ABSTRACT
When the Romans absorbed the West Asiatic provinces of the Seleucid Empire and Ptolemaic Egypt, they found themselves administering territories in which Semitic and Egyptian cultures and languages had continued to thrive under Greek rule. Already in the Late Achaemenid and Early Hellenistic periods, the practice of inscribing simultaneously in Greek and Aramaic had tentatively made its appearance. One of the oldest examples of Greek-Aramaic bilingual inscriptions comes from the early fourth to mid third century B. C. E. Palmyra, the famous caravan-city in the Syrian Desert, is the most publicly multilingual city in Roman Syria as evidenced by the large number of public and private inscriptions in languages other than in Palmyrene Aramaic. Although the vast majority of the 3,000 or so Palmyrene inscriptions recorded and published are solely in Palmyrene Aramaic, the number of bi- or trilingual inscriptions from Palmyra is still significant.
