Studies on Palmyrene Sculpture is the first volume in a new series devoted to Palymra, which, at the time of this review, includes seven volumes. It is also flagship publication for the Palmyra Portrait Project, which has for the last decade aimed to compile a single corpus of the thousands of scattered pieces of Palmyrene funerary portraiture and bring the attention of the English-speaking world to this important aspect of Palmyrene scholarship. Indeed, the Palmyra Portrait Project was itself founded by Rubina Raja based on the work done by Harald Ingholt in his lifetime.
Ingholt's influential 1928 Studier over Palmyrensk Skulptur is a pillar on which Palmyrene studies, more broadly, and Palmyrene iconography, more specifically, are based. Yet, until the publication of this new volume, Ingholt's work had been inaccessible to those unable to read Danish. The translation constitutes the backbone of the volume. Readers of the Loeb Classical Library will recognise the layout of the work, with the original Danish text on the left-hand page and the English translation on the right, enabling the reader to compare the text easily. While the English translation of Ingholt's Studier is a valuable resource in and of itself, the supplementary material adds further distinction. The volume opens with an introduction by Rubina Raja, who provides useful contextual information on Palmyra, the Danish connection to the city and Harald Ingholt himself, allowing the reader to get a sense of the man behind the research. The volume also provides 531 images of Palmyrene portraiture, including fifty-four reproductions from Ingholt's Studier, with an updated concordance of the locations and provenance of the objects both now and at the time of Ingholt's original publication. This volume will surely stand as a new pillar for both students and scholars of Palmyra and become a fundamental resource for the future of Palmyra studies.
Individualizing the Dead, the third volume of the series, is another output of the Palmyra Portrait Project and continues to build on the foundational work of Ingholt. Unlike many volumes claiming to acquaint a student or new scholar with a particular field, Individualizing the Dead provides a clear, yet thorough introduction to how one ‘reads’ a piece of portraiture, and in particular the iconography and attributes of the sculpture.
The volume opens with an introductory chapter by Maura Heyn and Raja, which sets out the purpose of the volume, while also discussing the issues surrounding identifying attributes in portraiture. In particular, Heyn and Raja highlight the importance of the portraiture — and consequentially the need for this volume — in illuminating Palmyra and the identity of the residents of the city. This importance is made clear in the second chapter of this volume, in which Fred Albertson discusses the ‘fringed’ mantle, an attribute that appears in only a small number of funerary portraits. Discussing such a small group provides scholars with an opportunity to examine how certain attributes link with the identity of the deceased. Albertson insightfully connects the appearance of the ‘fringed’ mantle on male Palmyrene portraits with the figures’ occupation as ‘military’ figures, either in the Roman army or alongside the Palmyrene caravans. Men who served in some sort of military capacity are notoriously difficult to identify in Palmyra, demonstrating the value of Albertson's chapter. The chapter goes on to discuss the appearance of the ‘fringed’ mantle on portraits of Palmyrene women, which is used alongside the Tower Type hairstyle to signify the wearer's cultural awareness and thus elite status. Later in the volume, in the sixth chapter, Raja picks up this thread to identify another example of adornment on Palmyrene portraits, the significantly more common, though little examined, attribute of brooches on priestly busts. Raja concludes that, in the context of the priestly busts, brooches were used as an attribute to display wealth and the wearer's elite position within Palmyrene society. While this chapter is brief, it demonstrates the need for further investigation into this specific attribute across all Palmyrene portraits. To aid this further study, Raja supplements her chapter with a catalogue of the ninety-two objects displaying brooches on the Palmyrene priestly busts.
Chs 3, 4 and 5 deal with attributes held by the deceased in the portraits. In ch. 3, Olympia Bobou discusses the depiction of branches and fruit in funerary reliefs, initially aiming to challenge previous opinions that such attributes could provide little information. Through the examination of these plants, Bobou discusses the problems with identifying attributes, particularly plants. Bobou concludes that there probably was no symbolic or social meaning to the use of plants and instead suggests that they may only have been used to create individuality between burials. The chapter also provides a helpful introduction to funerary practices in Palmyra, which provides context for the discussions elsewhere in the volume. Due to the importance of this discussion for the volume as a whole, it might have been included in the introductory chapter, though its inclusion in an early chapter means that this is not too serious an inconvenience for the reader. In ch. 4 Rikke Randeris Thomsen discusses the use of keys as an attribute in Palmyrene funerary portraiture. Thomsen first provides an overview of the scholarship on the attribute before giving an overview of the material, challenging the common view that the keys had a deeper symbolic meaning. Instead, Thomsen suggests that keys were often included simply as a decorative feature that had no deeper symbolism. This is, of course, in contrast with arguments made by other contributors throughout the volume and thus its inclusion, alongside Bobou's chapter, provides a stimulating contrast of views. In ch. 5, Heyn analyses drinking cups and bowls held by men in banqueting scenes. She begins by describing the usual designs for these banquet scenes in Palmyrene tombs and identifies that the bowls and cups were drinking vessels. Doing so, Heyn explains that this attribute was key to the message of the scene, which itself was designed to demonstrate the social status of the family it depicted. At the same time, Heyn explains the limitations to understanding the specific design choices of these vessels, demonstrating the problems inherent in understanding iconography.
The final two chapters move away from funerary sculpture to other contexts for Palmyrene iconography. In ch. 7, Nathalia Breintoft Kristensen examines the iconography on the local coinage, a topic which has been little studied to date. Kristensen outlines the issues surrounding the coinage, such as attribution and dating, before discussing its iconography and examining possible influences, such as from Parthia and Rome. This discussion demonstrates that the Palmyrenes did not necessarily use coinage as a means of expressing communal identity, though they broke with established traditions in ways that show the uniqueness of the oasis city. The chapter serves as the beginning of a much-needed examination of this material and provides an excellent introduction for scholars unfamiliar with the local coinage of Palmyra. In the final chapter, and as a useful contrast to the iconographic material, Jean-Baptiste Yon examines expressions of social position implicit in the choice of certain vocabulary in inscriptions. Yon begins by providing a brief overview of the formula of Palmyrene inscriptions, before going on to demonstrate how little expressions of profession or civic functions appear on Palmyrene epitaphs, showing that, instead, it was the expression of the relationship with their family that was important.
Broadly, Individualizing the Dead focuses on individual attributes on Palmyrene funerary sculpture to demonstrate how such details were used by the deceased to express their status in society. While the volume purposefully avoided discussing attributes used more frequently in Palmyrene portraiture — which might have provided scholars new to the field a good point of comparison — it does well to introduce readers to this corpus while also laying the foundations for future work in the field.
