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.

The decipherment of Palmyrene was the first decipherment of a dead language in modern times. 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. 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".

Approximately 3,200 such inscriptions are known; the Palmyrene Aramaic Texts (PAT) corpus includes 2,832 inscriptions, and Jean-Baptiste Yon’s subsequent L’épigraphie Palmyrénienne Depuis PAT, 1996–2011 added an extra 185 inscriptions. 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. 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.

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.

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.