ARTS

Above: the ‘Beauty of Palmyra’. Below: banquet relief of the priest Malku (c.146AD)— Tahnee Cracchiola/Getty

thevisitorcanstepintoareconstruction

some three metres by four where the

graves are packed one on top of the

other like pigeonholes in an old-

fashioned office. Each grave had loculus

reliefs, rectangular limestone slabs

which were placed at the head of the

grave with the image of the body carved

on them and which included inscrip-

tions with the names of the deceased,

explainingwhichclantheybelongedto.

The aim was to impress not only

Palmyrenesocietybytheirwealthbutto

assert that the family intended to exist

for a long time and to reach out through

the centuries as a way of claiming a kind

of immortality. All end with a final

lament,thesingleword,“alas”.

Close up, even the untrained eye can

see how the features were exaggerated:

large eyes, big ears, high cheeks, high

and pointy chins. Long hands and fin-

gers. This was a deliberate attempt to

make the portraits, which were placed

high above the mourners, stand out in

thedarknessofthetomb.

It was on a dig in a tomb like this that

the Glyptotek’s archaeologist Kai Har-

ald Ingholt discovered the “Beauty” in a

burial place reserved for the city elite,

known as Qasr Abjad, or White Castle.

Thanks to evidence built up over the 90

years and the interpretative work of

I

n the spring of 1928 a Danish

archaeologist unearthed a bust of a

woman in the ruins of Palmyra in

Syria. About 1,800 years old, she

had a broken nose and a fearsome

glare but was clearly a woman of sub-

stance, judging by a sketch drawn soon

after she had been unearthed, which

brought red to her cheeks and gold

to her elaborate headdress and her

extravagantbangles.

Shewasn’tthefirsttobediscoveredin

that ancient Syrian city, nor even in the

best condition, but a local newspaper

published the painting and dubbed her

the“BeautyofPalmyra”.

This week a digital recreation of the

bust will be unveiled inThe Road to

Palmyraat the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

museum in Copenhagen (from Septem-

ber 20). What little colour that survived

in 1928 has long faded with time but

today her headdress has been trans-

formed into a glory of gold and jewels,

her rouged cheeks made a little redder

andherfigureswathedinascarlettunic.

Hernosehasbeenstraightened.

In all her radiant — some might say,

gaudy — splendour, she will be the cen-

trepiece of the exhibition in which more

than100funeraryportraitscollectedby

Danish archaeologists since the 18th

century will be on display alongside

coins, sculptures, 19th-century photo-

graphsandpaintings.

It is tempting to interpret her “resur-

rection” as a kind of defiant gesture to

Isis, which destroyed many of the city’s

treasures in 2015, but curator Anne

MarieNielsentakesacoolerstance.“We

have made a balance between how

much to say and how much not to say.

We do not want to politicise it. Isis has

blown up a lot of buildings, but before

that Assad’s soldiers and everybody else

ruined things and stole things. We do

say it is terrible but we are matter of fact

aboutit.”

She is more eloquent when she talks

abouttheshowitself.

“The people in the portraits were so

determinednottobeforgottenthatthey

made these monumental tombs. We are

remembering them by painting a pic-

ture of a thriving merchant city at the

crossroads of the ancient world. By

being dead they tell us what they were

whentheywerealive.”

The funerary portraits were discov-

ered in the towers whose ruins still line

the Valley of Tombs, along which travel-

lerstrudgedontheirwaytothecitywith

its theatre, noble public spaces and col-

onnaded streets. There were maybe

more than 500 grave monuments, some

crammed with as many as 200 graves,

but rather than lining the gallery with

rows of bearded men and enigmatic

women, the museum has brought a

touch of theatre to the galleries with the

sounds that would have echoed around

the city in the early years of the second

century AD. We hear clamorous cara-

vans of camels padding their way along

the Valley of Tombs to deliver spices,

donkeysbrayingandtheraucousshouts

of dealers in Aramaic clashing with the

chantsofpriests.

To help understand what a tomb

chamberlookedlikeandhowitworked,

A beauty from

Palmyra’s past

curls fetchingly on to her cheeks in a

Roman style popularised by the

Empress Faustina the Elder (c.AD100-

140).Herjewelleryhasbeencarvedand

her eyes inlaid with glass in a way that is

typical of the art of Iran, which was part

of Parthia to the east, but one strand of

her necklace and the finger rings are

believedtobeinspiredbythewest.

She may well typify the elite of soci-

ety, but little is known of the life of the

women in the city despite 30 per cent of

the portraits being of females. It is

assumedthatsome,atleast,livedinlux-

ury and maybe held important posi-

tions, but Palmyra was a patriarchal

society and the daily life of women was

tiedtothehomeandfamily.

One woman did rise to a position of

power. The third-century Queen Zeno-

bia (AD240-274) defied Rome and was

described in theHistoria Augustaas a

woman of immense beauty with teeth

“as white as pearls”, but the only surviv-

ing likenesses of the queen are on coins

mintedinaboutAD271whichdepicther

withasharpnoseandlargeears.

Zenobia would almost certainly have

An ancient statue from Syria is going on display in Copenhagen

— along with its digital recreation. Richard Holledge reports

8 A FINANCIAL TIMES W e d n e s d a y 1 8 S e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 9

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bedecked herself with all the trappings

of status displayed by the anonymous

“Beauty” and probably would have

stayed locked in affluent domesticity

haditnotbeenforthemurderinAD267-

268 of her husband, the city’s ruler. She

took over and expanded Palmyra with

such success that it controlled the trade

routes from the east to the west until

AD273 when she lost her empire to the

Roman emperor Aurelian, who sacked

thecityandtookherprisoner.

Sheremainscladinmythasoneofthe

most fascinating women of the Orient

alongside Cleopatra and the Queen of

Sheba. The Romans were intrigued by

her and perhaps a little scared by the

visionofastrongwoman.

Palmyra may be battered by Isis but

what Zenobia, the “Beauty of Palmyra”

and the stern-faced portraits on show in

Copenhagen affirm is that for a few cen-

turies the city was at the heart of world

commerce,whereeastandwestmet.

As the Roman philosopher Pliny the

Elder wrote: “Palmyra forged its own

destiny between the two mighty

empiresofRomeandParthia.”

ToMarch1,glyptoteket.com

Aarhus University, we now know a great

deal about the world she inhabited, and

theconnectionssheandhercommunity

sharedwithfarawayplaces.

Nothing is known about her apart

from an estimate that she lived in the

early 200s. Her name has been cut

away, but placed in her own gallery and

picked out by spotlights she is a

resplendent figure, thecrème de la crème

ofPalmyrasociety.

Thanks to forensic work on her and

seven other portraits using UVF (ultra-

violet fluorescent light), X-rays and

microscopic examinations of samples

thesizeofapinhead,expertscanuseher

to tell a story of the city and its place in

theworldatthetimeofherlife.

Traces of madder lake, a vegetable

red dye whose earliest use is recorded in

India in the third millennium BC, have

been detected in her headdress and

indigo, one of the most expensive pig-

ments, was found in Egypt and Afghani-

stan. Cinnabar, a red pigment which

came from Almadén in Spain but also as

far way as China, has been traced on the

tunic. Red ochre came from Turkey and

Egypt,yellowfromFrance.

Although she looks Indian, her hair

‘We are painting a picture

of a thriving merchant

city at the crossroads of

the ancient world’

Digital recreation of the ‘Beauty’

SEPTEMBER 18 2019 Section:Features Time: 17/9/2019 - 18:04 User: david.cheal Page Name: ARTS LON, Part,Page,Edition: LON, 10 , 1