The first published Palmyrene inscription was the altar inscription from
Rome now catalogued as
CIS II 3902 (
Rome 1), published by
Jan Gruter in 1616. A second inscription, also from Rome,
CIS II 3903 (
Rome 2), was later published by
Jacob Spon in 1683. These inscriptions, preserved in the
Capitoline Museums, were recognised as belonging to an unknown script associated with the ancient city of
Palmyra. About a decade later, following the first modern European expedition to Palmyra in 1691,
William Hallifax published an account in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1695, including a copy of an inscription from a
lintel from the entrance gate to the modern village later catalogued as
CIS II 4202. Halifax observed that the unfamiliar script frequently appeared beneath
Greek inscriptions and likely represented the same text in the local language. Shortly afterward,
Edward Bernard and
Thomas Smith published a collection of Palmyrene inscriptions in 1698, including what later became known as
CIS II 3944,
CIS II 4214, and
CIS II 3943. However, all these copies were inaccurate, making decipherment challenging. The decisive breakthrough occurred after the visit of
Robert Wood and
James Dawkins to Palmyra in 1751. Their illustrated work
The Ruins of Palmyra (1753) provided more accurate copies of numerous inscriptions, including the important Greek–Palmyrene bilingual inscription which became known as
CIS II 3940. Using this material together with the previously published inscriptions (
CIS II 3902,
3903,
4202,
3944,
4214, and
3943), the French scholar
Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and the English antiquarian
John Swinton independently deciphered the script in 1754. Barthélemy’s method relied on comparing the Greek and Palmyrene texts of the bilingual inscriptions. By identifying repeated
proper names and chronological formulas in inscriptions such as
CIS II 3940, he was able to assign phonetic values to the Palmyrene letters and reconstruct the alphabet. Within a short time he produced a working reading of the inscriptions and demonstrated that the language was a dialect of
Aramaic. The decipherment of Palmyrene thus became the first successful decipherment of a previously "dead" ancient script in modern scholarship. ==Corpora==