Latin Epigraphy Along with all these other aspects, the study of the role of Latin in Dura,
in public inscriptions and on perishable documents, and of Latin vocabulary
transliterated into other languages, remains to be undertaken. The situation
is at least better, however, in the case of the other major site in the Near East
for the study of linguistic co-existence and the influence of Latin: Palmyra.
Here at least there are systematic, if inevitably not complete, collections
of the inscriptions, as well as a brief but extremely penetrating modern ac-
count.^17 The history of Palmyra cannot be reviewed in any detail here. But
three aspects will be considered, as a way of illustrating the complex ques-
tions which arise in relation to the role of publicly inscribed Latin in the
Near East: the significance of Palmyra as a new, and rapidly evolving, city;
the nature of the rather small corpus of inscriptions from Palmyra which are
trilingual, in Latin, Greek, and Palmyrene; and the way in which attention
to linguistic interplay between these three languages, as shown on contem-
porary inscriptions, can serve to correct mistaken views about the structure
of power in Palmyra in the third century.
Firstly, we need to recall the broad features of the history of Palmyra
which need to be borne in mind if the nature of its epigraphic record is to be
understood.^18 As a city, Palmyra was not ancient, but came into existence in
the first century..; only very slight evidence suggests the presence there
of tombs, and perhaps the original temple of Allat, in the second century..
But although there had been no ‘‘city’’ of Palmyra in the Seleucid period,
dating by the Seleucid era, beginning in autumn .., is universal in its
inscriptions. As a political community it evolved steadily towards the model
of the Greek city, acquiring aboulēanddēmosin the second half of the first
century.., along with a normal set of Greek city offices. In the course of
the first century it also came firmly within the orbit of the Roman prov-
ince of Syria. But, unlike all other Greek cities in the Roman East, its people
continued to use a Semitic language, or dialect of Aramaic, Palmyrene, both
in communal, official inscriptions and in epitaphs. In the latter, Palmyrene
often appears alone, but in public inscriptions characteristically in a parallel
text with Greek. So far as our evidence goes,as an inscribed language, Palmy-
reich und seine Zeugnisse(Historia-Einzelschrift , ), – ( chapter of the pres-
ent volume).
.Corpus Inscriptionum SemiticarumII. (); J. Cantineau et al.,Inventaire des inscrip-
tions de PalmyreI–XII (–). See J. Starcky and M. Gawlikowski,Palmyre^2 ().
. This section sums up a more detailed treatment inThe Roman Near East (..–..
)(), –.