Male Dress Habits in Roman Period Palmyra By: Maura Heyn and Rubina Raja Heyn, M. K., Raja, R. (2019). “Male Dress Habits in Roman Period Palmyra.” In M. Cifarelli, ed., Fashioned Selves: Dress and Identity in Antiquity. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 39-51. Made available courtesy to Oxbow Books: https://www.oxbowbooks.com/oxbow/fashioned- selves.html This article has been published in a revised form in a book entitled Fashioned Selves: Dress and Identity in Antiquity, edited by Megan Cifarelli published by Oxbow Books, ISBN: 9781789252545 Abstract: Palmyra, ancient Tadmor, was in the first three centuries CE a flourishing trade node in the Roman Empire. Situated as the last stop on the Silk Road, camel caravans were reloaded onto donkey caravans, and then went on to the areas west of Palmyra. Although having been under Hellenistic influence for centuries, the region displays little tangible evidence of exactly how such influence impacted the societies in the region. With Pompey’s conquest in the 60s BCE, the region came under firm Roman control, and local societies responded to this interaction. This contribution looks at the material evidence from Palmyra from the period between the 1st century CE and the late 3rd century CE in order to gauge the way in which Palmyrene men were represented in the Palmyrene art. Most evidence stems from the funerary sphere, since the public and religious statuary largely has disappeared over the centuries. This paper considers the ways in which local and foreign clothing traditions impacted Palmyrene society and shaped the expression of male identities in this oasis city. 1 Keywords: Portraits | Priests | Cloaks | Textiles | Women | Dresses | Dress codes | Sarcophagi | Men Book Chapter: Introduction – sculptural habit and dress in Palmyra Palmyra, ancient Tadmor, situated in the Syrian Desert halfway between the Euphrates River and the eastern Mediterranean coast, is known for its wealth of archaeological material. The city flourished in the first three centuries CE, when many of the Palmyrene elite were heavily involved in international trade, and the city was a nodal point for caravans (Seland 2015; Meyer et al. 2016). This wealth created the opportunity for the upper layers of society to represent themselves to each other as well as to the outside world. One group of sculptural representations, which gives us much information about the dress habits of the Palmyrenes, is the funerary 1 Rubina Raja thanks the Carlsberg Foundation for funding the Palmyra Portrait Project and both authors thank Aarhus University Research Foundation for granting Maura Heyn a visiting professorship in 2018 to come and work together with the Palmyra Portrait Project group.