Palmyrene Empire

Tadmor

Drafted from II, Roman Palmyra: Identity, Community, and State Formation (2013)formation

Palmyra is an oasis in the Syrian desert, roughly halfway between Damascus and the Euphrates, and its inhabitants called it Tadmor. It had water in a place with none, and that geography is the entire explanation for the city: goods moving between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean either went the long way round through Antioch or crossed the desert, and crossing the desert required Palmyra.

The Palmyrenes did not merely tax the traffic. They ran it. Palmyrene merchant families financed the caravans, and Palmyrene archers and camel troops escorted them; there are inscriptions honouring men who brought a caravan safely from Spasinou Charax on the Gulf, set up by the merchants who had travelled with them. There were Palmyrene trading communities at Dura-Europos, on the Gulf, and in Egypt. This was a city whose leading families were simultaneously its capitalists, its diplomats and its officer corps, and Smith's argument is that this is the state formation the city's later thirteen years came out of — not a sudden ambition, but a community that had been organising force and money together for two centuries.

The tariff inscription of AD 137 is the best-surviving customs schedule from the ancient world: a stone listing the duty on slaves, purple wool, olive oil, dried goods, prostitutes and camel loads, in Palmyrene Aramaic and Greek, set up because the old rules were unclear and merchants were arguing. It is a document of a city that lived on rates.

Politically it was Roman from the first century, formally a colonia by the 230s, and culturally it was neither Roman nor Parthian. The inscriptions are bilingual, the gods are Semitic with Greek epithets, the funerary portraits in the tower tombs show men in Parthian trousers and women in Greek drapery under Aramaic names, and nobody in Palmyra appears to have found this a difficulty.

The man who was given the east

Drafted from II, Roman Palmyra: Identity, Community, and State Formation (2013)expansion

In 260 the Roman emperor Valerian was defeated and captured alive by Shapur I at Edessa — the only Roman emperor ever taken prisoner by a foreign power — and the Sasanian army moved through Syria taking Antioch and everything else it wanted. The Roman command in the east had effectively ceased to exist.

Septimius Odaenathus, the leading man of Palmyra and a Roman senator, took his city's forces out and caught Shapur's army as it recrossed the Euphrates, heavy with plunder and prisoners, and beat it. He then spent several years doing it again, twice reaching the walls of Ctesiphon, and destroying the local Roman usurpers who had emerged in the vacuum.

Rome's response was to make the arrangement official. Gallienus gave him extraordinary authority over the eastern provinces — the sources give varying titles, corrector totius Orientis among them — and Odaenathus in Palmyrene took a second title of his own: king of kings, which is what the Sasanian sovereign he had beaten called himself.

It is important to be precise about what this was, because the popular account runs ahead of it. Odaenathus never rebelled. He struck no coins in his own name, he governed in the emperor's, and he spent his career fighting Rome's enemies. What had changed was that the effective military power in the Roman east was a Syrian city's own army, commanded by a man who held his position because he had won with it rather than because a bureaucracy had appointed him — and that the grant was to him personally.

In 267 he and his eldest son were murdered, at Emesa, by a relative. The sources give motives and do not agree on them; Zenobia was accused by later writers and the accusation is unprovable and convenient.

Zenobia

Drafted from II, Roman Palmyra: Identity, Community, and State Formation (2013)peak

Septimia Zenobia — Bat-Zabbai in Palmyrene — was Odaenathus's widow, and on his death she ruled in the name of their surviving son Vaballathus, who was about ten. She held the position for five years, and in that time Palmyra did the things it is remembered for.

In 270 Palmyrene forces took Egypt, defeating the Roman garrison and holding Alexandria. In the same period they moved north and west into Anatolia as far as Ankara and possibly Chalcedon, opposite Constantinople. At its widest the territory administered from Palmyra ran from the Nile to the Bosphorus and east to the Euphrates, which for a city of perhaps a hundred thousand people in a desert is one of the more remarkable things any city ever did.

The intention is genuinely disputed and will not be resolved here. On the coins, until 271, Vaballathus appears with Aurelian, junior and deferential, in a formula that claims inherited authority rather than independence — the argument being that Zenobia was asserting her son's right to his father's grant, which Rome had declined to renew. Then in 271 the formula changes: Vaballathus is Augustus, Zenobia is Augusta, and Aurelian is gone from the obverse. Whether that was the plan all along or the decision of a regime that had run out of other options is exactly what the evidence cannot settle.

What is not disputed is the effect. Egypt fed Rome. A power holding Egypt is not a client whatever its coins say, and the response was never going to be negotiated.

The later literary Zenobia — chaste, learned, descended from Cleopatra, conversing with philosophers, led in golden chains through Rome — comes mostly from the Historia Augusta, which is a fourth-century work of substantial invention, and from the eighteenth-century readers who found her useful. Smith's Palmyra is a corrective to it in the same way Hillenbrand's Saladin is: the figure who reaches us was assembled later, by people who needed something.

A simple woman

Drafted from Zosimus, The History of Count Zosimus (1814)contraction

Zosimus, writing two centuries later from the imperial treasury in Constantinople, gives the fullest surviving account of how Palmyra was taken, and it is full of the kind of detail nobody invents.

After the defeat at Emesa, Zenobia's advisers told her to give up any claim to the city — its people were friendly to Rome — and to withdraw inside Palmyra, where they could deliberate at leisure in safety. She did. Aurelian entered Emesa, was cordially received, found a treasure she had not been able to carry, and marched on Palmyra, investing it on every side while his troops were supplied from the surrounding country.

The man on the wall

The Palmyrenes derided the besiegers, as though they thought it impossible for the Romans to take the city, and one man in particular used very indecent terms about the emperor's own person.

A Persian standing beside Aurelian said: if you will allow me, sir, you shall see me kill that insolent soldier. The emperor consented. The Persian placed himself behind some other men so as not to be seen, shot at the man as he was leaning over the battlements, and hit him while he was still uttering his insults, so that he fell from the wall in front of the soldiers and the emperor.

The besieged held out anyway, expecting the Romans to run out of food, and kept it up until they themselves had none.

The camel

Then they held a council and decided to get to the Euphrates and ask the Persians for help. They put Zenobia on a female camel — the swiftest kind, and much faster than a horse, Zosimus explains — and got her out of the city.

Aurelian was extremely annoyed and sent cavalry after her. They caught her crossing the Euphrates in a boat and brought her back.

And then Zosimus records a thought that is not creditable to anybody and is almost certainly true. Aurelian was pleased at the sight of her, and, being an ambitious man, immediately became uneasy at the reflection that in future ages it would not redound to his honour to have conquered a woman.

The surrender, and the trial

The city divided. Some of the Palmyrenes resolved to fight it out; others made submissive gestures from the walls and begged pardon. Aurelian accepted, told them to fear nothing, and they came out with presents and sacrifices in their hands. He paid respect to the holy things, took the gifts, and sent them away unharmed.

The trial was at Emesa.

Zenobia came into court and pleaded strongly in her own excuse, producing a number of people who had seduced her as a simple woman — and one of them was Longinus, the Greek philosopher and critic, whose writings Zosimus pauses to call highly beneficial to all lovers of learning.

He was found guilty and sentenced to death, and bore it with such courage that he spent the time consoling the friends who were distressed for him.

Several others besides Longinus, Zosimus adds, suffered upon Zenobia's accusation.

What the plea was

It is worth being exact about what she is reported to have argued, because it is the opposite of the legend.

The defence was that a woman could not have done it. That she had been led, advised, imposed upon — that the empire, the coinage, the campaign into Egypt and the title of Augusta were the work of the men around her, and that she had gone along with them because she was not equipped to do otherwise.

It worked. She lived. The men she named did not, and the most distinguished of them died well, consoling other people, on the strength of testimony from the queen he had served.

What the pond said

Drafted from Zosimus, The History of Count Zosimus (1814)aside?What aside means

Almost everything narrative that is known about Palmyra's empire comes from one historian writing two hundred years later, and it is worth knowing what he was arguing.

Zosimus was a pagan in a Christian empire, and he says plainly what his book is for. Polybius, he writes, explained by what means the Romans in a short space of time acquired a vast empire; his own purpose is to show how, by mismanagement, they lost it in as short a time. The mismanagement he has in mind is the abandonment of the old religion. Palmyra is one of his demonstrations, and he breaks off the narrative of its fall to say so.

At Seleucia in Cilicia, he says, there was a temple of Apollo with an oracle in it, and the god used to supply people troubled by locusts with a species of bird that would fly among the swarms and destroy vast numbers of them in a moment. Zosimus attributes this to the happiness of that age, and notes that his own generation has not deserved such kindness from heaven. The Palmyrenes consulted that oracle to ask whether they would ever hold the empire of the east, and were told to get away from the temple, an accursed race whose treacherous deeds the gods disliked. Somebody else asked about Aurelian's expedition against them, and was told that one falcon commands many doves, and their end depends on his pounces.

Then the pond. Between Heliopolis and Byblos is a place called Aphaca with a temple of Aphrodite and beside it a pool like an artificial cistern, over which a round fire like a lamp was often seen in the air, including — Zosimus says — in his own time, whenever people gathered there on the appointed days. Worshippers threw offerings into the water: gold, silver, linen, silk. If the goddess accepted the gift it sank; if she refused it, it floated, and not only the cloth but the gold and silver too.

In the year before their overthrow the Palmyrenes held their festival there and threw in gold and silver and cloth, and all of it sank. The next year, at the same festival, all of it floated.

None of that is evidence about Palmyra. It is evidence about the man the record depends on, and the reason to set it out is that his account of Odaenathus, Zenobia, the campaigns and the trial at Emesa comes from the same pen and the same argument. Zosimus is not indifferent to the Palmyrenes: they are an instance in a case he is making about why Rome had declined since the emperors stopped sacrificing, and a state that was warned by oracles and ignored them is exactly the shape of instance he needs.

He is still, for long stretches, the only narrative there is. Zenobia's defence at her trial, the sequence of the two battles before the siege, the flight towards the Euphrates — all of it rests on Zosimus. He was using Palmyra to argue about the gods, and he is the reason we can say anything about it at all.

Aurelian

Drafted from II, Roman Palmyra: Identity, Community, and State Formation (2013)end

Aurelian became emperor in 270, stabilised the Danube, and then came east. He took Anatolia with little fighting, beat the Palmyrene army twice — at Immae near Antioch and again at Emesa — and besieged Palmyra itself. The city surrendered in 272. Zenobia was caught trying to reach the Euphrates, and Vaballathus disappears from the record.

Aurelian left a garrison and went west. In 273 Palmyra rose again, killed the garrison, and Aurelian turned round and came back. This time the city was sacked, its walls broken and its population dispersed or killed, and Palmyra as a power ended in a single season. Zenobia herself was, by most accounts, displayed in Aurelian's triumph in Rome and then settled in Italy, which is a considerably better outcome than a defeated sovereign usually got.

Two borrowed vocabularies

Drafted from II, Roman Palmyra: Identity, Community, and State Formation (2013)aside?What aside means

Palmyra's rulers claimed authority by taking other people's titles, and they did something with that device which is genuinely unusual.

Taking a title is normally a claim on one dead or defeated authority — the Ottoman Kayser-i Rûm, the Buyids on Sasanian kingship, the Byzantine successor states holding on to Roman style after 1204. One predecessor, one vocabulary, one audience.

Palmyra made two at once, in two languages, to two audiences. In Palmyrene Aramaic, Odaenathus was mlk mlk', king of kings — the Sasanian sovereign's own title, taken by the man who had beaten his army, and legible to everyone from the Euphrates eastward as a claim on the Iranian imperial tradition. In Latin and Greek, on the coins and in the inscriptions, the family used Roman offices and then Roman imperial titles, legible to everyone from Antioch westward as a claim on Rome.

Neither claim was a fiction and neither was complete. Odaenathus had genuinely defeated the Sasanians and genuinely held a Roman commission. What Palmyra had no vocabulary for was itself — there was no title that meant "the city of Tadmor, which is now the largest power between two empires", because the political language of the third century had no room for such a thing to exist. So the claim had to be assembled out of the two empires' words.

That is the general condition of every power in this part of the world between Alexander and Islam. The Ptolemies were gods in Greek and pharaohs in Egyptian. The Jafnid phylarchs of the sixth century held Roman ranks and were praised in Arabic verse. Almost none of them could describe itself in a single language, and any attempt to state what such a polity claimed will have to say who was being addressed before it says what was claimed.

A village in the temple

Drafted from II, Roman Palmyra: Identity, Community, and State Formation (2013)afterlife

What survived was a garrison town. Diocletian built a legionary camp in the ruins twenty years later; the site was a Roman frontier post, then a Byzantine one, then an Umayyad and Mamluk castle on the hill above, then a village inside the temple of Bel, and then — from the eighteenth century — a ruin that European travellers drew and argued about. The village was moved out in the 1930s so the ruins could be excavated.

Thirteen years puts this among the shortest spans on the site — only the Zubayrid caliphate is briefer, and Alexander's own empire is the same length — and the reason the page exists is not the thirteen years. It is that a caravan city organised by merchant families around the protection of trade produced, when two empires failed simultaneously, an army capable of beating both of them — and that this was possible because the escort and the tariff and the tribal levies had been there for two hundred years, doing something else.

The shape of that list

Read the sequence again slowly, because it is unusual.

Palmyra was not abandoned and it was not continuously a city. It was a site that successive powers found useful for successive reasons, none of them the reason it had originally existed. A caravan city stops being a caravan city when the caravans stop, and the caravans stopped because Rome took both ends of the route and Persia closed the other side. What was left was a good defensive position with water, halfway between two frontiers.

So it became a garrison. Then a different garrison. Then a castle. Then a village, built inside the cella of the temple of Bel, using the temple's own walls as the outer walls of houses — which is the most economical thing anyone ever did with the place, and preserved the temple by inhabiting it.

And then a ruin

The last stage is the one that made it famous, and it is the only stage in which Palmyra was valued for having been Palmyra.

European travellers reached it in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, drew the colonnade, published the drawings, and argued about the inscriptions. The bilingual texts in Greek and Palmyrene Aramaic are how the language was recovered. The city became, in that period, a fixed image — the desert ruin, the warrior queen, the merchant princes — and the image has almost nothing to do with the two centuries of quiet tariff-collecting that actually built it.

The village was moved out in the 1930s so the ruins could be excavated properly, which completed the process: a place that had been continuously inhabited for two thousand years was cleared of its inhabitants in order to be preserved as what it had been before them.