Rome and the East
rene was also a novelty as used in the imperial period: the earliest known
text, from the temple of Bel, dates to ..The ‘‘epigraphic habit’’ here was
a borrowing from the wider Greek world, but in a unique bilingual form.
The notion that under Hadrian Palmyra became a free city is a mistake,
although it was visited by the Emperor and acquired the Greek name ‘‘Ha-
drianic Palmyra’’ (HDRYN’ TDMR in Palmyrene), and it is under this name
that it appears in the famous bilingual customs law of the Seleucid year ,
...^19 In the early third century, however, under Septimius Severus or
more probably Caracalla, it was granted the status ofcolonia,anditwasasa
Romancoloniathat it played its remarkable, but very brief, role in the troubled
events of the s and s.
It might have been expected that in the ‘‘colonial’’ period Latin, always
rare but attested on inscriptions from Palmyra from the reign of Tiberius on-
wards, would become much more common. In fact it does not, and indeed,
paradoxically, there are no Latin inscriptions of thecolonia. Instead there is
an intensification of a linguistic phenomenon already visible in the ‘‘Greek-
city’’ period: the Palmyrene vocabulary for Graeco-Roman city institutions
was almost entirely constructed by transliteration (for instance, in the cus-
toms law, DGM’, BWL’ WDMS, GRMṬWS, and NMWS’—nomos, the law
itself ). Attempts at translation are relatively rare, for instance RB ŠWQ—
‘‘controller of the market,’’agaronomos. But this instance in fact comes from
the colonial period, when the new institutions of thecolonia, clearly marked
in the inscriptions, are expressed characteristically in Greek or in Palmyrene
transliteration of Greek.Coloniaindeed is expressed as QLNY’; butduumvir
asστρατηγός, and hence in transliteration as ’SṬRṬG.^20 As in the Babatha ar-
chive (text to n. above), Greek plays a dominant role in mediating between
Latin and a Semitic language.
Against that background, we may now turn to the quite brief corpus of
trilingual inscriptions from Palmyra, in which Latin, Greek, and Palmyrene
not merely influence each other but appear in formal parallel texts. In fact,
to my knowledge, there are only six such texts, dating between the s and
the s. As mentioned above, none is known from the colonial period. The
texts will be set out in chronological order.
. For the best treatment, see J. F. Matthews, ‘‘The Tax Law of Palmyra: Evidence for
Economic History in a City of the Roman East,’’JRS (): .
. See in more detail Millar (n. ), –.