Palmyra is one of the best examples of how cities could adopt the Graeco-Roman habit of setting up statues and reliefs in every available place and, more importantly, how this habit could be adapted according to local customs and traditions. Palmyra’s surviving funerary sculpture alone forms the largest corpus of portraits outside of Rome from the first three centuries CE, but only some of the city’s figural representations have survived. Bronze, marble, and limestone images were set up in public spaces and the sanctuaries, and together with the reliefs and sarcophagi found in the tombs, testified to the power of the portraits to honour, commemorate, and display the piety of men, women, and children. Clothes, jewellery, the style of carving, and the choice of representational types (reclining or seated), were combined and used to create a visual manifestation of Palmyrene identity that even now distinguishes their portraits from those found in other cities in the region, such as Dura-Europos, Heliopolis (Baalbek), and Zeugma. The types of monuments on which the portraits were placed are also evidence of the local Palmyrene usage and adaptation of a cross-regional phenomenon.
The blending of visual elements from Palmyra and neighbouring areas is one of the most distinctive features of Palmyrene sculpture. For the male portraits, it is most evident in the choices of dress and facial hair, while for the female portraits, it is most obvious in the hairstyles. Almost all men chose to be depicted wearing either a himation or a costume inspired by fashions in the Parthian Empire. The himation denoted a good citizen in the cities of the Greek East during the Roman period, and so carried connotations of interest in public affairs and beneficence towards the city and its citizens. The Parthian costume was composed of luxurious tunics and trousers that were embroidered, or even bejewelled, while boots, sometimes heavily patterned, and belts, sometimes with daggers, completed the ensemble. This style of dress instantly demonstrated wealth and status. In scholarship, beards are usually associated with the portraits of Hadrian (r. 117–138 CE), who was the first Roman emperor to be depicted with one. In Palmyra, however, even though Hadrian visited the city in 130/131 CE, bearded portraits only become popular from the middle of the 2nd century CE, indicating that the local clean-shaven practice persisted until then.
Women preferred to be shown dressed in their local costume rather than the Greek-style chiton and himation, and their hair was usually covered. There are a few cases, however, where their hair was left uncovered and its arrangement seems to depict either the Greek ‘melon coiffure’ (a hairstyle in which the hair is divided in rows resembling the stripes of a melon, before being gathered at the back of the head), or plaits gathered at the top of the head, a style popularized by Faustina the Elder, wife of the emperor Antoninus Pius (r. 138–161 CE). Even in those cases, the style was adjusted to the demands of the Palmyrene sculptural medium and customs: the bun that would have been at the back of the head of a statue was shown at the top of the head in deference to the medium of the relief, and the veil that they sometimes wore emphasized their adulthood.
The use and style of the portraits reveals that Palmyra was a city of Palmyrene images, not just a ‘city of images’ that blindly followed Greek and Roman sculptural trends.
