Dura-Europos under Parthian Rule guages does reveal the use at Dura of a number of Iranian personal names.^30
The more general pattern shown by the nomenclature of Dura in the Parthian
period—or which would be shown if there were any parallel to Bradford
Welles’ invaluable article on the population ofRomanDura^31 —is of a com-
plete intermingling of Greek and Semitic names. A study of the names would
probably show that office-holders, or benefactors responsible for the con-
struction of temples, tended to have Greek names, and that the rest of the
population exhibited a mixture. ‘‘Semitic’’ in this context refers, of course,
to the linguistic roots of the names, not to the ethnic origins of their bearers.
As I stressed earlier, there is not a single document from Dura in theParthian
period which is in any Semitic language other than Palmyrene. The use of
Greek, not only in formal inscriptions, or in dipinti identifying figures in
frescoes, but also on graffiti on walls or potsherds, strongly suggests, obvi-
ously enough, that those persons living in Dura under the Parthians who
were literate at all, and who used writing in their ordinary lives, were literate
in Greek.
Naturally, these observations can prove nothing about which languages
were used in spoken form, and here we must simply confess ignorance. But,
to go by the written evidence, Dura remained in a real sense a Greek city.
The wider context in which it functioned can be identified on the one hand
as the zone of influence of Palmyrene culture, religion, trade, and military
activity, and on the other (as we will see more clearly later) as the zone of
cultivable land along the Euphrates and Chabur, inhabited by a population
which wrote (if it wrote at all) in Greek, but which often used Semitic per-
sonal names. The great puzzle, which I do not know even how to begin to
answer, is the question of in what sense Dura belonged to the zone ofMeso-
potamianculture, religion, and language. Dura itself of course isnotliterally
in Mesopotamia, for it lies on the right bank of the Euphrates, looking across
the river to the vast expanse of the central Mesopotamian plain. The zone
immediately across the river is one whose culture in the Roman/Parthian
period is entirely unknown. It was a journey of some kilometres west-
north-west before one reached the small kingdom of Hatra, which has re-
vealed a long series of Aramaic inscriptions of the second century..(but
not before); or of some kilometres, as the crow flies, before one reached
(by travelling up the Euphrates and then either the Chabur or—as was evi-
dently a normal route—the Balikh) the cities of the north Mesopotamian
. Ph. Huyse, ‘‘Zum iranischen Namengut in Dura-Europos,’’Anz. Öst. Akad. Wiss.,
Wien (): –.
. Welles (n. ).