The oldest notice of Palmyra is in 2 Chron. viii. 5, when Tadmor in the wilderness is said to have been built by Solomon. But the source of this statement is 1 Kings ix. 18, and here the name is tmr, which cannot be read Tadmor, and from the context—in which Judaean towns are spoken of—is almost certainly the Tamar of Ezek. xlvii. 19, xlviii. 28. It is indeed extremely improbable that Solomon, whose policy was to enrich Judah by developing the Red Sea traffic, and so carrying the trade of the East to the Mediterranean ports through his own country, would have encouraged the rival route by Tadmor, which lies quite outside the Israelite settlements, and passes through districts over which Solomon was unable to maintain even the recognition of suzerainty which David had extorted by his Syrian wars. After the time of Solomon the Red Sea trade was interrupted, and an overland caravan trade from Phoenicia to Yemen and the Persian Gulf took its place. But neither on the cuneiform inscriptions nor in the Old Testament writings prior to Chronicles, not even in Ezekiel’s account of the trading connexions of Tyre, is there any mention of Tadmor; up to the 6th century b.c. the caravans seem to have been organized by merchants of southern or central Arabia, and they probably reached Damascus by way of Dιima (Jauf Beni 'Amir) and the W. Sirhân, without coming near the oasis of Palmyra (see especially Isa. xxi. 11 sq.; Ezek. xxvii.). On the other hand Tadmor cannot have been a new place when the Biblical Chronicler ascribed its foundation to Solomon, and thus we shall hardly be wrong in connecting its origin with the gradual forward movement of the nomadic Arabs which followed on the overthrow of the ancient nationalities of Syria by the Chaldaean empire. Arabian tribes then took possession of the partly cultivated lands east of Canaan, and, as has been explained in the article Nabataeans, became masters of the Eastern trade, gradually acquired settled habits, and learned civilization and the use of writing from the Aramaeans, whose language was in current official and commercial use in the Persian empire west of the Euphrates. The Nabataeans of Petra naturally appear in Western literature before the remote Palmyrenes, who are not even mentioned by Strabo. But we learn from Appian {Bell. Civ., v. 9) that in 42-41 b.c. the city was rich enough to excite the cupidity of Mark Antony, and that the population was still small and mobile enough to evade that cupidity by timely flight. The series of Semitic inscriptions of Palmyra begins a few years later. The oldest (De Vogüé, 30) bears the date 304 of the Seleucid era (9 b.c. ), and was placed upon one of the characteristic tower-shaped tombs which overlooked the city from the surrounding hillsides. The dialect and the writing (a form of the u square” character) are western Aramaic; the era, as we have just seen, is Greek, the calendar Macedonian; and these influences, to which that of Rome was soon added, were the determining factors in Palmyrene civilization. The proper names and the names of deities are also partly Syriac, but in part they are unmistakably Arabic. The Arabic element appears in the names of members of the chief families, and these retain some distinctive grammatical forms which biggest that, though Aramaic was the written language, Arabic may have not been quite obsolete in common life. That the town was originally an Arabic settlement is further rendered probable by the use of a purely Arabic term (η∏D “fahdh ”) for the septs into which the townsmen were divided. And thus we can best explain how, when the oasis was occupied by a settlement of Arabs, it gradually rose from a mere halting-place for caravans to a city of the first rank. The true Arab despises agriculture; but the pursuit of commerce, the organization and conduct of trading caravans, is an honourable business which gives full scope to all the personal qualities which the Bedouin values, and cannot be successfully conducted without widespread connexions of blood and hospitality between the merchant and the leading sheikhs on the caravan route. An Arabian merchant city is thus necessarily aristocratic, and its chiefs can hardly be other than pure Arabs of good blood. The position of Palmyra in this respect may be best illustrated by the analogy of Mecca. In both cities the aristocracy was commercial, and the ruling motive of all policy lay in the maintenance of the caravan trade, which involved a constant exercise of tact and personal influence, since a blood feud or petty tribal war might close the trade routes at any moment. To keep the interests of commerce free from these embarrassments, it was further indispensable to place them under the sanctions of religion, and, though we cannot prove that this policy was carried out at Palmyra with the same consistency and success as at Mecca, we can trace significant analogies which point in this direction. Mecca became the religious centre of Arabia in virtue of the cosmopolitan worship of the Ka'ba, in which all tribes could join without surrendering their own local gods. So at Palmyra, side by side with the worship of minor deities, we find a central cultus of Baal (Bel or Malachbel) identified with “the most holy sun.” To him belonged the great temple in the south-east of the city with its vast fortress-like courtyard 256 yards square, lined with colonnades in the style of Herod’s temple; and ’ the présidence of the banquets of his priests, an office coveted by the first citizens of Palmyra (W., 2606, a), may be compared with the Meccan rifâda, or right of entertaining the pilgrims. And, just as in Mecca the central worship ultimately became the worship of the supreme and nameless god (Allâh), so in Palmyra a large proportion of the numerous votive altars are simply dedicated to u the good and merciful one, blessed be his name for ever.” In Palmyra as at Mecca the name Rahmân, (merciful) may be due to the influence of the Jewish colony, which settled in the town after the destruction of Jerusalem; but the tendency to a universal religion, of which the dropping of the local proper name of God is so decided a mark, and which nevertheless is accompanied by no such rejection of polytheism as made Jehovah and Elohim synonymous in the religion of the Hebrew prophets, appears too early to be due to Jewish teaching (Mordtmann, 1), and seems as at Mecca to be rather connected with the cosmopolitanism of a merchant city. A secondary parallelism with Mecca is found in the sacred fountain of Ephka. Its tepid and sulphureous waters perhaps acquired their reputation from their medicinal use to cure the rheumatism which has always prevailed in Palmyra. This spring, like Zemzem at Mecca, had a guardian, appointed by the “moon-lord” Yarhibôl (W., 2571, c; De V., 30), whose oracle is alluded to in another inscription, and who may therefore be compared with the Meccan Hobal.

The wars between Rome and Parthia favoured the growth of Palmyra, which astutely used its secluded position midway between the two powers, and by a trimming policy secured a great measure of practical independence and continuous commercial relations with both (Appian, ut sup.·, Pliny, v. 89). These wars, too, must have given it a share in the trade with north Syria, which in more peaceful times would not have chosen the desert route. To some extent, however, the oasis soon came under Roman control, for decrees regulating the custom-dues were issued for it by Germanicus and Corbulo. The splendid period of Palmyra, to which the greater part of the inscribed monuments belong, began with the overthrow of the Nabataean kingdom of Petra (105 a,d.), which left it without a commercial rival. Hadrian took Palmyra into his special favour, and gave it on the occasion of his visit to the town {circa 130 a.d.) the name of Adrianopolis. Under the same emperor (8th April 137) the customs and dues of Palmyra were regulated by a law which has recently been copied from the stone on which it was engraved, and gives the fullest picture of the life and commerce of the city. At this time the supreme legislative authority lay in the hands of a senate (βουλή), with a president, a scribe, two archons, and a fiscal council of ten. At a later date, probably under Septimius Severus or Caracalla, Palmyra received the jus italicum and became a Roman colony, and according to usage the legislative power came into the hands of the senate and people under the administration of officers called strateqi. The Romans had soon other than commercial reasons to favour Palmyra, which became an important military post, and turned its commercial organization to good account in aiding the movements of the legions marching against the Persians (De V., 15). It was the Persian wars that raised Palmyra to brief political importance, and made it for a few years the mistress of the Roman East; but before we pass to this last epoch of its greatness we must attempt to describe the aspect and life of the city during the century and a half of its chief commercial prosperity.

The chief luxuries of the ancient world—silks, jewels, pearls, perfumes, and the like—were drawn from India, China, and southern Arabia; and Pliny computes the yearly import of these wares into Rome at not less than three quarters of a million of English money. The trade followed two routes, one by the Red Sea, Egypt, and Alexandria, the other from the Persian Gulf through the Syro-Arabian desert. The latter, after the fall of Petra, was in the hands of the Palmyrene merchants. West of Palmyra there were Roman roads, and the bales could be conveyed in waggons, but east of the oasis there was no road, and the caravans of Palmyra traversed the desert either to Vologesias (near the ancient Babylon and the later Cufa), where water carriage was available, or to Forath on the Pasitigris and Charax at the head of the Persian Gulf. The trade was enormously profitable not only to the merchants but to the town, which levied a rigorous duty on all exports and imports, and even farmed out the water of the two wells; but the dangers of the desert and the risks of Parthian or Persian hostility were also formidable, and successfully to plan or conduct a great caravan was a distinguished service to the state, often recognized by public monuments erected by the “senate and people,” or by the merchants of the caravan. These monuments, which form a conspicuous feature in Palmyrene architecture, took the form of statues placed on pedestals projecting from the upper part of the long rows of pillars which lined the chief streets; for every great merchant was eager to see his name handed down to posterity by an enduring memorial, and to add to the colonnades a series of pillars u with all their ornaments, with their brazen capitals (?) and painted ceilings,” was the received way of honouring others or winning honour for oneself. Thus arose, besides minor streets, the great central avenue which, starting from a triumphal arch near the great Temple of the Sun, formed the main axis of the city from south-east to north-west for a length of 1240 yards, and at one time consisted of not less than 750 columns of rosy-white limestone each 55 feet high. We must suppose that this and the other pillared streets were shaded from the fierce heat of the sun like a modern bazaar; and in some parts the pillars seem to have served to support a raised footway, from which loungers could look down at their ease on the creaking waggons piled with bales of silk or purple wool or heavy with Grecian bronzes designed to adorn some Eastern palace, the long strings of asses laden with skins or alabastra of precious unguents, the swinging camels charged with olive oil from Palestine or with grease and hides from the Arabian deserts, and the motley crew of divers nationalities which crowded the street beneath—the slave merchant with his human wares from Egypt or Asia Minor, the Roman legionary and the half-naked Saracen, the Jewish, Persian, and Armenian merchants, the street hawkers of old clothes, the petty hucksters at the corners offering roasted pine cones, salt fish, and other cheap dainties, the tawdry slave-girls, whose shameful trade went to swell the coffers of the state, the noisy salt auction, presided over by an officer of the customs. The production of “pure salt” from the deposits of the desert was apparently one of the chief local industries, and another which could not be lacking on the confines of Arabia was the manufacture of leather. We read too, on the inscriptions, of a guild of workers in gold and silver; but Palmyra was not a great industrial town, and the exacting fiscal system, which reached the most essential industries, and drew profit from the barest necessaries of life, must have weighed, heavily on the artizan classes. Though all quarters of the town still show traces of splendid buildings, wealth was probably confined to a comparatively small number of great families, and we must picture Palmyra in its best days as displaying a truly Oriental compound of magnificence and squalor, where the mud or straw-built huts of the poor stood hard by the palaces of the merchant princes.

The life of the mass of the population was the unchanging life of the Eastern poor; the great families too remained essentially Oriental under the varnish of their Greek culture and Roman citizenship. The life of a prominent townsman included an active share in the organization and even the personal conduct of caravans, the discharge of civic offices, perhaps the superintendence of the market and the victualling of a Roman expedition. The capable discharge of these functions, which sometimes involved considerable pecuniary sacrifices, ensured publie esteem, laudatory inscriptions, and statues, and to these honours the head of a great house was careful to add the glory of a splendid family tomb, consecrated as the “long home ,, (κtθSy ∏3—the same phrase as in Eccles, xii. 5) of himself, his sons, and his sons’ sons “for ever.” These tombs, which lie outside the city, are perhaps the most interesting monuments of Palmyra. Some are lofty square towers, with as many as five sepulchral chambers occupying successive stories, and overlooking the town and its approaches—a feature characteristically Arabic—from the slopes of the surrounding hills. Others are house-like buildings of one story, a richly decorated portico opening into a hall whose walls are adorned with the names and sculptured portraits of the dead. The scale of these monuments corresponds to the wide conception of an Eastern family, from which dependants and slaves were not excluded; and on one inscription, in striking contrast with Western usage, a slave is named with the sons of the house (De V., 33, a). The tombs are the only buildings of Palmyra that have any architectural individuality; the style of all the ruins is late classic, highly ornate, but without refinement.

The frequent Eastern expeditions of Rome in the 3d century brought Palmyra into close connexion with several emperors, and opened a new career of ambition to her citizens in the Roman honours that rewarded services to the imperial armies. One house which was thus distinguished was to play no small part in the world’s history. Its members, as we learn from the inscriptions, prefixed to their Semitic names the Roman gentilicium of Septimius, which shows that they received the citizenship under Septimius Severus, presumably on the occasion of his Parthian expedition. In the next generation Septimius Odaenathus (Odhainat), son of Hairan, son of Wahballath, son of Nassor, had attained the rank of a Roman senator, conferred no doubt when Alexander Severus visited Palmyra (comp. De V., 15). The East was then stirred by the progress of the new Sàsânian empire, and the Palmyrene aristocracy, in spite of its Roman honours, had probably never cordially fallen in with the changes which had made Palmyra a colony and a military station. Indeed the Romanizing process had only changed the surface life of the place; it lay in the nature of things that the greatest merchant prince, with the openest hand, and the widest circle of connexions along the trade routes, was the real head of the community, and could do what he pleased with boule and demos except when a Roman commander interfered. Odaenathus appears to have been the head of a party which secretly meditated revolt, but the outbreak was prevented by a Roman officer Rufinus, who procured his assassination. He left two sons; the elder named Hairan appears in an inscription of 251 a.d. as “headman” (b>ι, ⅛αpχoς) of the Palmyrenes, but it was the younger brother Odaenathus who sought revenge for his father’s death and inherited his ambition. In him the old Bedouin blood reasserted itself; an Esau among the Jacobs of Tadmor, he spent his youth in the mountains and deserts, where the hardships of the chase prepared him for the fatigues of war, and where no doubt he acquired the absolute influence over the nomad tribes which was one of the chief secrets of his future success. In 258, the year of Valerian’s ill-fated march against Sapor, Odaenathus is called h,ypatikos or consular, the highest honorary title of the empire, in an inscription erected to him by the gold and silver smiths of Palmyra. The title no doubt had just been conferred by the emperor on his way eastward, and the munificent patron of the guild of workers in precious metals had, we may judge, liberally scattered their wares among the wives and daughters of the Bedouin sheikhs. He meant to have a strength and party of his own, whatever the issue of the war. If we may trust the circumstantial account of Petrus Patricius, the captivity of Valerian and the victorious advance of Sapor induced Odaenathus to send gifts and letters to Sapor, and it was only when these were rejected that he threw himself heart and soul into the Roman cause. Sapor was offended that Odaenathus did not appear before him in person; the Palmyrene chief in fact did not mean to be the mere subject either of Persian or Roman, though he was ready to follow whichever power would leave him practically sovereign at the price of occasional acts of homage. Rome in her day of disaster could not afford to be so proud as the Persian; the weak Gallienus was the very suzerain whom Odaenathus desired; and, joining his own considerable forces with the shattered fragments of the Roman armies, the Palmyrene commenced a successful war with Persia, in which he amply revenged himself on the arrogance of Sapor, and not only saved the Roman East but reduced Nisibis, twice laid...