Zenobia’s Baths in Palmyra (Syria): An Assessment

The Roman baths of Palmyra were excavated by Syrian archaeologists between 1953 and 1975, in the center of the historic city, between the monumental arch and the tetrapylon. In 2009, within the frame of the project “Balneorient” (http://balneorient.hypotheses.org/), the French Institute in the Near East (Ifpo) and the Syrian Direction of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM) decided to complete the study of this building, visited by thousands of tourists since its discovery, but still unpublished. The beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011 prevented us from completing this work. After almost 7 years of conflict, the situation is more dire than ever, and many major monuments of Palmyra had disappeared. Considering the risk of destruction to Zenobia’s Baths, and the necessity to raise awareness of this threatened heritage, we have decided to present the uncomplete results of its study.The paper will present the monumental remains of the buildings (hypocausted rooms, ornamented basilica, porticoed palaestra and natatio, Diocletian’spropyleon), the results of the early excavations, and will then propose an architectural reconstruction ofthe building at each period of its long chronology (i.e. from the 2nd c. AD to the 6th c. AD). The links between the complex urban history of Palmyra and the social/political significance of public baths in Late Roman Near East will then be explored. The results of this Palmyrene case study will finally be comparedto ongoing works by the author on other remoted oriental Roman baths (Karnak and Petra), at the margin of the empire