Palmyra sealed its dead behind squares of limestone. Each slab closed one burial niche in a tower tomb, and each carries one person cut in shallow relief — frontal, shoulders flat to the plane, eyes level with yours. The name and lineage go beside the shoulder in Palmyrene Aramaic, not underneath as a caption.

Roughly four thousand survive, the largest portrait corpus in the Roman world outside Rome. The chalky white they show now is loss, not intent: red ochre, Egyptian blue and gilding were painted across dress and jewellery. This system keeps the stone bare and lets the colour return only where it once sat.