The script is a distinctive development of the Aramaic alphabet, used at Palmyra and, so far as the evidence goes, almost nowhere else except by Palmyrenes themselves. It exists in a formal monumental version cut into stone and a more rapid cursive form, and it appears on temple dedications, on the carved funerary portraits that sealed burial niches, and on the small tokens used to admit holders to religious banquets.
Because Palmyra was a trading city inside the Roman world, a large proportion of its inscriptions are bilingual, giving the same text in Palmyrene and in Greek, and occasionally in Latin as well. Those parallel texts are what make the corpus so useful: they supply not just a key to the script but a running commentary on how the city presented itself in two languages at once, and the versions are not always identical in what they claim. Palmyrene inscriptions also turn up a long way from Syria, wherever Palmyrenes settled, traded or served in the Roman army, including Dura Europos on the Euphrates, Rome itself, North Africa and the northern frontier of Britain.
One of the best known was cut near Hadrian's Wall by a Palmyrene commemorating his British wife, a freedwoman he had married, with the memorial given in Latin and then again in his own language and script. It is about as compact an illustration of the empire's reach, and of what people carried with them across it, as the epigraphic record offers.