Bilingual Inscriptions and Roman Imperialism” explains that the Latin element is primary in all 20 Latin-Aramaic inscriptions—whether they come from Palmyra or Rome.
To find out what this and other observations tell us about the Palmyrenes’ attitudes to Roman power and the process of cultural Romanization, read “Maintaining Cultural Balance: Palmyrene Bilingual Inscriptions and Roman Imperialism,” published in the Summer 2020 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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Subscribers: Read the full column “Maintaining Cultural Balance: Palmyrene Bilingual Inscriptions and Roman Imperialism,” by Catherine E. Bonesho, in the Summer 2020 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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