Palmyrene inscriptions

The first published Palmyrene inscription was the altar inscription from Rome now catalogued as CIS II 3902 (Rome 1), published by Jan Gruter in 1616.^[11] A second inscription, also from Rome, CIS II 3903 (Rome 2), was later published by Jacob Spon in 1683.^[12] These inscriptions, preserved in the Capitoline Museums, were recognised as belonging to an unknown script associated with the ancient city of Palmyra. About a decade later, following the first modern European expedition to Palmyra in 1691, William Hallifax published an account in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1695, including a copy of an inscription from a lintel from the entrance gate to the modern village later catalogued as CIS II 4202.^[13] Halifax observed that the unfamiliar script frequently appeared beneath Greek inscriptions and likely represented the same text in the local language. Shortly afterward, Edward Bernard and Thomas Smith published a collection of Palmyrene inscriptions in 1698, including what later became known as CIS II 3944, CIS II 4214, and CIS II 3943.^[14] However, all these copies were inaccurate, making decipherment challenging.^[15][16]

The decisive breakthrough occurred after the visit of Robert Wood and James Dawkins to Palmyra in 1751. Their illustrated work The Ruins of Palmyra (1753) provided more accurate copies of numerous inscriptions, including the important Greek–Palmyrene bilingual inscription which became known as CIS II 3940.^[17] Using this material together with the previously published inscriptions (CIS II 3902, 3903, 4202, 3944, 4214, and 3943), the French scholar Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and the English antiquarian John Swinton independently deciphered the script in 1754.^[18][19][15]

Barthélemy’s method relied on comparing the Greek and Palmyrene texts of the bilingual inscriptions. By identifying repeated proper names and chronological formulas in inscriptions such as CIS II 3940, he was able to assign phonetic values to the Palmyrene letters and reconstruct the alphabet. Within a short time he produced a working reading of the inscriptions and demonstrated that the language was a dialect of Aramaic. The decipherment of Palmyrene thus became the first successful decipherment of a previously "dead" ancient script in modern scholarship.^[15][20]

More information Earliest published Palmyrene inscriptions, used in the first decipherment, Image ...

Earliest published Palmyrene inscriptions, used in the first decipherment[21]
Image	Identification	Location	First published	Hallifax (1890)	Bernard (1698)[14]	Hyde (1700)	Wood (1753)	Barthélemy (1759)	de Vogüé (1868)	NE (1898)	CIS II (1926)
	Rom. I (Gruter)	Capitoline Museums	1616			2		3		477,1	3902
	Rom. II (Spon)		1683			1		4		477,2	3903
	Hallifax	Lintel of the entrance gate to the modern village[22]	1691	p. 280	XII	3			21	480,10	4202
	Bernard’s 2nd	Great Colonnade column	1698	p. 287	XIV	5	V		22	460,9	3944
	Bernard’s 3rd	Three architrave fragments found on the ground near Temple of Baalshamin[23]	1698	p. 292	XVII				71		4214
	Bernard’s 4th			p. 293	XVIII
	Bernard’s 5th	Great Colonnade column	1698	p. 286	XIX	4	IX	2	27		3943
	Wood VIII		1753				VIII	1	26	461,12	3940

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The first significant and accurate group of inscriptions was published by Robert Wood and James Dawkins following their visit to Palmyra in 1751; their book (1753) included copies of 11 Greek-Palmyrene bilingual inscriptions, 15 Greek-only and two Palmyrene-only inscriptions.^[16] The next significant publication of new inscriptions came a century later following the expedition of William Henry Waddington in 1861, organized on the advice of Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé. Waddington's records of 144 Palmyrene inscriptions were published by de Vogüé in 1868.^[16] At the beginning of the twentieth century selections of inscriptions were published George Albert Cooke and Mark Lidzbarski, and comprehensive corpus of Palmyrene Aramaic inscriptions was produced in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum (1926–1949), edited by Jean-Baptiste Chabot. The next phase of significant publications were made by Jean Cantineau, who initiated the series Inventaire des inscriptions de Palmyre (1930–1939), later continued by Jean Starcky, Javier Teixidor, and Adnan Bounni.^[16] In 1996 a consolidated collection of the Aramaic inscriptions was published as Palmyrene Aramaic Texts (PAT) by Delbert R. Hillers and Eleonora Cussini as part of the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon project. The work assembled approximately 2,830 inscriptions and remains the principal reference for Palmyrene Aramaic epigraphy.^[16]

These major scholarly corpora and catalogues are listed below:

• CIS – Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, an early comprehensive collection of Semitic inscriptions. The first Palmyrene volume (II t.3 f.1) was edited by Jean-Baptiste Chabot in 1926.^[24]
• NE - Handbuch der Nordsemitischen Epigraphik, 1898
• IIP / Inv – Inventaire des inscriptions de Palmyre, 1930-75 in twelve fascicules, a catalogue of Palmyrene inscriptions not included in CIS.
• IP - Jean Cantineau's Inscriptions palmyréniennes, 1930
• Tad - Jean Cantineau's Tadmorea in Syria, 1931-38
• RTP – Recueil Des Tessères de Palmyre, 1955
• BS III – Dunant, Christiane (1971). Le sanctuaire de Baalshamin à Palmyre: Les inscriptions. Vol. 3. Institut Suisse.
• RSP – Michał Gawlikowski's Recueil d'inscriptions palmyréniennes provenant de fouilles syriennes et polonaises récentes à Palmyre, 1974
• PAT – Palmyrene Aramaic Texts, a modern concordance and synthesis of earlier publications. In the reference system used in Palmyrene Aramaic Texts, the ID numbers ("sigla") follow a priority order beginning with CIS

A selected concordance is shown below:

Palmyrene inscriptions covered a range of social and religious contexts:

• Funerary inscriptions, among the most common, typically appear on tomb façades, loculi (burial niches), or funerary reliefs and record the name and lineage of the deceased. Many are accompanied by Palmyrene funerary reliefs. The inscriptions often follow formulaic patterns identifying the individual, their father, and sometimes their tribe or profession.
• Temple and dedication inscriptions with dedications to gods (e.g. Bel, Baalshamin) or construction work in temples
• Honorific inscriptions commemorated individuals who contributed to the city’s civic or religious life.
• Tesserae are small inscribed tokens, understood to have served as admission tokens or ritual markers connected with temple banquets and religious festivals.

About 1,200 of the inscriptions in PAT are known from museum collections. Many of the others are still in situ.