Thesiss

For millennia, ancient civilizations of the Near East pondered the important psychological questions posed by death. The funerary portraits produced by the desert kingdom of Palmyra from the first century B.C. to the destruction of the city by the Romans in A.D. 273 present some…

This is a study of identity, community, and the process of state formation in the Roman period at Palmyra, an oasis city in the Syrian desert, from the first to third centuries C.E. I address the key issue of cultural transmission and the development of an indigenous Palmyrene i…