Prosopographia Palmyrena. Towards a social morphology of Palmyra

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael Sommer
• Subject Area: Ancient History
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 450674799

For scholars with an interest in the periphery of the Roman Empire, Palmyra is a treasury. While research in the archaeology and epigraphy of this primary hub of the ancient intercontintental long-distance trade has made rapid progress over the last three decades, some aspects of the city's history are still poorly understood.Particularly enigmatic is the social setup of Palmyra's elite. While some scholars maintain that Palmyra was essentially a "Greek city" ruled by an oligarchy of wealthy landowners ("notables"), others claim that Palmyra's society was largely tribal and its elite defined by kinship. The applicant himself has argued in favour of the tribal model, but at present this is still a model that cannot be proven with the evidence. This model needs to be tested against the evidence.In order to gain a more consistent image of the Palmyrene elite, it is essential to know more about individuals, of which some are quite well-attested in the epigraphic record. The methdology of choice is prosopography, complemented with computer-aided data mining. It is the purpose of the study proposed here to find out as much as possible about people and their connections: connections between people and people, between people and collectivities, and between people and places. The applicant believes that a prosopographical data base of the known Palmyrenes can produce a clearer image of who was when in power in Palmyra than previous research.This in turn, will shed light on Palmyra's role in the Roman Empire and hence its social morphology to use a term coined by Maurice Halbwachs and Marcel Mauss: on the question, whether the oasis metropolis was just one of the many cities of the Roman world, or rather an urban society sui generis, with a unique history "inter duo imperia", as Pliny the Elder put it.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants