Palmyrene Coinage

Palmyrene coinage describes the coins associated with Palmyra, the caravan city in the Syrian desert that rose to great wealth under Roman rule and briefly led a breakaway empire in the third century CE. Palmyra's own coin output was modest: a series of small, mostly undated bronzes for local use, followed in 270–272 CE by issues in the names of Vaballathus and his mother Zenobia, struck not at Palmyra but at the imperial mints of Antioch and Alexandria.

For most of its history Palmyra relied on Roman and provincial money. Its importance in monetary history lies less in its own coins than in its role as a hub of trade between the Roman world and Mesopotamia, and in the short-lived Palmyrene challenge to Rome.

Palmyra's merchants organised caravans that carried goods between the Euphrates, the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, linking Roman Syria with ports such as those of Characene. Payments in this trade were made largely in Roman silver denarii and in the provincial tetradrachms of Antioch, along with eastern coins such as the Parthian drachm and, from the third century, the Sasanian drachm. Merchants and city officials had to deal with several currencies at once, so exchange and weighing of coins were routine parts of the caravan business. A long bilingual inscription of 137 CE, known as the Palmyrene Tariff, set out local customs dues and shows how carefully the city regulated commerce in terms of Roman money.

Palmyra struck small bronze coins for everyday change, probably in the first to third centuries CE. They are generally anonymous, without an emperor's portrait, and show local deities and symbols, with Greek or Palmyrene Aramaic legends. They are hard to date precisely and were produced in limited numbers. Palmyra is also known for thousands of small clay tesserae, tokens used for admission to religious banquets; these are sometimes confused with coins but were not money. The small scale of Palmyra's own minting is a reminder that great commercial wealth did not require a large local coinage when a trusted imperial currency was available.

After the death of Odaenathus, who had defended the Roman East against Persia, his widow Zenobia ruled in the name of their young son Vaballathus. In 270 CE Palmyrene forces took Egypt and much of Asia Minor. At Alexandria, the mint struck billon tetradrachms showing the emperor Aurelian on one side and Vaballathus on the other, a careful display of partnership with Rome. At Antioch, the mint issued antoniniani in the same paired form.

In 272 CE the Palmyrene rulers broke openly with Rome. Coins were struck naming Vaballathus as Augustus and Zenobia as Augusta, without Aurelian. These issues were brief and are now rare, especially those of Zenobia. They were struck from already debased billon, reflecting the wider debasement of Roman money in the third-century crisis, when the silver content of coins had fallen to a few per cent.

Aurelian defeated the Palmyrene armies in 272 CE and captured Zenobia. After a revolt in 273 CE the city was sacked and never recovered its former wealth. Aurelian then reformed the coinage, partly to restore confidence after decades of decline. The episode illustrates how control of mints was a sign of political authority: issuing coins in one's own name was a claim to imperial power. Similar regional coinages in the area include those of Emesa and the kingdom of the Nabataeans.

• British Museum – Collection online