Ancient World Seminar: Rubina Raja (Aarhus), "The Palmyra Portrait Project. Visual representations from the funerary sphere in Palmyra, Syria"

In 2012 the Palmyra Portrait Project was initiated by Rubina Raja, Aarhus University. The project set out to collect all known Palmyrene funerary portraiture and synthesise these in a corpus. The corpus at present holds more than 3,400 portraits of deceased Palmyrenes. This collection of portraits make up the largest group of individual stemming from the Roman period and from one place in the ancient world. The tight chronology of the portraits, which only were produced over the course of three centuries, make this group of material significant to scholars of the ancient world. The portraits allow us to study questions of stylistic developments, trends and fashions as well as identity within Palmyrene society over hundreds of years. This lecture will give insight into the project and highlight case studies, which have proven useful for our understanding of Palmyra and its role in the Roman world.

Rubina Raja is professor of Classical Archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark. She studies in Copenhagen, Rome and Oxford. Since February 2015, she has also been centre director of the Danish National Research Foundation's Centre of Excellence for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet). Rubina Raja’s research focuses on urban development, visual representations and religious identities in the eastern Roman provinces and the Levant. She initiated and heads the Palmyra Portrait Project, which has collected the largest corpus of Roman funerary portraits outside Rome, found in Palmyra, Syria. Rubina Raja directs an extensive excavation project in Jerash, Jordan, together with Achim Lichtenberger, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, focusing on the so far unexplored Northwest Quarter of the ancient city of Gerasa and she also co-directs the new Italian-Danish excavations on Caesar’s Forum in Rome together with Jan Kindberg .