Rome and the East
between Palmyra and Chalcis, or more probably to the south, where Palmy-
rene territory shaded off into the true desert of the Empty Quarter. At any
rate this is the aspect which Ulpian chooses to stress rather than any role in
the protection of long-distance trade with the East, or any function as a mili-
tary strong point in relation to Parthia. By comparison with his allusions to
grants of colonial status in connection with the civil war of the s, he does
not in this case offer any explanation of how or by whom the title came to
be conferred. Nor does he make clear whether he would have thought of the
Palmyrena civitasitself as being somewhatbarbara.
For us, however, though we remain entirely ignorant of the date or im-
mediate context of the grant to Palmyra, the fact that Palmyra is the only
city in the entire Near East to offer a long series of public inscriptions in
both Greek and a Semitic language has the further consequence that it offers
the fullest documentary, and trilingual, reflection of the new status. Palmyra,
like Edessa (below), offers the image of a city which was ‘‘Semitic,’’ Greek,
and Roman all at once—or, at any rate, was so for the few decades before its
reconquest by Aurelian in .
Before the grant of colonial status, apparently under Severus or more
probably Caracalla, its formal character as a community had been merely
dual, Greek and Palmyrene. This character is best seen in the famous tax law
of the s, where the city isἉδριανὴΠάλμυραin Greek, HDRYN’ TDMR
(Tadmor) in Palmyrene. It has aβουλήandδῆμος/ BWL’ WDMS; and office-
holders with the Greek titles:proedros(given as the abstract nounproedria—
PLHDRWT’);archontes/ ’RKWNY’; agrammateus/ GRMṬWS. These terms
are all, as is obvious, merely transliterated into Palmyrene. But a further term,
dekaprōtoi, or perhaps betterdecuria(as Teixidor suggests), is not, being trans-
lated as ‘ŠRT’, or ‘‘group of ten.’’^158
Palmyra, as it was in the last two-thirds of the second century, could thus
be seen as a place with the normal institutions of a Greekpolis, but where
those institutions were, uniquely, also reflected in a long series of public in-
scriptions in a Semitic language. Like many a Greek city it had acquired also
a Roman imperial name,Hadriane; and the inscriptions also show a steady in-
trusion of Roman citizen names, borne by individuals. Then, from Caracalla
onwards, the standard ‘‘Roman’’ name borne by a Palmyrene is of a strange
. For the tax law, seeCISII, , . Note also J. Teixidor, ‘‘Le tarif de Palmyre I. Un
commentaire de la version palmyrénienne,’’Aula Orientalis (): , and J. F. Matthews,
‘‘The Tax Law of Palmyra: Evidence for Economic History in a City of the Roman East,’’
JRS (): . For a discussion of the officials appearing in the tax law, see J. Teixidor,
Un port romain du désert: Palmyre(), –. Cf. also M. Zahrnt, ‘‘Zum Fiskalgesetz von
Palmyra und zur Geschichte der Stadt in hadrianischer Zeit,’’ZPE (): .