Ca. 1st to mid-2nd century AD. A beautiful limestone bust of a young man, likely to be a fragment of a larger banqueting relief from the desert city of Palmyra. The subject depicted is a youthful beardless man with almond-shaped eyes and a small, down-turned mouth. The hair brushed forward in a series of locks. He wears a sleeved tunic with braided edges and groups of comb-pattern bars at the joined seams; over this, a chlamys is secured on the right shoulder by a rosette-shaped brooch, and he is holding in his left hand a sceptre.The wreath shown across the head is typically associated with priests, which were a common subject and form 10 per cent of Palmyrene funerary representations in total. Palmyrene priesthood was passed on within families to male members, sometimes from father to sons and sometimes from uncle to nephews. Furthermore, it is now clear that priesthood was not a profession that was necessarily held for a lifetime but rather a position and a status symbol, which carried great significance in Palmyrene society and was restricted to the elite of the city. To find out more about the representation of priests in Palmyrene funerary sculpture, see Raja, R. (2017). ‘“You can leave your hat on”. Priestly representations from Palmyra: Between visual genre, religious importance and social status’, in Richard Gordon, Georgia Petridou and Jörg Rüpke (eds), Beyond Priesthood: Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Roman Empire (Berlin: De Gruyter), pp. 417–442. Size: L:With stand: 205mm / W:99mm ; 1.2kgProvenance: Private UK collection; From an old London collection formed in the 1980s.