ABSTRACT
Septimia Zenobia was born in Palmyra, to a family of the city's Graeco-Syrian elite. She claimed to have Macedonian blood, by descent from Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and a kinship with Cleopatra VII of Ptolemaic Egypt – this perhaps at a time when she felt herself heiress to a string of powerful women from the Hellenized east. The sources on her life and career are largely of a biased Western (Roman) nature – passages in the Historia Augusta and the later Byzantine histories of Malalas (6th century) and Zosimus (5th—6th century). Led by the general Zabdas, Palmyrene forces marched through Palestine and invaded Egypt in AD 269/70, ostensibly with fifth-column support in Alexandria, where one Timagenes (possibly a Palmyrene himself) is said to have raised Palmyrene support. Zenobia is said to have been paraded in Aurelian s eventual triumph through Rome, loaded down with chains of gold.
