Diversity in the Year 200: Dura Europos (c. 240), with Dr. Lisa Brody [Yale University Art Gallery]
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One of the great treasures of the Yale Art Gallery is the Dura-Europos Exhibition. Dura-Europos, located in modern day Syria, is one of the great archeological sites with extraordinary treasures, including one of the first Christian house churches.
To tell us more about the Dura-Europos, we're very fortunate to have Dr. Lisa Brody, Associate Curator of Ancient Art here at Yale. >> Welcome. >> Thank you. Can you tell us some more about the connection between Yale and the Dura-Europos? >> Of course. So this collection is here at Yale because in the 1920s and 30s, Yale and the French collaborated on a ten-year campaign, excavating at this site. And through the partage agreement from that campaign, Yale ended up with a share of half of all of the finds discovered. So we have in the gallery's collection currently about 12,000 artifacts. We also have the excavation archives from those campaigns, photographs from the excavation, drawings, plans, diagrams, field notebooks. So what that does is to allow us to study the collection, and the objects in it, in context, in an archaeological and historical way, and really understand what was going on in the city and what life was like in the city. Because of Dura's location in Syria in the desert, it's right on the banks of the Euphrates River, the preservation at the site is particularly extraordinary. So we got, for example, things like bone and basketry and wood, wall paintings, papyrus. It gives us a very rich body of material with which we can learn more about the life in this ancient city. And what it gives us in return, an understanding of a very multicultural environment, where there were soldiers and civilians, Greeks, Romans, Palmyrans, and Jews, Christians, and Pagan worshipers, all living together and working and interacting in the city in the early third century AD. >> Well, this is fascinating that we have examples of Jewish, Pagan, and Christian worship. Can we go and have a look at what the collection holds? >> Absolutely.
>> So, it's an extraordinary story that Pagans, Jews and Christians lived along side of one another in Dura. Can you say something about what we find here at Yale? >> Of course. So there were several major discoveries of religious buildings in the Yale French excavations. One was the synagogue. It was originally a house, a domestic building, but a very large one that was converted into a synagogue.
And when the finds from the excavation were divided between Yale and the French, the wall paintings from the assembly room of the synagogue went to Damascus. So what Yale got from that discovery were several of the, more than is here, dozens of ceiling tiles. These are terracotta-painted tiles that were set into wooden coffers in the ceiling.
And we have photographs from the Damascus installation, which show the reconstruction of the ceiling in the room. This was, when compared to several of the other religious buildings on this sight, It's clear that the synagogue is, by far the most elaborate, largest of the meeting places. And i tells us that the Jewish community was a particularly large and significant and important one. At the same time, or when the finds were divided because the French team got the wall paintings from the synagogue, Yale received the wall paintings from two other religious buildings. Also extremely important, but just overall smaller. So we have the wall paintings from the Mithraeum, which is a shrine to the god Mithras. Again, this was a house originally that was converted into a temple, basically a shine. Mithras and the worship of Mithras is something that's very enigmatic to scholars. He seems to have been a god that was particularly important to soldiers and this is why we find him at Dura, which was a Roman garrison. All around the Roman Empire, where soldiers were, we find shrines to Mithras. It was a mystery cult and it was worship by initiation only, so we know very little about their occult rituals and what went on. What is interesting at Dura-Europos, where we can compare this Pagan shrine to, as we'll look in a minute, to the house church and also the synagogue, there are certain similarities in the arrangement of the rooms and the architectural design and the wall paintings, the style of the wall paintings. Both the baptistery in the house church and the Mithraeum had vaulted ceilings that were blue with gold stars. So there is a link, there is a connection among these very different religious groups.
>> So another treasure from Dura is the Christian house church, and we see here these extraordinary wall paintings. Tell us, what has survived and what do we know about that house church? >> So, like the Synagogue in the Mithraeum, this was originally a domestic building that was converted into a meeting place for the Christian community.
The one room of the building was created as a baptistery. So there was a baptismal font, and then paintings on the walls, so all of these paintings that you see here are from the baptistery. The layout of the room was, again, very similar to the Mithraeum, a long rectangular room with a vaulted ceiling and a niche at one end where the baptismal font was above the baptismal font. And you can see it in the excavation photographs, with this painting of Christ as the Good Shepherd. And then the other paintings going down the walls that you would see as you approach the baptismal font, showing scenes from the miracles from the life of Christ, walking on water, and healing of the paralytic, David and Goliath. This small painting has received a lot of attention recently. It had traditionally been identified as the Samaritan woman at the well, and there's been a new interpretation suggested that it's instead representing an annunciation scene with the Virgin Mary at a well. And it's interesting to think about studying the iconography of these images, I think because it's in Syria, it's perhaps not and very early, so perhaps not part of what we now think of as the canonical Christian tradition associated with text. That there are maybe some more, I think flexibility in the images, that they had multiple meanings or multiple possible interpretations.
These paintings from the moment they were excavated, they were of course recognized as being extremely significant in the history of early Christianity, being from one of the earliest discovered house churches and among the very earliest images of Christ and scenes of Christian iconography. So they've received a great deal of conservation attention over the years. They were in poor condition even when discovered, due to salts in the plaster of the walls.
They received a lot of early treatment using materials in the 20s, 30s, and 40s that we now know are not, sort of archival. And wouldn't be used by conservators today, like polyvinyl acetate and cellulose nitrate, which have actually caused the surface of the paintings to deteriorate even more, than they would have originally, very sadly. So they've received some rather drastic conservation treatment in recent years, to try to restore them to at least how they looked when they were first discovered. So that they could be put on view and people could come to see them and appreciate them.
>> Do we have any sense of how large that Christian community was? Does the survival give us any notion of how many? Was it a small community or not, or do we simply not know? >> Well, I think it's possibly difficult to judge that, because we don't have house churches from other sites at this time. So to compare it, for example, to a Christian community elsewhere would be difficult. But for at Dura-Europos, if you look at the size of the house church compared to the size of the synagogue, it's much smaller. And I think it's quite clear that the Jewish community was much more important, much larger community, probably much more public. The fact that churches at this time were house churches, where it's a domestic building that is not changed on the outside, so it still looks like all the other houses in the city. And the community could be even meet in secret if they needed to at a time where Christians were often still prosecuted.
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FullscreenDiversity in the Year 200: Dura Europos (c. 240), with Dr. Lisa Brody [Yale University Art Gallery]
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