these deities, who both had a huge following in the Roman empire as a whole, above
all among soldiers, clearly calls to mind the cult of the main Jupiter from Rome.
But they were not the only ones, and the same borrowing of Jupiter’s epithets
happened in the cult of rather obscure deities such as “the Lord of the Dances,”
who received dedications at a sanctuary in the mountains near Berytus under the
name of IOMBalmarcod(CIL3.155), or the otherwise unknown IOBeelseddes, who
was worshiped at a minor site in Syria called Timnin el-Tahta (IGLS6.2925). By
taking over the labels of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, these local gods, even the minor
ones, laid claim via traditionally Roman means to a position of the highest cultic
power. Simultaneously, key aspects of Roman religion were given the opportunity
to penetrate the indigenous religious systems to which these gods belonged.
Greco-Roman Patterns of Religious
Culture in Palmyra
It could be argued, however, that the influence of Rome on religious life in the east
was traceable also in places which were less obviously permeated by aspects of Roman
religion, even places in the orient which seem at best to have undergone the effects
of Greek culture, and at worst to have maintained a dominant indigenous charac-
ter. Let us look in some detail at Palmyra, a city with a unique local religious cul-
ture (Kaizer 2002). The inhabitants of its divine world came from various oriental
spheres of influence: Bel and Nebu were originally Babylonian; Reshef and Shadrafa
had a Phoenician background, Allat and Baal-Shamin were brought to the city by
tribal groups, and Yarhibol and Aglibol originated at Palmyra itself. Sometimes the
oriental deities are identified with Greek ones in the bilingual (Greek and Aramaic)
inscriptions from the city, but in most cases it seems clear that the Greek name is
secondary. They were worshiped in sanctuaries which had traditionally been built in
mud-brick, centered on a sort of chapel or series of niches with an altar in front of
it and set in a sacred enclosure, although, as time went by, most of them were gradu-
ally transformed into monumental Greco-Roman temples in the first three centuries
ad. That the Palmyrene cults were indigenous and affected by Greek culture
(“Hellenism”) is certainly true. But that should not blind us to the fact that, simul-
taneously, Palmyra conformed to at least some of the general frameworks of reli-
gious behavior that were in vogue in other, more “typical,” cities in the eastern provinces
of the Roman empire, such as Ephesus and Antioch, and also the cities of the Syrian
Decapolis. I will come back to Palmyra with examples of this soon, but first we will
need to sketch briefly the setting of such patterns of religious culture in other places
in the Roman east.
Whereas in the “culturally bare” western lands of its empire Rome found a reason
to introduce its own language (Latin) as the lingua francaand its own imperial
culture, Greece and (since Alexander the Great) Asia Minor and the Levant had Greek
language and culture in common long before the imperial armies arrived on the spot.
The Roman authorities could not do better than to take full advantage of the ready-
made structures which they found at their disposal, and the eastern half of the Roman
450 Ted Kaizer