For almost 300 years wealthy Palmyrenes commemorated their deceased with portraits set up in elaborate family tombs. Now we can use this wealth of information to reconstruct the historical trajectories of the city's elite. We present an extensive analysis of over 3500 funerary portraits and other funerary data collected in the Palmyra Portrait Project and contrasted with other sources of data on the city's wealth and status as well as the historical timeline of the region. We examine whether the trends in portrait production can serve as a proxy for i) demographic changes in the city population, ii) social transitions or iii) economic phenomena.

The results of the analysis demonstrate that broad historical trends in the portraits concur with our understanding of Palmyrene history, but the more detailed patterns highlight the impact of particular historical events over other ones. In general, the funerary data reflects the continuously changing socio-economic circumstances of the Palmyrene elite more closely than its demographic history.

Although the outline of Palmyra's history is known thanks to written sources, large archaeological datasets can provide a backdrop to historical events by evaluating their impact on the communities involved. Thus combining historical and archaeological data enables us to gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the social and economic transitions that past societies underwent over century-long time scales.

近 300 年来，富有的帕尔米勒人在精心制作的家庭墓葬中设立肖像来纪念他们的死者。现在我们可以利用这些丰富的信息来重建城市精英的历史轨迹。我们对巴尔米拉肖像项目中收集的 3500 多幅丧葬肖像和其他丧葬数据进行了广泛分析，并与有关该城市财富和地位以及该地区历史时间线的其他数据来源进行了对比。我们检查肖像制作的趋势是否可以作为 i) 城市人口的人口变化，ii) 社会转型或 iii) 经济现象的代理。

分析结果表明，肖像中的广泛历史趋势与我们对巴尔米勒历史的理解一致，但更详细的模式突出了特定历史事件对其他历史事件的影响。总的来说，葬礼数据比其人口历史更密切地反映了巴尔米勒精英不断变化的社会经济环境。

虽然帕尔米拉的历史大纲因书面资料而为人所知，但大型考古数据集可以通过评估历史事件对相关社区的影响来提供历史事件的背景。因此，结合历史和考古数据使我们能够更深入、更细致地了解过去社会在长达一个世纪的时间尺度上所经历的社会和经济转型。