Religious integration during the Roman era: the Palmyrene goddess Allat as a model.

Abstract

The goddess Allat is considered one of the prominent goddesses in the city of Palmyra, whose worship spread in the city in the late Hellenistic period, where some images were found that embody her as a local character in traditional dress on a throne of lions. However, starting from the middle of the second century AD, the inscriptions discovered in the city of Palmyra began to link the name of the goddess Allat to the Greek goddess Athena under the influence of the new religious traditions that the Palmyrene warriors who joined the Roman army helped to transfer to the city and was not accompanied by any noticeable pictorial changes in the way the goddess was embodied in religious sculptures. However, starting from the third century AD, some pictorial characteristics of the Greek goddess began to appear in sculptures of the goddess Athena-Allat, while maintaining the local character of the style of depicting the goddess, which suggests that there were attempts to give a local character to the imported goddess in order to create religious acceptance for her among the Palmyrene believers who stick to the original traditions of their religion.