Jews and Others
dinary range of different languages, Greek, Latin, Semitic (including Ara-
maic, Hebrew, Palmyrene, and Syriac), and Iranian (including some perish-
able documents which have still not been fully published),^11 that we can
really encounter. It is probably best portrayed still in Bradford Welles’ paper,
‘‘The Population of Roman Dura’’ ().^12 Even the Mithraeum, first attested
in , just after the Roman takeover, belongs in this context.
For Parthian Dura, or Dura during the period of Parthian rule, we must
expect to have much more limited evidence and should anticipate that many
aspects of it will hardly be discernible at all—or alternatively might appear
more clearly only if and when, for instance, the evidence on the evolution
of private housing could be more fully analysed. I am in any case in no way
equipped to analyse the data from small finds, and, as a historian, feel some
confidence only when dealing with verbal evidence, with definable public
or communal structures, like temples, or with relatively intelligible works
of art, such as sculptures, reliefs, and wall paintings.
But, having stated these very clear limitations, both as to what we can ex-
pect from the evidence, and as to what this modern observer of it can offer
by way of interpretation, what remains truly striking is, on the contrary,
the sheer extent and the very explicit character of so much that does in fact
survive from Parthian Dura. The evidence for this period, some of it also
reflecting the life of small settlements along the Euphrates above and below
Dura, includes a large range of material of a very concrete, impressive, and
revealing nature.
Dura bore throughout its history the marks of its original establishment as
a Hellenistic settlement. The most recent excavations have, however, shown
that early Hellenistic occupation was limited to a small area around the cita-
del; the city plan and the walls belong to the middle of the second century,
just before the arrival of the Parthians.^13 The resultant chequer-board pat-
tern of streets, and the circuit of walls fronting the steppe (and, originally,
running along the bluff overlooking the river), remained to the end (see
map ). Almost nothing is known of Seleucid Dura, though it is notice-
able how a Greek parchment of.., thus dating to some fifteen years
after the Roman occupation, emphatically reasserts the continuing role of
. See H. M. Cotton, W. E. H. Cockle, and F. G. B. Millar, ‘‘The Papyrology of the
Roman Near East: A Survey,’’JRS (): nos. –.
. C. B. Welles, ‘‘The Population of Roman Dura,’’ in P. R. Coleman-Norton, ed.,
Studies in Roman Economic and Social History in Honor of A. C. Johnson(), –.
. P. Leriche and A. Al-Mahmoud, ‘‘Doura-Europos. Bilan des recherches récentes,’’
CRAI(): –.