Rationale for a review article
It was more than 100 years ago, in March 1920,Footnote 1 that British troops camping in the ruins of some unknown ancient fort on the Euphrates, named Al-Salihiyah in Arabic, during the skirmishing that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War, dug a trench and excavated some astonishing wall paintings. The officers in charge, along with the Civil Commissioner, managed to call in an American archaeologist who happened to be in Syria at the end of April, James Henry Breasted, first director of the Oriental Institute in Chicago (founded the previous year, 1919). Breasted visited in May, in dangerous conditions and with the British about to withdraw. He stayed only a day, managing to clear and take photographs of the murals that depict the sacrifices of Conon and Julius Terentius in what later became known as the Temple of Bel or the Temple of the Palmyrene Gods.
That work – published as a book in 1924 – was to lead to a remarkable excavation of what was soon recognized as the ancient city of Dura Europos. The excavation was conducted first by French archaeologists, who took over the League of Nations Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, and later by Americans from Yale University.Footnote 2 It is hard to overestimate the scholarly significance of this series of digs and their publications in the ’20s and ’30s for: the history of the borderlands between the Roman Empire and that of the Parthians/Sasanians; the history of cultural relations in the Late Ancient Near East; understanding the deployment of the Roman military in the Syrian steppe; the history of the visual cultures of Syria; the understanding of Early Christian and Ancient Jewish art; and the archaeology of the cities and fortresses in the later Empire. Indeed, in the judgment of Fergus Millar, one of the greatest recent students of the Roman Near East, “the mass of evidence” excavated from Dura, though “still far from fully digested,” has “from the perspective of the Roman Empire” given Dura “almost too great an importance.”Footnote 3
The centenary of this discovery, in the year that the COVID-19 pandemic raged, was hardly noted. But the book which is the cause, if not the excuse, for this review article was published in 2020, a work which serves as a small commemoration of the inception of a project so important in the history of Roman archaeology that it is worth revisiting. This is the 2020 publication edited by Danny Praet (P.), Ted Kaizer (K.), and Annelies Lannoy (L.), and printed by the Academia Belgica in its Scripta Minora series, a part of the Bibliotheca Cumontiana, of Franz Cumont's huge corpus of articles, reviews, and notes on Dura Europos written between 1922 and 1939. The volume is intended as a companion piece to the republication of Cumont's major archaeological monograph of his Dura excavations, Fouilles de Doura-Europos (1922–1923), first published in 1926, which remains forthcoming in the Scripta Maiora series of the Bibliotheca.Footnote 4 Like the other volumes in this monumental project of republishing Cumont's entire scholarly corpus, this book is graced by a lengthy (in this case, superb) introduction written by K.Footnote 5 It is extremely unfortunate that his parallel introduction to the Fouilles, written and intended to be read in tandem to that of the Minora volume under review here, has yet to be published, which means that we have access only to half of K.'s careful re-evaluation and historiography of the Cumontian project at the site. Since he is himself a noted expert on both the Near East and on Dura in particular, K. writes with exceptional command of the issues, especially from a historical vantage point.
I have no intention in what follows of critiquing Cumont's own arguments from over 80 years ago, nor of making a song and dance about any minor points or misprints. As a republication exercise, the Bibliotheca Cumontiana is exemplary, and its subject – the greatest scholar of ancient religion of the first half of the 20th c. – is well worth reconsideration. The important issues for readers of a periodical like JRA are what Dura became, how the dig was conducted, what we know as a result of it, and what we fail to know. It is unfortunate – given the decision to put all this material together between two covers – that Cumont's two contributions to the so-called preliminary reports on the site, published by Yale University Press, are for some reason excluded, so we cannot call the Minora complete.Footnote 6 But what we can trace in this volume (as opposed to the more settled and considered monographic thoughts of the Fouilles) is the process of thinking and publishing in response to new archaeological discoveries from a great expert of the time – in fact (as K. shows), the man who impressed on Breasted the great importance of what he had found, who translated and published Breasted's first intervention, who led the French dig from 1922 to 1924, and who was a rather hands-off co-director of the joint Yale–French excavations of 1928–37 but nevertheless reviewed the Yale preliminary reports regularly in order to disseminate their results in the Francophone world. The focus on Cumont's essays is naturally one that plays up interest in ancient religions, especially polytheism, and plays down the extraordinary finds of Christian and Jewish places of worship with decoration. These discoveries would have a great impact in the study of Early Christian art, in the new field of Jewish art in the context of the rise of the Nazi state in 1933, less than a year after the synagogue was discovered, and in the pursuit of Jewish archaeology among the Zionist settlers in British Mandate Palestine.
In his discussion, K. has had the great advantage of a series of major historiographic endeavors of the last couple of decades which have seen, in addition to the lengthy introductions of the Bibliotheca Cumontiana project, the publication of a great deal of the private correspondence between the major scholarly actors of the early Dura excavations – Breasted, Cumont, and RostovtzeffFootnote 7 – as well as a number of memoirs.Footnote 8 In certain cases – for example, the unpublished letters held in the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago – K. brings to light new material. A century on from the find, we are in a unique position to make a historiographic evaluation of its early progress. From Cumont's end, K. has done this work superbly, although we must wait for the introduction to Fouilles for the full picture. Someone still needs to give the same attention to Rostovtzeff's enterprise at Dura in the context of his other work and in relation to his many US and international collaborators.
Some problems with Dura
The excavations at Dura Europos were led by one of the greatest scholarly teams ever assembled for such purposes. Franz Valérie-Marie Cumont (1868–1947) was the most distinguished expert on the religions of Antiquity (and especially the Near East) of his era, as well as being curator of Classical Antiquities at the Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire du Cinquentanaire in Brussels from 1898 to 1912.Footnote 9 Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff (1870–1952) was perhaps the most influential ancient historian of the first half of the 20th c., and exceptional (for that or any other time) in his long and serious commitment to archaeology and material culture, having dug and published extensively on the archaeology of the Black Sea and on Pompeii. Both men were established scholars in their 50s when the opportunities of Dura beckoned, so they brought maturity of vision and experience to the dig. Despite the stringency of finances in the difficult period after the First World War, they managed to assure adequate funding and support, notably through Rostovtzeff's excellent relations with President James Rowland Angell at Yale (President 1921–37), who had brought the Russian historian and archaeologist to the university and funded the dig through the crash and recession of the early ’30s with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation,Footnote 10 with money only drying up at Angell's retirement in 1937.Footnote 11 The issue of American funding is significant since Yale's deal was to receive half the excavated materials, which would ultimately include the earliest murals ever found from a Christian church and those from the Mithraeum. That element of archaeology which is a treasure hunt for sensational finds was never entirely separable from the supply of money.Footnote 12 It must be said that the sensations came in a steady stream: the Christian building in January 1932, the synagogue in November of the same year, the Mithraeum in 1934.Footnote 13
Yet anyone who has worked on Dura is painfully aware that the problems of the dig and its interpretative publications do not match the promise offered by the distinction of its excavators. I summarize some issues here, from a modern perspective rather than one that would have been meaningful in the ’20s and ’30s – in other words, the problems of “our Dura” as opposed to the one its excavators thought they were digging up. First, as P. suggests in his brief preface to the new collection of Cumont's essays on Dura,Footnote 14 with reference to the very recent destructive activity of the so-called Islamic State at both Dura and Palmyra, the history of the excavations is wrapped up in a complex of colonial archaeology the effects and motivations of which are as difficult for us to process today, as are the extremes of post- and anti-colonialist anti-archaeology demonstrated by Isis-Daesh.
The site was discovered in a war zone, its first murals the result of the building of military rather than archaeological trenches (what a resonant word “trench” is, if one wants to stress the paranoia of ideological drives governing so much of our archaeological histories). It passed from the control of one imperial power (Britain) to another (France) under an awkward pretense of moving from colonialism to self-determination characteristic of the British and French Mandates in the Near East in the ’20s and ’30s. The site, its excavation, and its protection were entirely dependent on the presence of troops, to such an extent that Cumont dedicated his Fouilles de Doura-Europos to the French officers and soldiers who protected the ancient city and performed much of the physical labor.Footnote 15 One reason for abandoning the dig after 1937 was that it was getting too dangerous. As P. rightly notes, the second attempt at a Dura campaign by a joint Syrian–French mission (La mission Franco-Syrienne d'Europos-Doura), which began in 1986, was abandoned for the same reasons in 2011, at the onset of the Syrian civil war. This military element, equally familiar from the archaeology of Palestine both before and after the establishment of the state of Israel,Footnote 16 is the foremost in a series of colonialist assumptions – whereby civilization could be imposed by Western troops, whether ancient Roman or modern British and French – shared by the early excavators and never far from what we can now identify as reprehensible forms of Orientalism.Footnote 17
More fundamentally, the time spent at the site by its principal excavators amounts to what might be described as extraordinarily good value if one assesses academic achievement according to the ratio of scholarly production to time invested in the work. Breasted was at Dura for a day, from which he produced an article and a monograph;Footnote 18 Cumont's first season lasted ten days (in 1922) and his second mission just over a month (October 3–November 7, 1923), the direct results of which were about 200 pages of articles in the book under review (21–250) and the two volumes of Fouilles.Footnote 19 He came twice more: for a week in the spring of 1928 and to see the Mithraeum in 1934. These coincided with the only occasions when Rostovtzeff went there, making trips of 11 days in 1928 and of just over two months in the freezing cold from January to March 1934.Footnote 20 In other words, the hands-on work was almost entirely done by others – often the military, some of it led by able excavators like Robert du Mesnil du Buisson, Clark Hopkins, Frank Brown, Alfred Bellinger, and C. Bradford Welles, and some of it by apparently less competent figures like Maurice Pillet.Footnote 21 Moreover, Cumont at least had never had direct excavation experience before he took on Dura, although he had traveled extensively in the East and was an acute armchair art historian.Footnote 22 These were gentleman amateurs, occasionally out in the field alongside the young soldiers.Footnote 23
However, the greatest problem was precisely the academic expertise of the principals and their role in what Millar elegantly described as matters of “conception and interpretation. Preconception one might say.”Footnote 24 Those preconceptions were teleologies that governed the two principals’ interest in Dura and operated to formulate the conceptual frame within which the dig was conducted. They determined not only that the findings could be so swiftly published in Cumont's Fouilles and Rostovtzeff's series of Preliminary Reports, but also that these were not “in character preliminary reports at all, in the sense of formal presentations of raw data, [… but were] much closer to general narratives, on the one hand, and to discursive and wide-ranging interpretations, on the other.”Footnote 25 Again, the need to keep the interests of funders high is not irrelevant to the speed and interpretative excess of the publication project, but it could not have happened in this way unless there was a ready-made frame in which to fit the material, guaranteed by the scholarly reputations and expertise of two of the greatest intellects of their time.
I seek to unmask a little of this conceptual frame, since it is so unfamiliar to any student of modern archaeology or ancient history – indeed aspects of it are downright weird – while at the same time being profoundly rooted in the cultural and intellectual arguments of the late 19th c., during which both Cumont and Rostovtzeff received their training and reached maturity.Footnote 26 The historiographic project, although hitherto not properly attempted, is essential to any archaeological understanding of Dura because – especially since the near destruction of the site by the so-called Islamic State – any remaining excavation must begin with the archive and the preliminary reports: that archive is crucially framed, and I suspect fundamentally vitiated, by the limitations and peculiarities of the theoretical agenda which governed its assembly and the writing of field reports.Footnote 27
Some deep assumptions
Cumont
Cumont became, like Rostovtzeff, an exile in middle age. For reasons that remain somewhat obscure, his liberal politics and anti-clericalism led the Belgian Government to refuse his promotion to the Chair of the History of Religions in Ghent in 1910.Footnote 28 Cumont's father and brother were Freemasons, and it is possible, though not certain, that this was the heresy that underpinned the resistance to him ‒ potentially alongside his lifelong interest in mystery religions.Footnote 29 The family wealth meant that he did not need an income: Cumont resigned from the university and from his position in the Brussels museum and went into exile from 1912 as an independent scholar, living mainly in Rome and Paris.Footnote 30 Indeed, Rostovtzeff, in a moving letter addressed to Cumont in Sweden, written in support of “mon cher ami” when he heard of the resignation, foresees his own exile.Footnote 31
For all his own writing and the vast industry of historiography recently generated about him, the causes of Cumont's ideological drives remain opaque (at any rate to me), although their parameters are clear. He was a leading scholar in what might be thought a golden age for the study of ancient religions between the Belle Époque and the Second World War,Footnote 32 and a major mover in the great international congress on the history of religions that met every four years from 1900.Footnote 33 His religious Orientalism, dependent especially on German models of the history of religions, and a development of the approaches of such scholars as Johann Gustav Droysen (1808‒84),Footnote 34 is highly complex but involved locating the origins, significant agency, and positive force of much of Greek and Roman religious culture in influence from the East.Footnote 35 The vitality of that force lies essentially in its place in explaining Christian origins, which cannot be entirely unconnected with displacing the more traditional Jewish genealogy from the study of Early Christianity.Footnote 36 In the preface to his much reprinted and translated bestseller, Religions orientales (first published in 1906),Footnote 37 Cumont puts it this way:
We have investigated only the internal development of Roman paganism … and have considered its relation to Christianity only incidentally and by the way. … Theologians were for a long time more inclined to consider the continuity of the Jewish tradition than the causes that disturbed it; but a reaction has taken place and today they endeavour to show that the church has borrowed considerably from … the pagan mysteries. … In considering the Roman empire, the principal fact is that the Oriental religions propagated doctrines, previous to and later side by side with Christianity, that acquired with it universal authority at the decline of the ancient world.Footnote 38
The phrase “only incidentally and by the way” in relation to Christianity means the conceptual framing device for the whole project. The claim for movement away from Jewish continuity to pagan mystical inspiration in Christian origins makes the case for a vibrant, emotionally compelling paganism (i.e., the opposite of the legalistic model of Roman religion of his time, associated with the likes of Theodore Mommsen,Footnote 39 but the full passion of religious fervor).Footnote 40 Despite Cumont's own complicated personal relations with Roman Catholicism, this is very much a Catholic model of Christianity founded on pre-Christian Antique Rome wherein the Jews are necessary but not sufficient, and in key issues (like the naturally hegemonic nature of the religion) only incidental. The model, with its cocktail of Iranian, Semitic, and Hellenistic elements, is well presented in his account of Mithraism:
The basal layer of this religion, its lower and primordial stratum, is the faith of ancient Iran, from which it took its origin. Above this Mazdean substratum was deposited in Babylon a thick sediment of Semitic doctrines, and afterwards the local beliefs of Asia Minor added to it their alluvial deposits. Finally, a luxuriant vegetation of Hellenic ideas burst forth from this fertile soil and partly concealed from view its true original nature.Footnote 41
As Richard Gordon puts it succinctly: “The concealed agendum was the question of the uniqueness, and by implication, validity, of Christianity; at the same time, it was the model of that religion which provided the agreed terms of discussion.”Footnote 42 The position is not incompatible with a moderate version of the Aryanist models which became dominant in European (especially German but also French) scholarship from the late 19th c. to the first half of the 20th c.Footnote 43
Rostovtzeff
Rostovtzeff was one of the most prolific, wide-ranging, and profound ancient historians of any area of Antiquity since the modern discipline began. His ideological frame was also one of the most complex. He had exceptional command of the technical aspects of his trade (epigraphy, papyrology, the ancient languages and sources) and regularly demonstrated what is perhaps the most consistent integration of material culture (including all forms of art history and archaeology) shown by any historian of the ancient world.Footnote 44 His interests stretched across all periods from Archaic to Late Antique, and over all areas of Eurasian antiquity. Today he is most famous for his two great books on the social and economic history of Antiquity; the second, dedicated jointly to his wife and to Cumont, was published as the Second World War was raging.Footnote 45 These are extraordinary projects of narrative and analytic history, inclusive of but not dependent on material culture ‒ narratives in which the Russian bourgeois exile from the Bolshevik Revolution took on the enemy's own economic discourse to deliver a riposte to the Soviet regime. This came in the form of a hymn to the unity of the urban bourgeoisie and rural peasantry in creating enlightened imperial peace, and a lament for the weakness of the middle class, “the foundation of the Empire” unable to support the fabric of a world state.Footnote 46 While the terminology of proto-capitalism in both books is in concord with their author's exilic American context, in many ways both read like a nostalgic celebration of an idealistic fantasy of enlightened empire moving to social democracy in the continuing late imperial Russia of some alternative universe, coupled with grim reflections on the causes of its ending. That parallel universe to the current world was Antiquity in the Rostovtzeffian vision.Footnote 47
These works are quite remarkable gestures from the refugee imaginaire ‒ all the while embedded in empirical scholarship (the second with an entire volume of notes) ‒ but they are in some way tangential to other major strands of Rostovtzeff's Russian and exile work, including the Dura project. As a member of the late Romanov intelligentsia, Rostovtzeff's ideological frame was molded at a time of radical political change and liberalization, of extraordinary intellectual openness and creativity in the academy,Footnote 48 and of significant imperialist nationalism around the notion of a Holy Mother Russia.Footnote 49 A significant foundation of this project was the desire to use archaeology in the region around the Black Sea to prove that the twin strands of civilized Hellenism and an Iranian religion, as exemplified by the Scythians, were native to Russia and hence Russian identity.Footnote 50 Crucial to this venture, and in deep sympathy with the atmosphere of occultist spirituality that infused pre-revolutionary upper-class Russia in the so-called Silver Age (emblematized by Rasputin at the imperial court),Footnote 51 is the “conception of monarchy by the grace of god”: a god with deep indigenous origins which Rostovtzeff located through archaeological discussion in the visual cultures of the Scythians as rooted in Iranian influence.Footnote 52 None of this is unrelated to the deep Eurasian fantasy of late imperial Orientalism in Russia – not to be confused with Edward Said's model of Orientalism – an Orientalism that was fundamentally a romantic and spiritual drive to animate the Asian element of Russian identity.Footnote 53 The key elements in this heady ideological mix that emerge in Rostovtzeff are: sacrality and religion (the deep ancestor of Russian Orthodoxy); monarchy (the deep ancestor of the Tsarist system); and an Eastern, and not Mediterranean, spiritual origin founded in the interface of Iranians and Greeks (that is, a set of Russian origins free of the West, as if the key links were the Orthodox line from Constantinople [the second Rome] to Moscow [the third Rome] without need for the first Rome).
We may flesh out some aspects of this uniquely Russian Orientalism in Rostovtzeff's later works, written in exile. The cardinal theme of an Eastern center of spiritual monarchy is expressed in his view that:
Iranian conceptions, which have such a long history in our [i.e., greater Russia's] half-Iranian south, filtered far into the West, conquering the minds and hearts of those who were not satisfied by the half-barbarian elements of their local religions or by the Greek religious ideas entirely foreign to the West.Footnote 54
The turn to the East as opposed to the West in terms of core origins comes from Rostovtzeff's teacher, Nikodim Kondakoff (1844‒1925), who built an Eastern model for the origins of Byzantium.Footnote 55 But in antique studies the influence of Cumont, and especially his work on Mithraism as an Iranian religion that moved westward, is palpable here. This influence became the foundation for the friendship at the core of the Dura dig. Cumont's theory of an Iranian (i.e., Aryan) origin and underpinning of the Mithras cult that spread west through the Roman Empire was an unshakably established academic truth for almost a century after it was first conceived in the 1890s, until it was irretrievably demolished for lack of any conclusive or compelling evidence in the 1970s.Footnote 56 It crucially underwrites Rostovtzeff's Iranocentrism.Footnote 57
The need for finding mechanisms behind “the mixture of Greek and native elements in Babylonia” underpins Rostovtzeff's interest in Seleucid seals and bullae.Footnote 58 Such a model of inquiry also underlies a range of other books written by Rostovtzeff in exile: notably Iranians and Greeks in South Russia (1922), where he roots the “animal style” of the Neolithic and later (so important for finds in Russia) in Mesopotamia and Iran;Footnote 59 and his subsequent The Animal Style in South Russia and China (1929), which places the Scythians (who were “almost pure Iranians with a slight admixture of Mongolian (or Turkish?) elements”) at the center of Eurasian cosmopolitanism from Greece to China.Footnote 60 Rostovtzeff's remarkable catalog of Han bronzes from the Loo Collection makes the case about Western influence on Chinese art from Greece, Mesopotamia, south Russia, and especially Iran most strongly; the point is made more generally in his fine stylistic analyses of specific objects.Footnote 61
Meanwhile, the other core element – religion itself – is the theme of Mystic Italy (1927). It is this topic which remains the driving presentist agenda in Rostovtzeff's work once the sacred Russian Empire had been toppled. He attacks materialism repeatedly, contrasting it (in Antiquity) with the forces of the spirit:
penetrate beneath the outward show of materialism and hedonism, and we shall see how strong was the religious and mystic current even in the happiest days of the Roman empire … It is evident that materialism was a lost cause. … The triumph of the Christian faith, and of the religious conception of life which our modern self-confidence and our materialism try in vain to throw overboard.Footnote 62
The contemporary parallels (should we read “dialectical” with “materialism”?) and targets are clear, but still more explicitly so here:
We live in an age which can be compared with the Hellenistic epoch in the history of the ancient world. We believe in our almighty mental power. We are confident we are able to conquer nature and reform human life. Religion is for a good many of us a survival, a tradition, a social and moral concept. And yet religion is not dead. From the depth of human conscience, mystic aspirations in their higher and lower aspects are coming up afresh, especially among those peoples who have learned a bitter lesson in the turmoils of revolution led by the materialistic aspect of socialist teachings. … For good or for bad? Are we nearing a time when religion will be vanquished and eliminated? Or is this the turning point by which our road will lead to a revival of mystic aspirations which may work the end of our proud civilization?Footnote 63
The relative absence of religion in the two major historical projects of Rostovtzeff's American years – absent because, I would argue, Rostovtzeff chose the socioeconomic weapons of his Marxist enemy to argue the case for the bourgeoisie against BolshevismFootnote 64 – and the lack of interest until recently in his Russian and Eurasian projects have led to both a misunderstanding of his liberalism, since it is in profound conflict with secularism,Footnote 65 and an overestimation of its commitment to capitalism in an American sense.Footnote 66 Likewise, the long oblivion of a lost and forgotten imperial Russia in the age of the Cold War has meant a failure to put issues of Russian nationalism (conceived as monarchical and anti-Soviet) at the occluded (or we might say concealed) center of everything Rostovtzeff wrote. That is clearly the case with two social and economic histories written against Bolshevism, and with the texts obviously about Russia, but I would argue that it is also not irrelevant either to his early work on Italy and on the colonate, or – and here I come to the principal concerns of this review essay – to the Dura project. The study of the colonate and the creation of serfdom as an institution had a different meaning for Russians than for others. Only in 1861 did Czar Alexander II emancipate the serfs, inaugurating a new era of liberalism (and liberating Rostovtzeff's own teacher, Kondakoff).Footnote 67 (One might even suggest that, to a Russian liberal, Late Antiquity only ended in 1861.) In the archaeology of Pompeii, it is often forgotten that Rostovtzeff's major and lasting contribution was the invention of the so-called “sacro-idyllic” model of landscape painting, in a monograph-length paper of almost 200 pages in German.Footnote 68 The premise was that Campanian wall painting was an imitation of Hellenistic models, which were therefore his real subject. What the imagery showed was a sanctification of landscape and of the land itself, located in the East; it laid a pictorial claim to a sacred territory by contrast with the Roman West. The logic of such argumentation was the product of a pre-revolutionary ideological perspective that linked the holy East (a world that included Scythia, Iran, Babylon, Syria, and Palestine) to Christian Constantinople and ultimately to Mother Russia.Footnote 69 The model is founded in part on the work of Kondakoff.Footnote 70
These themes all culminate in the long excavation of Dura. They are expressed most explicitly in Rostovtzeff's books on the caravan cities and on Dura Europos itself.Footnote 71 In the former, Dura becomes the fundamental node of caravan trade to Palmyra and the West from the Euphrates, and eastward from Mesopotamia and Iran;Footnote 72 yet the account is above all about the religious buildings and finds.Footnote 73 In the latter, after a sketch of ancient Eurasia from Greece to India, he states that what he wanted from the excavation was “to throw light on the problem and origin of the Greco-Semitic civilization of Mesopotamia which was unquestionably from its early beginnings linked with the equally enigmatic Greco-Iranian civilization of Parthia. And Dura has not disappointed me.”Footnote 74 Notably:
There is found a kind of religious koinē, familiar to all the Semites and to the semitized Greeks and Iranians throughout Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Arabia. This koinē was probably evolved in the Hellenistic epoque and accepted both by the Parthians and the Romans. The greatest creation of the koinē was solar henotheism, which in this period became more and more accentuated.Footnote 75
In other words, the drive for the Dura project and the excavation of “Pompeii of the Syrian desert” was the great sacro-Iranian model (derived from Cumont, especially his work on Mithras) of a Eurasian center, ancestral to modern Russia, where civilization burgeoned at the nexus of the caravan cities between East and West.Footnote 76
Some upshots and some ways forward
For the Cumont–Rostovtzeff axis, Dura was crucial as prime evidence for cultural and especially religious fusion at the very borders of the Persian and Roman empires.Footnote 77 The frame of their approach (and that of their followers) has been characterized as “text-led,”Footnote 78 “inadequately exploiting … the rich archaeological data they recovered – and which they did not fully publish.”Footnote 79 The price of this, in the history of the site's excavation, recording, and publication, was a downplaying of the civic aspects,Footnote 80 the private houses,Footnote 81 and the military dimension,Footnote 82 and an up-playing of the religious sites and their (admittedly impressive) visual culture. Even in the areas which the two principals’ interpretative focus illuminated, such as the cultural mix at the militarized borderlands of great empires,Footnote 83 or issues of religion itself, the teleological frame of their approach erected at least as many obstacles as it has opened opportunities. Clearly, there is fundamental Orientalism governing the excavators’ assumptions – but we need to beware of the specter of Said's notions of a passive Orient in approaching the Orientalism of the 19th- and early 20th-c. study of religion.Footnote 84 For both Cumont and Rostovtzeff, deeply invested in the ex oriente lux model of the history of religions, where the bright dawn from the East came to enlighten the West, and in which the energies of mystery and revelation counted as key to civilization, the East – whether Mesopotamian, Persian, or Syrian – carried plenty of positive agency.Footnote 85
If one looks at the involvement of the principals in the publication of the site, the most important building to them was clearly the Mithraeum, which they published together in the Preliminary Report of 1939.Footnote 86 Yet, even as the French–American expedition was proceeding, issues in the outside world conspired to change the conceptual frame. The plight of German Jewry after Hitler's rise to power in 1933 and before the dig was suspended in 1937/8, what happened to Jews across the whole of Europe between the end of excavations and Cumont's death in 1947, and then the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 all turned the prime focus of discussion to the synagogue (in the monographs of Eleazar Sukenik, Carl Kraeling, and E. R. Goodenough, as well as du Mesnil),Footnote 87 and later to the church,Footnote 88 both of which saw extensive “final reports.” The Mithraeum has not only failed to receive a final report, but Cumont's own text on it was only posthumously published in an English version in the 1970s (in the same volume that demolished his theory of Mithraism), while the French original has only been published for the first time in the volume under review.Footnote 89 That is, subsequent scholarship and the drive of historical events moved away from the subtle (and subtly antisemitic) agenda of Christian origins founded on Hellenized Iranian monotheism (which, for Classicists, stood in opposition to the norms of Christianity's Jewish heritage) back to Jewish origins and the synagogue. (Care is needed around terms: I mean “antisemitic” in the sense of downgrading Jewish influence in European ancestral history and Christian origins.Footnote 90)
The religious frame has been highly problematic. Those of us who have written on Durene art in relation to religion or on Dura's religions and religious life have been caught in its meshes (consciously or not);Footnote 91 those who have resisted the religious hegemony of the excavators’ reports and approach to explore other things have had to write against the thrust of the reports and the structure of the archive.Footnote 92 The Orientalist delusion of Iranian vitalism underpinning Western mysteries and Hellenic spirituality has little factual substance but significant foundations in the history and literatures of a number of European fantasies, from Freemasonry to the antisemitism that contaminated approaches to Christian origins (and much else besides) for most of the later 19th c. and early 20th c. Its driving persuasive energy was certainly (one might hope finally) overturned in the revulsion to the Holocaust after 1945. But the excavators of Dura used the material culture of the site in an attempt to establish Greco-Iranian “realities” that have no evidential foundation, such as the idea of Parthian art,Footnote 93 on the basis of interpretative positions extrapolated from what today seems a highly eccentric theoretical position as applied to the material culture they discovered. It means that those trying to look anew at the manifold evidence of one of the greatest excavations of the last century must do so through a grim series of distorting, ideological mirrors.
So where do we go from here? In the foreseeable future there is no chance of further archaeological work, after the disasters of the recent civil wars in Syria and Iraq, and the activities of the so-called Islamic State. We need to be creative with the archive. That means taking studies in new directions – for instance, Jennifer Baird's work on domestic housingFootnote 94 – and seeing Dura through new lenses. The city has a long history (much of it opaque) from obscure Seleucid beginnings (it was probably founded around 300 BCE), followed by a longish period of Parthian dominance (it fell to the Arsacids around 113 BCE), and then a brief span of Roman military control (from about 165 CE to its fall and destruction ca. 256).Footnote 95 Most of what survives now is from the Later Parthian and Roman eras, when the town was subject to significant Palmyrene influence and included many Palmyrene residents.Footnote 96 One of the oddest aspects of all this is the late “golden age” of multi-faith religious and visual activity just as the so-called crisis of the 3rd c. was kicking in across the Roman world, as evidenced by the temples, the houses adapted into cult buildings, the large numbers of frescoes and reliefs depicting subjects of religious cult in particular, and notably non-animal sacrifice by means of sprinkling incense on altars.Footnote 97 This material is precisely what so galvanized Cumont and Rostovtzeff.
One move would be to go beyond the specifics of the site and to set it in a broader set of contexts, both local and international.Footnote 98 The city stood at the eastern edge of what was called in Late Antiquity the “Barbarian Plain,” the Syrian steppe between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean Sea, which sat politically at the border between the great imperial worlds of Rome/Byzantium and Parthia/Sassania (that is, Europe and Iran).Footnote 99 That borderland was also a no-man's land of essential political importance: a polyglot, multifaith world out of which Palmyra briefly made its own empire in the 270s; a contested territory in which sections were repeatedly taken and retaken by each of the great empires over more than half a millennium from Trajan's Parthian conquests in the 1st c. CE to Heraclius's war with Persia in the 7th c. It ceased to have a political meaning when it was definitively and finally conquered by the new and vibrant religion of Islam in the 630s, in a sweeping move that ended the political patterns of Antiquity across the Near East and north Africa forever. In Mesopotamia, across the Euphrates from Dura and close to the Tigris, the so similar and yet so different city of Hatra in the “‘Parthian near west,” which was never taken by the Romans despite various attempts and which has also been destroyed by the so-called Islamic State in recent years, intimates a very different kind of peripheral territory.Footnote 100
Before Islam, the world of the Barbarian Plain operated with a mix of an intrinsic and distinctive identity of its own on the one hand and, on the other, a hybridity calculated to appeal beyond itself both eastward to Iran and west to the Greeks, especially in matters of religion. Whether one looks at the cult of the Syrian goddess in Hierapolis on the northern Euphrates in the pre-Christian era, which Lucian describes vividly in the 2nd c. CE,Footnote 101 or that of St. Sergius of Rusafa (approximately midway between Hierapolis and Dura but away from the river) from the 5th c.,Footnote 102 the religious, pilgrimage culture of the Barbarian Plain looks out beyond itself toward both East and West.Footnote 103 These local cults themselves emulate the larger-scale, new religions born in the broader borderland between Persia and the Roman world, which spread through conversion, persecution, hegemony, and war beyond both the Mediterranean and Iran: I mean Christianity and Manichaeism, and finally Islam.
It is within the localist and international dynamics of a distinctive world defined by a specific historical geography and by being a problematic borderland space within ancient international relations, within a world that could rise to expansive imperial pretensions in Zenobia's Palmyra of the 270s and later, in the Umayyad period, attempt to rule the Islamic Empire from Damascus, that the vibrant mix of religion, militarism, and domesticity evidenced by the Dura dig needs to be placed and understood. These issues are not so far from what the principals of the excavation wanted to explore, but they need to be de-ideologized, decolonialized, and reinvigorated through a modern understanding not only of globalism across Afro-Eurasia but also of regionalism and civic identity within the intercultural world of Dura.
I should thank Ted Kaizer and the Bibliotheca Cumontiana for making the multiplicity of Cumont's Dura publications available in one place: we need to know these things both for the information they convey and for understanding how to keep our distance from their assumptions and starting points. I realize that, in focusing on Cumont and Rostovtzeff, I have somewhat moved beyond my duty in reviewing K.'s volume, but I have done so because to take account of 100 years of Dura requires confronting the full frame of its early publication. What has been uncovered is complicated and awkward, and much of it unfamiliar. The need to know more about the critical axioms and presuppositions of our ancient historical and archaeological fathers (I fear they were almost always men) is essential – well beyond the archaeology of Dura Europos – because to think outside the box that previous generations have created requires a critical understanding of why that box was made and why it may have seemed compelling in earlier and different historical contexts. If there is a takeaway from this piece, beyond thinking about Dura itself, it is that archaeologists need to do more of this kind of historiographical work.
Acknowledgments
In addition to the comments of the editorial team of this journal, I am grateful to Philippa Adrych, Bruce Lincoln, John Ma, Caspar Meyer, and Brent Shaw for careful reading and responses to an earlier draft.
