Unknown Maker, Palmyrene

This portrait of a bearded man was broken off a rectangular relief panel that sealed a grave. The panel formed part of the wall of an underground family tomb chamber or an above-ground tower tomb. Panels from Palmyra often included a portrait of the deceased from the waist up, with the head carved in high relief and an inscription in Palmyrene Aramaic. Large eyes and a linear treatment of the hair are characteristic of these portraits.

Originally an oasis settlement in the Syrian desert, Palmyra controlled the trade routes between the Roman Empire and lands east of the Euphrates River. Palmyra lost its prominence as a trading center by the mid-650s and was gradually abandoned. The buried city was rediscovered in 1691, and in the mid-1700s wealthy British tourists began visiting the site. By the late 1800s, Western Europeans and Americans were traveling there, some bringing back Palmyrene portraits as souvenirs. Thousands of these portraits are now in museum collections in the U.S., Western Europe, Turkey, and Russia. Systematic excavations of the site did not begin until 1902. This portrait was purchased by the RISD Museum at an art auction in 1971, but records suggest it was probably taken out of Syria much earlier.

In 2015, the terrorist group ISIS seized Palmyra, killing many people and using Palmyra’s Roman amphitheater as a site for executions. ISIS intermittently controlled the city over a period of about two years, during which they destroyed several important ancient structures. Because Palmyra is culturally important to Syrians, and because Westerners have long romanticized the site, ISIS considered its destruction particularly meaningful.

This sculpture of a man from Palmyra reflects the fact that museum collections are often shaped by histories of colonialism, and that objects were sometimes first collected in contexts we can find troubling today. At the same time, this sculpture also illustrates that in an era of global political upheaval, contemporary museums often play important roles in preserving irreplaceable cultural material.