Dura-Europos

Google photos album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/fzTwjXCuCv31dVhr7

The objects in this gallery are from Dura-Europos, a peripheral garrison fort/city in what is now eastern Syria. After a intense period of Roman construction and occupation starting c. 150 CE, the Persians sacked the city in 253 CE and the city was abandoned. As a consequence, the city was well-preserved, especially the frescos of the synagogue (once in Damascus and still now, we hope). Yale participated in the excavations in the 1930s and brought many objects back to New Haven, including the Christian frescos.

Initial interest in the site was sparked by “a monograph seductively called Oriental Forerunners of Byzantine Painting,” (link). By contrast to such works, recent scholarly opinion has turned against a) stylistic interpretations of art and b) narratives of decline in late antiquity (e.g. Elsner 2018: 16-7).

Overall, though, what I find most striking about this art is a) how different it is from standard contemporary imperial art and b) how it does foreshadow major cultural and stylistic shifts in late antiquity throughout the empire.

Interests and Concerns

The art of Dura-Europos is strikingly different in its interests and concerns from the kind of canonical elite art you can see from one end of the empire to the other. The Yale gallery displays almost exclusively art showing gods and humans interacting with gods, but other than Heracles these gods are none of the canonical Greco-Roman deities. Instead they’re marginal Greek gods (Nemesis), local Palymerene gods (often syncretic), or novel pan-empire deities (Mithras, Jesus, the Jewish god). Yale displays mosaics of Dionysus and the Muses from contemporary Jordan in the same room, but the absence of the standard pagan iconography is pretty striking.

Not all of this material will win out in the end, but certainly the marginal Christian sect here will move to the imperial center within a century.

The other recurring subject matter is the Roman military, often combined with the gods: either soldiers worshipping the gods (like painting of Julius Terentius below), or the god themselves represented in the guise of a Roman soldier, like this painting of Iarhibol.

The overlap between gods and the military also points to late antique uses of Roman military imagery in Christian contexts, e.g. the 6th century icon of the Virgin and Child flanked by military saints “dressed in the elaborate ceremonial garb of the imperial guard” (link).

The syncretic mix of the Roman military with local gods is also exemplary of a general trend toward syncretism in the gallery. Many of the inscriptions are bilingual, and even the monolingual inscriptions blur linguistic boundaries, e.g. the Latin title actuarius written in the Greek alphabet.

Style

Subjectively I would call most of this art pretty crude and bad. Less subjectively, there are many features that will become more common in late antiquity. Elsner points to the adlocutio relief on the Arch of Constantine for its “intimations of late antique style, including centralizing symmetry, the frontality of the emperor, the stacking of figures, and the elimination of illusionism in depicting space” (Elsner 2018: 16). The wall painting of Julius Terentius performing a sacrifice contains many of these features: the frontality of Julius himself, the stacking of his men behind him, the centralizing symmetry of gods on left and men on right, and in general the elimination of illusionism. One of the Mithraeum reliefs also has stacking. The adlocutio relief is more extreme in all these features, but the fresco of Julian is a glimpse of what is to come.

Religion

Elsner emphasizes the differences between the religious cults at Dura-Europos, but I would place more stress on the similarities. Many of the representations of religious behavior include the burning of incense at a sacrifice (Julius, Nemesis) and procession (Julius, Christian women).

Christianity

Dura-Europos is perhaps best known for having extremely early art associated with Christianity. In this gallery there are:

• a shepherd with his flock holding one sheep, identified as Jesus as the Good Shepherd and his worshippers as the flock. The artwork is framed within the borders of a drawn arch, a bit like the Mithraeum.
• A large fresco fragment:

• above two miracles, the healing of the paralytic and Jesus & Peter walking on water. Presumably there were other miracles as well.
• below women dressed in white and walking with torches toward a large white tent (?)

The material is suggestive but baffling, especially the women. Like the Mithraeum, the objects show events in the life of a single legendary figure from the past and imply some kind of link between that individual and the community gathered in the building in Dura.

Conclusion

Dura-Europos must have been less marginal than it appears, or at least the traditions it represents. What we have here is a story of syncretism between pan-imperial Roman martial culture and local traditions. After the military conflicts of the 3rd century, emperors like Diocletian and Galerius, from marginal backgrounds but who rose through the military, will bring the culture and world of the militarized periphery to the center.