[2] The last surviving inscription dates to 274 CE, two years after Palmyra was sacked by Roman Emperor Aurelian, ending the Palmyrene Empire.

The Palmyrene alphabet was derived from cursive versions of the Aramaic alphabet and shares many of its characteristics:[3][4] Palmyrene was normally written without spaces or punctuation between words and sentences (scriptio continua style).

[4] Palmyrene used a non-decimal system which built up numbers using combinations of their symbols for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, and 20.

[6] The Palmyrene alphabet was deciphered in 1754, literally overnight, by Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy using these new, accurate copies of bilingual inscriptions.

Palmyrene was added to the Unicode Standard in June, 2014 with the release of version 7.0.