‘Les dieux armés’ in Palmyra: Religious, Iconographic, Ethnic, and Historic Considerations

This contribution analyses a quite diffused iconography in Palmyra that displays divinities–not only male ones–as ‘dieux armés’. The customary interpretation of this habit is challenged in the light of the new hermeneutic frame by Kaizer in his work on the religious life of Palmyra. This kind of iconography was well diffused all over in Syria, but above all in the internal regions of it. There, divinities usually never portrayed in arms in the rest of the Roman world, are shown as armed, just like the ‘dieux armés’, such as e.g. the Mithraic torchbearers. The theory that the rise of Odaenathus and Zenobia was due to the introduction of the heavy cavalry into the Palmyrene army is challenged as well by the fact in the Palmyrene testimonies, the ‘dieux armés’ never wear the armours of the cataphractarii.