Roman Palmyra: Identity, Community, and State Formation by Andrew M. Smith II (review)

This book, which originated as a PhD dissertation written at the University of Maryland, sets out to present a social and political history of Palmyra during the first three centuries CE in view of its unique setting as an oasis city-state on the desert frontier between Rome and Parthia. While influential works such as Millar's The Roman Near East, 31 B.C.-A.D. 337 (1993) or Teixidor's Un port romain du désert: Palmyre et son commerce d'Auguste à Caracalla (1984) have highlighted the political and economic development of this city, Smith's focus on the process of sedentarization and the relationship between sedentary and pastoral communities to illuminate the evolution of Palmyrene "identity" is noteworthy.

When looking at the structure of the book, it quickly becomes apparent that the first chapter, "Framing the Narrative," is somewhat ambivalent, containing simple introductory parts such as the setting, a review of the available sources as well as a summary of Palmyrene history and urban development, but also introducing the theoretical concepts of the "construction of Palmyrene identity" (pp. 11-13) and "state formation at Roman Palmyra" (pp. 13-16). The following chapters (2-6) are more uniformly structured with an introduction and conclusion, each dealing with the problems of "Tribes and Tribalism," "The Growth of Community," "Mapping Social Identities," "The Civic Institutions of Palmyra," and "The Palmyrene Diaspora." The two concluding chapters narrate "The Palmyrene Empire: A Crisis of Identity" and "Retrospect and Broader Implications" without any of the subdivisions of the chapters above. A rather extensive section at the end contains notes, references to ancient works, bibliography, and an index. The author starts out every chapter with a discussion of current research and definitions of the concepts approached, which should prove highly useful to students and novices in Palmyrene history and form a good backdrop for the following discussion of the actual archaeological and epigraphic sources used in the study.

Smith's starting point in the discussion of identities juxtaposes two different perspectives: one of Palmyra's urban and social development being shaped by the respective political agendas of Rome and Parthia, and one of Palmyra as the center of its own political network sharing social, cultural, and economic relations with other centers and communities. Both are certainly valid and complementary approaches to the question of individual and communal identity, which Smith very ably situates in the academic discourse on ethnicity and the symbolic contexts that apply to the manifestations of identity and community, especially in the generation of boundaries that maintain distinctiveness and reflect power relationships between individuals and groups. He then summarizes the theoretical framework of the role of tribalism and the Greek polis in different models of state formation processes in order to provide a background for his discussion of tribalism in the Palmyrene territory in chapter 2. After reviewing the scarce epigraphic sources on this subject, the author paints a picture, not of dichotomy between settled and nomadic populations, but of mutual cooperation between the inhabitants of the city, the villages of the hinterland, and the pastoralists of the countryside supporting the mixed economy of Palmyra. A slow migration of people with tribal affiliations to the oasis seems to have been responsible for the gradual expansion of the settlement in the first century BCE. His analysis of tribal elements in the genealogical inscriptions is quite convincing, and in comparing these findings with sources such as the Safaitic texts in the countryside he concludes that the economic interdependence of pastoralist and semi-pastoralist groups with the traders in the urban center was supported by a social and cultural kinship based on tribal values.

In the urban growth of Palmyra, the city's institutional development as a Greek polis was a key factor, and by the second century CE it had all the required civic institutions and had endorsed monumental public building projects such as...