Palmyrene Aramaic Texts

Delbert Hillers and Eleonora Cussini's Palmyrene Aramaic Texts is a scholarly critical edition of the surviving Palmyrene Aramaic inscriptions from the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Both editors were recognized specialists in Aramaic epigraphy, and the volume's authority rests on its status as the standard comprehensive scholarly compilation and translation of this specific inscriptional corpus, widely cited as the reference edition in Palmyrene studies since its publication. Its strength is comprehensiveness and philological rigor in transcribing and translating a genuinely difficult and dispersed body of ancient texts. Its limit is genre, a critical text edition rather than a historical or religious interpretive study, so a claim about what the inscriptions reveal about Palmyrene religious practice benefits from a dedicated interpretive study built on this edition's textual foundation.