Dura-Europos under Parthian Rule the Greek cults of the city, including the priesthood of Seleucus Nicator
himself.^14
There are no inscriptions which are datable to the Seleucid period,^15
though there are—very remarkably—two surviving parchment documents,
one of the second century.., without a more precise date (P. Dura, no. ),
and one fragment of ..(P. Dura, no. ), thus dating to very shortly be-
fore the Parthian occupation. An even greater silence envelops Dura in the
first six or seven decades of Parthian control. In the normal sense of ‘‘Hel-
lenistic,’’ the life and culture ofHellenisticDura is almost wholly unknown
to us. It should therefore be stressed that the ‘‘Parthian’’ Dura of which we
can know something, and on which some of our material, both written and
iconographic, throws a lot of light, is that which was contemporary with
thefirsttwohundredyearsoftheRomanEmpire,fromthesofthefirst
century..to the s..
This fact immediately confronts us with a major problem, in that the main
reason why we have some conception of developments in Dura is precisely
the same reason why we can follow local developments in so many regions
of the Roman Empire, namely the sudden emergence of building projects,
and of inscriptions accompanying them. Moreover, it is not just that there
is a parallelism between Dura and the now ‘‘Roman’’ Mediterranean world.
It is also that the datable inscriptions of Dura begin with a Palmyrene one
of /.., recording the construction of a temple of Bel and Yarhibol.^16 It
happens to precede by one year the next earliest dated inscription from Dura,
a Greek inscription of /..from the ‘‘temple of Artemis/Nanaia.’’^17
This pair of inscriptions is significant in many different ways. Firstly, as
already mentioned, they inaugurate the inscriptional evidence for building
in Dura, which continues to the end of the ‘‘Parthian’’ period, and through
the Roman one up till the Persian conquest. Secondly, Greek and Palmyrene
are the only two established languages of public inscriptions (and dipinti) in
Parthian Dura. As we will see, the traces of Parthian itself are so slight as to
be negligible; the other Semitic languages which, as we have also seen, are
attested in the Roman period do not appear earlier. Thirdly, the series of Pal-
. Welles, Fink, and Gilliam (n. ),P. Dura, no. Cotton, Cockle, and Millar (n. ),
no. .
. See Leriche and Al-Mahmoud (n. ), –.
. R. Mesnil du Buisson,InventairedesinscriptionspalmyréniennesdeDoura-Europos(),
no.PAT, no. . See now the important study by L. Dirven,The Palmyrenes of Dura-
Europos().
. F. Cumont,FouillesdeDura-Europos(), ff., no. ;ReportVI, ff., see below.