Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/218

200 P A L M Y R A than commercial reasons to favour Palmyra, which became an important military post, and turned its commercial organization to good account in aiding the movements of the legions marching against the Persians (De V., 15). It was the Persian wars that raised Palmyra to brief political importance, and male it for a few years the mistress of the Roman East ; but before we pass to this last epoch of its greatness we must attempt to describe the aspect and life of the city during the century and a half of its chief commercial prosperity. The chief luxuries of the ancient world silks, jewels, pearls, perfumes, and the like were drawn from India, China, and southern Arabia ; and Pliny computes the yearly import of these wares into Rome at not less than three quarters of a million of English money. The trade followed two routes, one by the Red Sea, Egypt, and Alexandria, the other from the Persian Gulf through the Syro-Arabian desert. The latter, after the fall of Petra, was in the hands of the Palmyrene merchants. West of Palmyra there were Roman roads, and the bales could be conveyed in waggons, but east of the oasis there was no road, and the caravans of Palmyra traversed the desert either to Vologesias (near the ancient Babylon and the later Cufa), where water carriage was available, or to Forath on the Pasitigris and Charax at the head of the Persian Gulf. The trade was enormously profitable not only to the merchants but to the town, which levied a rigorous duty on all exports and imports, and even farmed out the water of the two wells ; but the dangers of the desert and the risks of Parthian or Persian hostility were also formidable, and successfully to plan or conduct a great caravan was a distinguished service to the state, often recognized by public monuments erected by the " senate and people," or by the merchants of the caravan. These monuments, which form a conspicuous feature in Palmyrene architec ture, took the form of statues placed on pedestals project ing from the .upper part of the long rows of pillars which lined the chief streets ; for every great merchant was eager to see his name handed down to posterity by an enduring memorial, and to add to the colonnades a series of pillars " with all their ornaments, with their brazen capitals (?) and painted ceilings," was the received way of honouring others or winning honour for oneself. Thus arose, besides minor streets, the great central avenue which, starting from a triumphal arch near the great Temple of the Sun, formed the main axis of the city from south-east to north-west for a length of 1240 yards, and at one time consisted of not less than 750 columns of rosy- white lime stone each 55 feet high. We must suppose that this and the other pillared streets were shaded from the fierce heat of the sun like a modern bazaar ; and in some parts the pillars seem to have served to support a raised footway, from which loungers could look down at their ease on the creaking waggons piled with bales of silk or purple wool or heavy with Grecian bronzes designed to adorn some Eastern palace, the long strings of asses laden with skins or alajbastra of precious unguents, the swinging camels charged with olive oil from Palestine or with grease and hides from the Arabian deserts, and the motley crew of divers nationalities which crowded the street beneath the slave merchant with his human wares from Egypt or Asia Minor, the Roman legionary and the half-naked Saracen, the Jewish, Persian, and Armenian merchants, the street hawkers of old clothes, the petty hucksters at the corners offering roasted pine cones, salt fish, and other cheap dainties, the tawdry slave-girls, whose shameful trade went to swell the coffers of the state, the noisy salt auction, presided over by an officer of the customs. The produc tion of " pure salt " from the deposits of the desert was apparently one of the chief local industries, and another which could not be lacking on the confines of Arabia was the manufacture of leather. We read too, on the inscriptions, of a guild of workers in gold and silver ; but Palmyra was not a great industrial town, and the exacting fiscal system, which reached the most essential industries, and drew pro fit from the barest necessaries of life, must have weighed heavily on the artizan classes. Though all quarters of the, town still show traces of splendid buildings, wealth was probably confined to a comparatively small number of great families, and we must picture Palmyra in its best days as displaying a truly Oriental compound of magnifi cence and squalor, where the mud or straw-built huts of the poor stood hard by the palaces of the merchant princes. The life of the mass of the population was the unchang ing life of the Eastern poor ; the great families too remained essentially Oriental under the varnish of their Greek culture and Roman citizenship. The life of a pro minent townsman included an active share in the organ ization and even the personal conduct of caravans, the discharge of civic offices, perhaps the superintendence of the market and the victualling of a Roman expedition. The capable discharge of these functions, which sometimes involved considerable pecuniary sacrifices, ensured public esteem, laudatory inscriptions, and statues, and to these honours the head of a great house was careful to add the glory of a splendid family tomb, consecrated as the " long home "(sobj? J"Q the same phrase as in Eccles. xii. 5) of himself, his sons, arid his sons sons "for ever." These tombs, which lie outside the city, are perhaps the most interesting monuments of Palmyra. Some are lofty square towers, with as many as five sepulchral chambers occupy ing successive stories, and overlooking the town and its approaches a feature characteristically Arabic from the slopes of the surrounding hills. Others are house-like buildings of one story, a richly decorated portico opening, into a hall whose walls are adorned with the names and sculptured portraits of the dead. The scale of these monuments corresponds to the wide conception of an Eastern family, from which dependants and slaves were not excluded ; and on one inscription, in striking contrast with Western usage, a slave is named with the sons of the house (De V., 33, a). The tombs are the only buildings of Palmyra that have any architectural individuality ; the style of all the ruins is late classic, highly ornate, but without refinement. The frequent Eastern expeditions of Rome in the 3d century brought Palmyra into close connexion with several emperors, and opened a new career of ambition to her citizens in the Roman honours that rewarded services to the imperial armies. One house which was thus distin guished was to play no small part in the world s history. Its members, as we learn from the inscriptions, prefixed to their Semitic names the Roman gentilicium of Septimius, which shows that they received the citizenship under Septimius Severus, presumably on the occasion of his Parthian expedition. In the next generation Septimius Odaenathus 1 (Odhainat), son of Hairan, son of Wahballath, son of Nassor, had attained the rank of a Roman senator, conferred no doubt when Alexander Severus visited Palmyra (comp. De V., 15). The East was then stirred by the progress of the new SAsAnian empire, and the Palmyrene aristocracy, in spite of its Roman honours, had probably never cordially fallen in with the changes which had made Palmyra a colony and a military station. Indeed the Romanizing process had only changed the surface life of the place ; it lay in the nature of things that the 1 OSaivaOos, not O$(va6os, is the form of the name on the inscrip tions.