On 14 March 2023, Professor Rubina Raja will present her latest research on ancient Palmyra when she will be giving the annual Rumble Fund Lecture in the Great Hall at King’s College London.

In the lecture, Palmyra Undone: Reconstructing Knowledge through Archaeology and Legacy Data, Raja will discuss the results of the different projects about ancient Palmyra that she has headed in the last 10 years. An immense catalogue of portrait sculpture, supercomputer modelling of research data and archival material that has been thoroughly scrutinised are but some of the highlights of her presentation.

9^th Annual Rumble Fund Lecture

The prestigious annual lecture is one of the outreach activities supported by the Jamie Rumble Memorial Fund. The fund makes it possible for students from the Department of Classics at King’s College London to go on study trips to the Mediterranean, but the fund also focuses on outreach and public engagement. The annual lectures are open and have in former years attracted up to 400 people. As a leading expert on Palmyrene art and archaeology, Rubina Raja will present this year’s lecture:

Palmyra Undone: Reconstructing Knowledge through Archaeology and Legacy Data, by Professor Rubina Raja

Through the civil war in Syria – on-going since 2011 – the country has been devastated, people have suffered and so has the rich cultural heritage of the country. It has been labelled one of the most destructive humanitarian catastrophes the world has experienced since WW2. Shortly before the war broke out, the Palmyra Portrait Project was initiated. It was supposed to collect all known funerary portraits from the city and study them within their cultural and historical context. The impact of the war in some ways changed the scope of the project and resulted into several spin-off projects, which revolved around cultural heritage, legacy data and making such data widely available both to the public and scholars – moving beyond the art historical and classical archaeological aims of the core project. The Rumble Lecture 2023 presents the results of the Palmyra projects based at Aarhus University in Denmark. It ties together the various strands of information and data into a larger narrative about the value of classical archaeology, cultural heritage and deep knowledge about the past to our modern society. It underlines that without knowledge of the past, we cannot situate ourselves in our present.

More information

Read more about the Jamie Rumble Memorial Fund here, and find more information on registration for participation in the Rumble Fund Lecture here.