Local and Global Narratives at Palmyra

Abstract

While early scholarship aimed to uncover the Eastern and Western elements of Palmyrene identity, recent research appreciates that Palmyra was first and foremost at the center of its own world. At the same time, Palmyra was deeply embedded in networks spanning the length of Eurasia and far into the Indian Ocean. The Palmyrenes seem to have moved easily along and between these trajectories while maintaining group cohesion and orientation toward their common homeland. Here, they adopted and adapted the impulses encountered abroad in order to use them for their own purposes. In this article, I explore how Palmyrene iconographic, epigraphic, and architectural records might be interpreted as speech acts—performative statements—by which local elites inscribed themselves in a range of narratives that communicated on different scales. The Palmyrene cityscape thus integrated local, regional, imperial, and global representations in manners that signify integration, accommodation, and, in some cases, arguably also rejection.