Dura Europos

How Angels Found their Wings

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 …

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When you tell your daughters that you collect images of Jonah and they send you one from a Basilica

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 …

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“Dura Europos Fanboy”

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.  

Destroying Dura Europos

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 …

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Dura Europos and Its Art

 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. 

Yale’s Religious Treasures

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). …

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More on Dura Europos Looting

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 …

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Dura Europos Looting

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 …

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Edge of Empires at Dura Europos

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 …

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Links and the Persistance of Memories

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 …

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Dura Europos and Me

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 …

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Long Term v. Short Term

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 …

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