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Zenobia, Empress of the Desert Frontier: Statecraft, Logistics, and the Making of a Near Eastern Empire
Paperback
Series: Women in Wars
General Military HistoryMilitary Strategy
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Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Dec 5 2025
Pages: 76
Weight: 0.25
Height: 0.16 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In the middle of Rome's third-century meltdown-a half-century of assassinated emperors, plagues, broken frontiers, and collapsing economies-one ruler in the East achieved what Rome could not: stability, prosperity, and military victory. Her name was Zenobia of Palmyra.
Drawing on epigraphic, archaeological, and numismatic evidence, Zenobia, Empress of the Desert Frontier reconceptualizes Zenobia not as a romantic warrior queen or a seductive usurper, but as one of antiquity's most competent state-builders. Historian Alice Cavendish-Spencer reveals:
How Zenobia inherited a collapsing frontier-and turned it into a functional empire
How Palmyra's caravan economy, tax system, and hydraulic infrastructure became an imperial war machine
Why Zenobia's annexation of Egypt was a geopolitical masterstroke, not a rebellion
How religious politics (Christian, Jewish, Arab, and pagan) shaped Palmyra's cohesion
Why her downfall at the hands of Aurelian was a contest of logistics-not destiny
How later writers recast her as a second Cleopatra to contain the threat of her success
This book reframes Zenobia as a ruler who temporarily solved the crisis Rome could not, revealing her as a political architect, strategist, and economic reformer whose vision briefly reshaped the ancient Near East.
For readers of Roman history, feminist historiography, and military-economic strategy, this is a definitive re-examination of one of antiquity's most important-and most misunderstood-leaders.
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