Prosopographia Palmyrena. Towards a social morphology of Palmyra

对于对罗马帝国周边地区感兴趣的学者来说，帕尔米拉是一个宝库。在过去的三十年里，对这座古代洲际长途贸易中心的考古学和金石学研究取得了迅速的进展，但人们对这座城市历史的某些方面仍然知之甚少。尤其是帕尔米拉精英阶层的社会结构。虽然一些学者认为，帕尔米拉本质上是一个"希腊城市"，由富裕的地主（"贵族"）寡头统治，其他人则认为，帕尔米拉的社会主要是部落和其精英由亲属关系定义。申请人本人曾主张采用部落模式，但目前这仍然是一个无法用证据证明的模式。这个模型需要用证据来检验。为了获得一个更加一致的帕尔米林精英的形象，有必要更多地了解个人，其中一些人在金石记录中得到了很好的证明。选择的方法是人学，并辅以计算机辅助数据挖掘。这里提出的研究目的是尽可能多地了解人及其联系：人与人之间的联系，人与集体之间的联系，以及人与地方之间的联系。申请人认为，已知的帕尔米拉人的人学数据库可以比以前的研究更清楚地了解谁在帕尔米拉掌权，这反过来又会阐明帕尔米拉在罗马帝国中的作用，从而揭示其社会形态，使用Maurice Halbwachs和Marcel Mauss创造的术语：关于这个问题，绿洲大都会是否只是罗马世界众多城市中的一个，或者更确切地说，是一个独特的城市社会，有着独特的历史，如老普林尼所说的"两个帝国之间"。

For scholars with an interest in the periphery of the Roman Empire, Palmyra is a treasury. While research in the archaeology and epigraphy of this primary hub of the ancient intercontintental long-distance trade has made rapid progress over the last three decades, some aspects of the city's history are still poorly understood.Particularly enigmatic is the social setup of Palmyra's elite. While some scholars maintain that Palmyra was essentially a "Greek city" ruled by an oligarchy of wealthy landowners ("notables"), others claim that Palmyra's society was largely tribal and its elite defined by kinship. The applicant himself has argued in favour of the tribal model, but at present this is still a model that cannot be proven with the evidence. This model needs to be tested against the evidence.In order to gain a more consistent image of the Palmyrene elite, it is essential to know more about individuals, of which some are quite well-attested in the epigraphic record. The methdology of choice is prosopography, complemented with computer-aided data mining. It is the purpose of the study proposed here to find out as much as possible about people and their connections: connections between people and people, between people and collectivities, and between people and places. The applicant believes that a prosopographical data base of the known Palmyrenes can produce a clearer image of who was when in power in Palmyra than previous research.This in turn, will shed light on Palmyra's role in the Roman Empire and hence its social morphology to use a term coined by Maurice Halbwachs and Marcel Mauss: on the question, whether the oasis metropolis was just one of the many cities of the Roman world, or rather an urban society sui generis, with a unique history "inter duo imperia", as Pliny the Elder put it.