Palmyra and its Empire: Zenobia's Revolt Against Rome.

• Author: Cussini, Eleonora

The author, who is a senior editor at the British publishing house of Routledge, states that his book is intended to provide the general public with "a good serious book about Zenobia" (p. 1). Such an attempt at popular reconstruction of the history of Palmyra and the figure of Queen Zenobia is certainly praiseworthy, and the great amount of data gathered, including excerpts from the classical sources, bears witness to Stoneman's extensive research. Of interest are the references to a good many works usually not included in Palmyrene historical and philological studies, as well as citations from literary works showing Zenobia's impact on Western literature and on figurative art. The reader finds here mention of Chaucer's portrait of Zenobia in The Canterbury Tales, in Tennyson's "The Princess" and in Boccaccio's "De claris mulieribus." Furthermore, Stoneman cites plays, poems, nineteenth-century novels, and a painting by Tiepolo, possibly depicting Zenobia, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington (pp. 197ff.). The bibliography is dense, and cites many out-of-the-way items. However, the experienced student of matters Palmyrene will find these benefits spoiled by shortcomings large and small.

The bibliography lacks reference to such major works as the Corpus inscriptionum semiticarum, cited on p. 12 as "Corpus of Semitic Inscriptions." Some abbreviations used but missing from the list of abbreviations may leave the general reader at a loss, e.g., the above-noted Corpus of Semitic Inscriptions appears as "CISem 2" on p. 52. More serious shortcomings are the unacceptable description of Palmyrene Aramaic as "written in an alphabet similar to that of cursive modern Hebrew" (p. 12) and the unsatisfactory definition of Palmyrene Aramaic as "a form of the universal Aramaic of the Middle East" (p. 2).

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