Palmyran funerary sculpture is the largest corpus of portrait sculpture in the Roman world outside Rome, which makes this group of material extremely significant both in relation to issues of identity in the Roman provinces, as well as in comparison to core-Roman portraiture studies. Both are facts which have been completely ignored in scholarship until now. There are more than 1500 pieces scattered through various museums and private collections across the world. These have never been collected, catalogued and treated as a single corpus. The aims of this project are therefore threefold: to compile a corpus of all known Palmyrene funerary portraits, to digitalise the H. Ingholt-archive and to produce text volumes to accompany the corpus, as well as a number of publications on various aspects of Palmyrene sculpture. The corpus and the archive will be made available online. To achieve these goals effectively, this project must be undertaken by a group of researchers at various stages in their careers.
