Zenobia between Reality and Legend (BAR International)

In the mid 3rd century AD Zenobia, the Queen of Palmyra, seized the city from the Romans and established an Arabian empire that stretched from the Bosphorus to the Euphrates. Yet after only a few years it was brutally crushed by the Romans, culminating in Zenobia's suicide in AD 273, aged only 33, to escape being paraded through the streets of Rome. This unusual study, a mix of fiction and `fact', tells the story through Zenobia's own words which are reconstructed from contemporary Arabian and Roman sources as well as archaeological and artefactual evidence. This account of her life, presented as Zenobia's last words while she starved herself to death, are interspersed with explanatory sections that discuss the sources, the cultures, relations between the Severan emperors and the Arabs, artwork, the legends that grew up around Zenobia and her legacy.