Zenobia’s caravan city briefly defied Rome from the desert
Palmyra in central Syria appears in documents from the early second millennium BCE, with Neolithic finds beneath. Silk Road merchants funded the Great Colonnade and Bel’s temple; in the 260s King Odaenathus beat Shapur I before queen regent Zenobia rebelled and built a short-lived empire.
The oasis city in central Syria grew rich on caravans crossing the desert, and its merchants set up trading colonies along the Silk Road and across the Roman world. That wealth paid for monumental works such as the Great Colonnade and the Temple of Bel. Attached to Roman Syria yet largely self-governing, the city took on Greek civic customs and was later raised to the rank of colonia. In the 260s its king Odaenathus defeated the Persian ruler Shapur I, and afterwards Queen Zenobia, ruling as regent, rose against Rome and built a short-lived empire that ended in 273.
The local name, Tadmor, is attested far earlier than Palmyra. Eighteenth-century BC cuneiform tablets from Mari spell it Ta-ad-mi-ir, eleventh-century BC Assyrian inscriptions write Ta-ad-mar, and the city’s own inscriptions use both Tadmar and Tadmor. The usual explanation, championed by Albert Schultens, links it to tamar, the Semitic word for date palm, after the palms around the oasis.
Pliny the Elder is the first writer known to use the Greek form Palmyra, in the first century AD. Schultens thought it a garbled Tadmor, shifting through an unrecorded Talmura to Palmura under the pull of Latin palma. Jean Starcky and other philologists instead took it as a translation of Tadmor from a Greek word for palm.
Others disagree entirely. Franz and Ruth Altheim favoured a Syriac root meaning object of wonder, an idea Starcky and Michael Gawlikowski rejected. In 1988 Michael Patrick O’Connor proposed that both names were Hurrian, built from words for to love and to know with the same suffix.
Source: Palmyra
