oa Staying at Home or Taking Away. Palmyrene Priestly Iconography as Expressions of Local Religious Traditions and Societal Status

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Representations of Palmyrene priests are abundant in Palmyra. More than nine hundred of these exist in a variety of media: sculpture in the round, relief sculpture, sarcophagi lid banqueting scenes, as well as the on the well-known so-called banqueting tesserae. However, outside of Palmyra representations of Palmyrene priests are rarely found. In fact, the only ones that we know of come from Dura-Europos. This contribution revisits this evidence and considers the ways in which these few representations, in the light of the now massive corpus from Palmyra, can give new insights into the reasons for exporting images of Palmyrene priests, both as finished objects and through rendering the priests in the local artistic style found in Dura-Europos.