Around 165 A.D., Christians, Jews and pagans lived and worshiped side by side in a cosmopolitan city called Dura-Europos by the Euphrates River on the frontier of the Roman Empire.
Located in modern-day Syria, it housed a Roman military garrison of more than 10,000 soldiers and civilians whose lives reflected the hopes and dangers of those uncertain times.
A couple exchanged an engagement ring engraved with the word “Omonoia,” or “concord.” Soldiers dallied in a brothel adorned with a statue of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. A man named Tiro sold a 28-year-old female slave Math-Sin for 700 denari, worth about two years of unskilled labor.
Then sacked by invading Sasanians and abandoned in 256, the city lay covered by earth and lost for 16 centuries.
Through serendipity and determined archaeology, the city has come alive again through a remarkable exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College.
Organized by the McMullen and Yale University Art Gallery, “Dura-Europos: Crossroads of Antiquity” opens a thrilling window into a multicultural society through fascinating artifacts of great beauty and historical significance.
For Lisa R. Brody, who helped organize the exhibit, the 75 artifacts on display “provide glimpses into the lives of the people” who lived in Dura-Europos so long ago.
An associate curator of ancient art at Yale University Archives, she said thousands of objects recovered from the site and resulting research provide a multidimensional picture of the physical and spiritual lives of the city’s residents.
Visitors can stand before reconstructions of sacred spaces from the city where early Christians baptized their children, Jews gathered and adherents of mystery cults participated in forgotten rituals.
They can gaze upon some of the earliest painted images of Christ performing miracles, a statue of Hercules battling a lion, a Roman’s red wooden shield or an invader’s flattened iron helmet.
The exhibit includes the earliest known example of a baptistry, or baptisimal pool, along with 14 painted plaster scenes of Christian narratives such as Christ healing a paralytic or walking on water.
The exhibit includes four copies of wall paintings from the synagogue, one containing symbols of uncertain meaning.
Visitors can see a Mithraeum, a shrine for the mystery cult known as Mithraism, often practiced by Roman soldiers that featured secret rituals such as the killing of a bull.
Assistant Professor Gail L. Hoffman, who teaches classics and fine arts at BC and helped organize the show, predicted visitors would be intrigued by the accidental discovery of the city in 1920 by British soldiers digging a gun emplacement and subsequent excavations by archaeologists from Yale University, France and Syria.
“The exhibition explores how the ancient town of Dura-Europos, while it was destroyed by and then unearthed as a result of the clash of empires, contains within its walls a city where cultures and languages, the arts and even settings of religious worship mixed and intermingled,” she said.
Far more than a collection of old objects, “Crossroads” brings alive the people of Dura-Europos by showing where they prayed, what they wore, how they fought and even how they divorced.
A document from 254 A.D. recovered from the site records the divorce decree between a soldier, Julius Antiochus, and Aurella Amimma, who is illiterate, in which they give each other permission to remarry and relinquish future claims against one another.
Life in Dura-Europos was as uncertain in 165 A.D. as it is today.
The city was founded around 300 B.C. by Macedonian Greek soldiers, prospered from trade on nearby caravan routes and vanished from sight after six centuries.
When the end came in 256, Sasanian and Roman soldiers fought to the death in underground tunnels, trying to sabotage and shore up, respectively, the fortress walls even to the point of using a kind of chemical warfare that presaged brutalities to come.
McMullen Museum Director Nancy Netzer compared the exhibit to a snapshot of a polyglot, a multicultural society that appeared to thrive in the face of threats from Sasanians, the precursors of the Persian empire.
She observed that some of the exhibit’s most important artifacts were inadvertently preserved when Roman soldiers buried several city blocks within an earthen embankment constructed to shore up the city’s western wall.
“The architectural record is so rich for this site...and tells us something about how different ethnic societies existed in the ancient world. Jews, Christians and pagans worshiped in buildings alongside each other. There’s no evidence of strife except that which came from outside,” she said.
For her own research, Netzer examined arms and military trappings worn by some of the invading Sasanians, which appear to have come all the way from England, suggesting trade routes and other ties that require further exploration.
Netzer said she was especially struck by architectural and decorative similarities in the spaces where Christians, Jews and pagans worshiped.
“The similarities provoke questions about relationships among different religious group in a very wealthy and strategic outpost of the Roman empire,” she said. “It’s a crossroads in many ways.”
“Dura-Europos: Crossroads of Antiquity”
Through June 5
McMullen Museum of Art
Boston College
Admission: Free
Call: 617-552-8587
www.bc.edu/artmuseum
Read more: Dura-Europos: A buried city unearthed - Dover, MA - Dover-Sherborn Press http://www.wickedlocal.com/dover/archive/x1705412184/Dura-Europos-A-buried-city-unearthed#ixzz1FSYs33Xm
