Palmyra, the Roman Empire, and the Third Century Crisis

Zooming in and Scaling up from the Evidence

Rubina Raja, Eivind Heldaas Seland

• Publisher: Franz Steiner Verlag GmbH
• Year: 2025
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9783515140324
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The third century is often seen as a period of crisis in the Roman world, marked by political upheaval, violence, war, religious strife, hyperinflation, climatic instability, pandemics, and border incursions. These troubled times, however, coincided with the peak of Palmyra's prosperity. They encompassed the Syrian city's drift towards centralised rulership and short-lived political hegemony in the Near East, as well as its reach for imperial power and downfall in the years 270–272 CE.

How can this discrepancy between metropolitan crisis and peripheral prosperity be explained? Along with experts on different aspects of Palmyra, this volume gathers contributions from leading scholars working with the Roman Empire, and with neighbouring regions inside and beyond the imperial borders. Highlighting parallels, discrepancies, connections, and disconnections between developments in Palmyra and other parts of the world with which Palmyra interacted, the aim is a more critical, detailed, and nuanced understanding of the situation in the Roman Near East in the third century CE.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titel
• Impressum
• Table of Contents
• Rubina Raja / Eivind Heldaas Seland: Palmyra and the Third Century Crisis. Entangled Perspectives
• Kai Ruffing: Was There a Crisis of the Third Century CE?
• Michael A. Speidel: The Military in the Third-Century Roman Empire. An Overview
• Wolfgang Spickermann: Religious Trends in the Roman West in the Third Century CE
• Matthew Canepa: The Third Century in the Iranian World, a Time of Rupture and Renovation. Palmyra between the Arsacid and the Sasanian Empires
• Tomas Larsen Høisæter: The Crisis of the Third Century in East Asia. Political Collapse and Change in East and Inner Asia During the Third Century CE
• Eivind Heldaas Seland: Palmyra and the Indian Ocean World in the Third Century CE
• J. A. Baird: Sheltering from Crisis. Living the Third Century in Roman Syria
• Olympia Bobou / Rubina Raja: Palmyra in the Third Century CE: Looking for the Invisible ‘Crisis’ at Home
• Sarah Madole Lewis: The Third Century Crisis and the Sarcophagus Market in Syria
• Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet: The Development of Aramaic Writing Between Palmyra and Edessa at the Turn of the Third Century
• Lucinda Dirven: The Third Century Crisis and Religious Life in Palmyra
• Jean-Baptiste Yon: Inscriptions in Third Century Palmyra. Where is the Crisis?
• Andrew Wilson: The Palmyrene Revolt, the Eastern Desert of Egypt, and Red Sea Trade in the Late Third Century CE
• Nathanael Andrade: Third-Century Palmyra After Das palmyrenische Teilreich. The Palmyrenes and Their Connections to Jews, Christians, Baptists, and Manichaeans
• Emanuele E. Intagliata: What’s New in Palmyra? Notes on Housing, Society, and the Role of the City after the Third Century CE Crisis
• Index
• Backcover