Collecting Palmyra: The Global Dispersal of Palmyrene Funerary Reliefs

Palmyra has been pivotal in archaeological and historical research due to the wealth of material and the long history of fascination with the site. Its material culture can be found on every continent except Antarctica, in more than 250 public museums and private collections. This article focuses on the modern global dispersal of Palmyra’s material culture, specifically its characteristic funerary reliefs, and examines the ways in which the consumption of Palmyra’s past was underpinned by various motivations and was transferred globally through several mechanisms. The dispersal underlines a long-term global consumption of Palmyra’s material culture since its so-called rediscovery by Europeans in the mid 18th century. Examining in detail the journeys of some of the 4,000 known portraits, this article demonstrates how the disassembly of the objects from their original contexts reflects changing flows of materials, desires, and knowledge over three centuries. The analysis underlines the importance of this material culture to histories of collection that might be more accurately described as histories of dispersal, and therefore histories of the nature of global networks, colonialism, markets, and geopolitical power structures.1