How Angels Found their Wings | History Today: The angels of the Bible were not winged. (The winged Cherubim and Seraphim are figures derived from the Near Eastern tradition of winged zoomorphic guardian figures and are not angels since they perform none of the angelic functions.) In fact, in the Old Testament angels are often …
Pretty cool kids… It’s always been my conjecture that the Dura Europos Baptistry had images of Jonah present as a representation of the 3-day Resurrection event in a Jewish/Chritian context. There were depictions of Adam and Eve in the Baptistry area (along with Jesus as the Good Shepherd as well as other common representations from …
My time with the incredible finds from Dura Europos at the Yale University Art Gallery are some of my fondest memories… Walking alongside the shelves, one can step from intricate African sculptures to ancient Greek vases to Chinese porcelain to a collection of Picasso ceramics. Opposite the entrance and behind glass display cases are a …
Show and Tell: Handling Art at the Wurtele Center Read More »
Merianna just called me a “Dura Europos Fanboy” as she walked past me reading an article in this morning’s NY Times by Prof. Michael Peppard about Dura Europos while drinking coffee from my Dura Europos mug.
A Greek settlement on the Euphrates not far from Syria’s border with Iraq, Dura-Europos later became one of Rome’s easternmost outposts. It housed the world’s oldest known Christian church, a beautifully decorated synagogue, and many other temples and Roman-era buildings. Satellite imagery shows a cratered landscape inside the city’s mud-brick walls, evidence of widespread destruction by …
Tragic. “There is a complete and massive change to this site,” Wolfinbarger says, comparing the pre-war images to those collected in 2014 of the renowned archaeological treasure. British soldiers discovered Dura Europus in the 1920s. They hit on the wall of the ancient city while digging a trench during World War I. Excavation revealed a …
More sadness regarding ISIS and looting at Dura Europos in Syria… “I am fearful that there will be mass looting as in Syria,” said Katharyn Hanson, a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Cultural Heritage Centre and a specialist in Mesopotamian archaeology, who is visiting Erbil. She says that Nineveh, Nimrud and other cities of …
Just received my 1938 first edition copy of M. Rostovtzeff’s Dura Europos And Its Art today. I’ve now been able to secure every first edition of books about Dura (outside of the Final Reports, which I’m working on). Good day.
This is terrible… The Islamic State group released a video on Thursday showing militants using sledgehammers to smash ancient artifacts in Iraq’s northern city of Mosul, describing them as idols that must be removed, according to the Associated Press. The destructions are part of a campaign by Islamic State, who have destroyed a number of …
Why We Should Care About Archaeological Destruction Read More »
My masters degree in religion is from Yale, and it’s great to see the religious treasures there highlighted. However, I can’t believe the Dura Europos baptistry (from the earliest house church we’ve recovered and one of the first depictions of Jesus we have) didn’t make the list (the Mithraeum did, though… which is also spectacular). …
The first image is the site of Dura Europos from June 28 2012 and the second image is from April 2 2014 (notice how many looting holes there are now): Dura Europos is located right near the border of Syria and Iraq on the Euphrates and is an archaeological record of the strife this …
The “holes” in the inset picture are looting holes from the area near the main agora at Dura Europos. Sadly, we haven’t properly excavated much of that area. This literally breaks my heart given that we’ve properly excavated such a small amount of Dura Europos and we’ve learned so much about Judaism, early Christianity, and …
Finally got my copy of Edge of Empires: Pagans, Jews, and Christians at Roman Dura-Europos. It’s a fascinating and beautiful book (I actually took some of the photos in there during my time at Yale University Art Gallery when I worked on digitizing our amazing Dura Europos collection). I could literally go on and on …
Doc Searls riffing off of Dave Winer’s post about the history of podcasts here… Doc Searls Weblog · Why durable links matter: “We can find these historic details because links have at least a provisional permanence to them. They are, literally, paths to locations. Thanks to those, we can document the history we make, and learn from …
Thanks to Evernote, I’ve been able to digitize most of the notebooks I’ve written on Dura Europos. I know take digital notes on the small city, but thumbing back through my Moleskine notebooks full of clippings and hand written notes makes me feel a bit like Indiana Jones with his father’s collected notebooks on the …
As much as I’m drawn to Dura Europos, the interesting convergence of narrative interpretation, post-colonial criticism and historical authenticities surrounding the study of 7th and 6th century Judah as played out in the Deuteronomistic “History” of Joshua thru II Kings (and Jeremiah and parts of Hosea, Genesis, etc) is too fascinating to avoid. I really …
Art of Dura-Europos by Ann Louise Perkins (Used, New, Out-of-Print) – Alibris want
https://www.alibris.com/search/books/qwork/430087/used/Art%20of%20Dura-Europos want
Dura Synagogue and Jewish/Christian Liturgy
thomaswhitley: Welcome guest blogger, Sam Harrelson. I recently shared this article with him about a scholarly journal that is going to begin requiring its authors to post a summary of their research to the online encyclopdia, Wikipedia, an interesting idea, indeed. I then shared with him this response by Jim West, who vehemently disagrees with …