This book is an experiment. In the past, many workshops and conferences have been organised in connection with the Palmyra Portrait Project, a research group headed by Professor Rubina Raja and funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. Since 2011 and increasingly in recent years, when the political situation and the enormous damages to the Syrian historical heritage forced the scholarly community to interrupt its work on the field, the activities and the numerous initiatives of the Project have become a reference point for all the scholars dealing with Near Eastern subjects in general and Palmyra in particular. This volume is also part of this research path, but at the same time, it represents something different, a step further in the research. In the wake of the work done by the Project on the Palmyrene artistic and funerary tradition this volume aims at promoting research on the same topic along the same lines, but for whole Roman Syria collecting contributions from experts of the various sub-regions that can be individuated within the composite cultural situation of Roman Syria. 

         The elements of novelty expressed by the volume thus do not consist in the presentation of the single pieces described and analysed by experts of one or the other particular region within Greater Syria, although several of them are not so well known to the scholars’ community. The interesting new approach consists mainly in the leading role taken by the Palmyra Portrait Project research group in promoting and coordinating the study of portraiture in different parts of Roman Syria. Following the example and inspired by the research made by the group in the recent years, with particular attention to the methods and experience they gained, experts of different Syrian areas have been invited to collect the evidence available from the territory the know better, in order to research and discuss the theme of “portrait”. The volume collects the results of all these local investigations highlighting similarities and differences. The result is polyhedric description of the portrait habit in the whole Greater Syria.

         The first contribution works as a more detailed introduction to the topic of the whole volume. In this contribution, Michael Blömer and Rubina Raja, two of the most prominent scholars belonging or connected to the Palmyrene Portrait Project try to illustrate the situation of the studies concerning Roman Syria funerary portraiture, fixing some new research lines for the future (Shifting the Paradigms: Towards a New Agenda in the Study of the Funerary Portraiture of Greater Roman Syria). Some new approaches are suggested. Similarities and differences between the features and the occurrence of portraits suggest that each Syrian sub-region developed its own way of receiving Greek and Roman artistic influences probably mixing them with local Near Eastern themes, such as the banquet scene theme or the so-called "Parthian dress". Local issues influenced each other, creating a shared and independent language of expression that was not Eastern Classical or Western oriental anymore and should be investigated by the modern scholar acknowledging its specific identity.¹

         The investigation of the specific Syrian sub-regions starts from Antiochia on the Orontes - the political capital of Seleucid in earlier times and that of Roman Syria later - and its region: Andrea De Giorgi, ‘Til Death Do Us Apart: Commemoration, Civic Pride, and Seriality in the Funerary Stelai of Antioch on the Orontes. The author analyses iconographies and the symbolism of the not particularly rich corpus of funerary representations, where Hellenistic themes survived and were modelled along with local variations both in the city and its countryside, shaping a particular idea of Greekness. The following paper (Michael Blömer, The Diversity of Funerary Portraiture in Roman Commagene and Cyrrhestice, deals with Commagene and Cyrrhestice, two regions in northern Syria. Here it seems that only in the two centres of Seleucia Zeugma and Hierapolis was the funerary portrait accepted by the population as a means to remember the deceased. In other cities of the region, portraits are much rarer. An interesting exception is the Savur plain, a rural environment influenced by the funerary portrait habit of Zeugma and Hierapolis whose themes and symbols are replicated. Nonetheless, in that rural area, artistic instances from the major Hellenized cities appear in conjunction with themes such as that of the eagles sheltering the deceased, recalling pre-Hellenistic examples. Jutta Rumscheid, Different from the Others: Female Dress in Northern Syria based on Examples from Zeugma and Hierapolis, focuses on the headgear and female dress in Zeugma and Hierapolis, spotting differences and highlighting the peculiar artistic tradition of the region of these two cities. Michael Speidel, Roman Soldiers' Gravestones in Greater Syria: Thoughts on Design, Imports and Impact, investigates the funerary habits of the legionary soldiers in Syrian military bases. If sites like Seleucia Zeugma surprisingly lack the large numbers of legionaries’ funerary monuments collected in the western bases, other sites like Bostra, Apameia and Anzarbos provided large numbers of pieces for a comprehensive analysis. In Bostra the military monuments maintain distinctive characteristics from their civilian counterparts. In other places, the tastes imported from Western provinces by soldiers encounters local stonecutters' styles and skills. Due to the lacunose situation of sources, it is hard to say whether or not the soldiers were so deeply influenced by local tradition as to abandon their military identity once discharged and to merge totally into the local funerary habits. Two papers deal with the largest and most striking corpus of funerary portraits in Roman Syria, that is to say, the Palmyrene one. Rubina Raja’s contribution - Funerary Portraiture in Palmyra: Portrait Habit at a Crossroads or a Signifier of Local Identity?- connects the portraits and the results of the Palmyrene Portrait Project research with new ideas concerning funerary practises, urban development and Palmyrene social structure. In particular, she stresses the relevance of investigating groups of funerary portraits in the framework of the funerary structures which contained them, to shed light on the family and families’ relationships as cohesive elements of the city's upper class. Signe Krag, Palmyrene Funerary Portraits: Portrait Tradition and Change, focuses on how female representation techniques changed through time. The author considers the hypogeum of Bolha where female portraits from different family members belonging to different generations have been found. The Bolha findings allow us to delineate the artistic development of Palmyrene female portrait within the same family in connection with the changes in their funerary context. In Portrait Habit and the Funerary Portraiture of the Decapolis, Achim Lichtemberger and Rubina Raja investigate the use of portraits in the Decapolis region. The evidence is scarce and mainly concentrated in the north, connected with the cities of Abila, Gadara and Scythopolis. Therefore, it is difficult to speak about a definite funerary portrait habit for the region of northern Decapolis; a better analysis would be to speak about different local habits being influenced by a variety of factors mixing Roman influence with local aniconic tradition. Karl-Uwe Mahler’s contribution, Funerary Portraiture from the Coastal Region of Roman Syria, introduces the reader to the Phoenician coast's Syrian sub-region. A funerary grave monument from Qartaba, east of Byblos is analysed as an example of how sometimes it is not easy to find appropriate parallels for some very particular items. In the case of the Qartaba monument, the author was able to trace some tokens of Roman influence along with references to Greek and local cultural substrate. With his work Petrified Memories: On some Funerary Portraits from Roman Phoenicia, Bilal Annan gathers evidence concerning funerary portrait habits on the Syrian coast. Dealing with different examples of portraits from the main Phoenician cities and their territories the author concludes that the sculptors and artists in the coastal region, which had been since ancient times a crossroads of cultures, were able to conjugate Roman imports with local themes like the Totenmahl tradition which flowed into Greek-Roman funerary art. The two final chapters by Cristopher Hallet and Sheila Dillon look beyond Roman Syria, to Roman Egypt and Athens, where portrait habit research is already at an advanced stage. 

         Returning to Syria, Annan's final remarks summarise the value of the whole collection of contributions: he discusses the difficulties encountered in dealing with a relatively new research field, the portraiture on the Roman Phoenician Coast. The sources are scattered, and a necessary preliminary work to any further research would be to collect all the evidence available to establish a firm starting point for any future research. This conclusion drawn by Annan concerning Syrian Phoenicia represents the main scope of the whole volume once applied to all the sub-region of Greater Syria introduced in the various contributions. Following the example of the Palmyrene funerary portrait corpus, the experts gathered in the volume worked to establish a valid starting point for future research, each in their own area of investigation. The result is thus a composite volume reflecting the composite nature of the topic throughout Roman Syria but providing at the same time a fundamental overview of the state of the art for the whole Roman province. The volume represents a new beginning in the research concerning the funerary portrait habits in the Roman Near East following in the footprints of the Palmyrene Portrait Project that promoted it. A new project that enjoys the collaboration, methods and experience acquired by the Palmyrene group's protagonists, will be indeed as successful and as fundamental for future research on Near Eastern art and society.

1  It is interesting that the two authors reached on an artistic level a conclusion similar to that which the reviewer illustrated on a socio-political level in his recent: Gregoratti L., The need for a Third Space, geographical and political spaces at the periphery of the Parthian and Roman empires: some preliminary remarks, in I.B. Mæhle, P.B. Ravnå, E.H. Seland, Methods and models in ancient history, Essays in Honour of Jørgen Christian Meyer, Athens, The Norwegian Institute at Athens, 2020, pp. 221-230