Secrets revealed

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Published: April 2011

In 1920, British soldiers bivouacking on a bluff alongside the Euphrates River in what is now eastern Syria unearthed a wall decorated with frescoes. Subsequent excavators from Yale University and the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belle-Lettres revealed it to be part of Dura-Europos, a long-lost, multicultural city established by Macedonians in about 300 B.C. The settlement was seized by Parthian soldiers (from northern Iran) in the late second century B.C., then by the Romans in 165 A.D. It became a major garrison and trading post—148 acres at its peak—only to be abandoned after a successful siege by Sasanians (from southern Iran) in 256. For some 1,500 years the city lay largely preserved by a blanket of stone and sand.

Finds at the site include the earliest surviving Christian house church, the first extant synagogue, pagan temples, and more than 12,000 artifacts, including 60 percent of surviving Roman military archives. Of this trove, 75 items—frescoes, sculptures, and articles of daily life from Yale’s Dura-Europos collection—are on display for the first time in some 30 years, at the McMullen Museum through June 5, 2011. The exhibition is co-curated by Lisa Brody of the Yale Art Gallery and Gail Hoffman, a classics professor at Boston College.


<strong>The armorer’s art</strong><br />This third-century curved Roman shield, or scutum, is the sole specimen of its type ever found—it was previously known only through literature. Made of wood and rawhide and decorated with Roman military iconography, the 41-inch-tall shield was discovered in the collapsed remains of a tower built into the city’s western wall. The tower was adjacent to an underground tunnel dug by besieging Sasanians; when the Sasanians caused the tunnel to collapse so did the wall above. The shield, which archeologists believe was awaiting repairs, was buried and thus protected from the elements.


<strong>Wrought iron</strong><br />This second-century helmet was found in a tunnel dug by invading Sasanians beneath the city’s outer wall and was likely worn by a soldier trapped in the tunnel’s collapse. Measuring 12 x 10 inches and made of iron (now heavily corroded), it represents a midpoint in ancient helmet design. Earlier Roman helmets, for instance, were custom made of brass, as a single piece. The Sasanians mass-produced their helmets in two pieces, joined by a bar of iron. The point on top would have held a decorative plume.


<strong>Torchbearers</strong><br />Excavated from the city’s third-century Christian house, which is, by some hundreds of years, the earliest preserved Christian church, this painting is one of a dozen or so narrative friezes adorning the Baptistery. The 55 x 37–inch segment of fresco shows a line of women carrying torches and vessels. Their meaning is debated. Scholars long believed the women were on their way to anoint the crucified body of Christ, suggesting a theme of rebirth; current thinking is that they are brides, illustrating Eastern Christianity’s correlation of baptism with marriage.


<strong>The well in the wilderness (Numbers 21: 16–20)</strong><br />The quantity and complexity of artwork in the third-century synagogue "defied a conventional understanding" among early 20th-century archaeologists, who thought that illustrations of humans in such a setting would have been barred by the Second Commandment, says classics professor Gail Hoffman. This reproduction, one of the synagogue’s numerous narrative panels, was executed on site and at full scale (73 x 105 inches) by Yale artist Herbert J. Gute in 1934-35. The original panels are in the National Museum in Damascus, Syria, and their images have not been seen in print since the 1950s.


<strong>Public sacrifice</strong><br />Julius Terentius, the Roman tribune of the 20th Palmyrene cohort, commissioned this 42 x 65–inch frieze depicting himself (center) burning incense. It was found in the Temple of the Palmyrene Gods, built by Parthians in the beginning of the first century. Terentius is backed by his men; to his right is the cohort’s standard and beyond that are the city’s fortunae and three haloed deities. The soldiers are labeled in Latin and the fortunae in Greek. The deities are not labeled—perhaps as a gesture of diplomacy in Dura-Europos’s diverse community.


<strong>Ancient wordplay</strong><br />This foursquare acrostic, painted on a first-century plaster wall in the pagan Temple of Azzanathkona, is both a palindrome and a boustrophedon. The Latin words construct a sentence of unknown importance: "The sower Arepo holds the wheels by means of his toil." It may be graffiti created by idle soldiers. The earliest-known rendering of this composition was found in the ruins of Pompeii, which was buried in 79 A.D.

This feature was posted on Monday, April 25, 2011 and is filed under Slideshows.
Photographs by: Gary Wayne Gilbert


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