The Religious Life of Palmyra: A Study of the Social Patterns of Worship in the Roman Period

Ted Kaizer's The Religious Life of Palmyra, A Study of the Social Patterns of Worship in the Roman Period, published by Franz Steiner Verlag in 2002 as volume 4 of the Oriens et Occidens series, is the standard scholarly study of Palmyrene religion, built from the city's bilingual Palmyrene Aramaic and Greek inscriptions together with its temple architecture and sculpture, and deliberately reading the cults as the acts of named tribes and civic bodies rather than through the older, looser label of syncretism. Its strength is that direct epigraphic and archaeological grounding, and it materially raised the sourcing behind the Palmyra entry, which previously rested only on a Tier 2 UNESCO listing. Its limit is that Palmyra's own textual and material record is itself incomplete and unevenly preserved, so any claim about a specific cult's precise practice should be checked against the inscriptions Kaizer himself cites.