Zenobia, Martyr Saint of Cilicia and her brother

Today the Orthodox church calendar (give or take a day or two*) commemorates the martyrdom of Zenobia and her brother Zenobius. A Russian Orthodox hymn, a kontakion ( © by Alex Ledkovsky), celebrates the martyred siblings.

Let us honor with inspired hymns the two martyrs for truth:
the preachers of true devotion, Zenóbius and Zenobía;
as brother and sister they lived and suffered together and through martyrdom received their incorruptible crowns.

Everything about Zenobius (naturally, he gets top billing) and Zenobia is obscure. And that is an understatement.

The story, most of which we know from a 10th C Byzantine monk, Symeon Metaphrastes [for good reason, dubbed 'the re-writer'] goes like this -- slightly abbreviated, but I've left in the bits of gore.

The Blessed Martyr Zenobius, Bishop of Aegea, and his sister Zenobia suffered a martyr's death in the year 285 in Cilicia. From childhood they were raised in the holy Christian Faith by their parents, and they led pious and chaste lives. In their mature years, they distributed away their inherited wealth giving it to the poor. For his beneficence and holy life the Lord rewarded Zenobius with the gift of healing various maladies. [He] was able to heal the sick of every sort of infirmity simply by the touch of his hand.

As bishop, Saint Zenobius zealously spread the Christian Faith among the pagans. When the emperor Diocletian (284-305) began a persecution against Christians, Bishop Zenobius was the first one arrested and brought to trial to the governor Licius. "I shall only speak briefly with you," said Licius to the saint, "for I propose to grant you life if you worship our gods, or death, if you do not." The saint answered, "This present life without Christ is death. It is better that I prepare to endure the present torment for my Creator ... then be tormented eternally in Hades." By order of Licius, they nailed him to a cross and began the torture. The bishop's sister, seeing him suffering, wanted to stop it. She bravely confessed her own faith in Christ before the governor, therefore, she also was tortured. By the power of the Lord they remained alive after being placed on a red-hot iron bed, and then in a kettle of boiling pitch. The saints were then beheaded.

That did it. At least they didn't walk about afterwards, with their heads tucked underneath their arms, but were buried in a grave together. This all happened in about 285 AD (or perhaps in 304). Or perhaps not?

In 310 AD, we are told by Bishop Eusebius, writing not long after the events :

that St. Tyrannio, Bishop of Tyre, when, being conducted from Tyre to Antioch, with St. Zenobius, a holy priest and physician of Sidon, after many torments [Tyrannio] was thrown into the sea. Zenobius expired on the rack, whilst his sides and body were furrowed and laid open with iron hooks and nails.

So this Zenobius, too, was a doctor ( "that best of physicians", says Eusebius) as well as a priest. And his martyrdom took place, as Eusebius clearly says, on 29 October, whereas the saint of Cilicia is celebrated by the Orthodox on 30 October. Thus, it seems quite possible that the two Zenobii have been confused -- after all, Aegae (modern Ayash) is but a hop across the Gulf of Alexandretta from Antioch.

If so, what happened to Zenobia?

I just wonder if she is not the saintly lady described (but not named) in Eusebius, "admirable for strength of soul yet in body a woman and famed as well by all that were at Antioch for wealth, birth and sound judgment" -- who, with her two daughters, threw herself into the Orontes River rather than suffer a fate worse than death (the threat of fornication!) having fallen into the hands of soldiers. Her name is given by St John Chrysostom, half a century or so later, as Domnina -- but we already have a martyred Domnina who was said to have suffered death at Aegaea in 285 (or 305) in Lycia. And there is no Aegaea, or Aegae, or even Aegea, in Lycia. So this must refer to Aegae in Cilicia, where (and when) Zenobia met her end. And we're not finished yet. There's yet another Domnina or Domnica waiting in the wings:

The Holy Martyress Domnica suffered for confessing Christianity in the year 286. Domnica lived in the region of Cilicia. By order of the governor Licius they beat her for a long time, and burnt her with fire. All tormented, Saint Domnica was thrown into prison, where she died.

Licius, of course, was the evil "praeses provinciae Lyciae" who tortured Zenobia and Zenobius to death ... in Cilicia.

What are we to make of all this?

Oh, I don't know.

But Zenobia is always worth a hymn or two.

Alex Ledkovsky wrote a Zenobian Troparion as well as the Kontakion reproduced above.

[If readers despair of my ever getting back to the main subject of this blog (the life and times of Queen Zenobia), be of good heart: Sassanian Stuff II is coming up next.]


* a poor excuse for being a day late (31 Oct.) with this post. It was due on the saints' day, 30 Oct.

How the Tiger and the Tigris Got their Names (Updated)

I came down with an awful case of tigrology last week.

I was going mad, trying to discover the origin of the words for tiger, the animal, and Tigris, the river.

Believe me, there's nothing worse than an attack of etymological questions: it can turn a sober scholar into a foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic in a trice. My apologies ... but I'd like to take you with me around the bend.

It's all the fault of Isidore of Seville, who wrote a big big book, the Etymologies (in Latin), an encyclopedic account of just about everything known in the western world in the years around 600 AD, when Isidore was alive. After the Bible, Etymologies was perhaps the most influential book in the Latin West for nearly a thousand years. If you wanted to know anything about what the ancients thought about art, music, nature, God or grammar, you'd check with Isidore first thing.

The only problem is, as Emily Wilson tells us (in an enjoyable review in the Times Literary Supplement, 3 Aug. 2007) that Isidore is like a bad search engine, with little or no control over his sources. Not for nothing is Isidore the patron saint of the Internet! Much of the information he provides is blatantly false and most of his supposed etymologies are complete twaddle. They go like this:

"Health (salus) takes its name from salt (sal), for nothing is better for us than salt (sal) and sun (sol)"

"Cats are called cats because they catch mice (catuma captura vocant)

"Days (dies) are so called from 'the gods' (deus, ablative plural diis).

Or, as Isidore himself might have put it -- 'days are called after dayities.' Groan.

So I was surprised when Prof. Wilson seemed to take him seriously on a point of Persian etymology. This is what tripped me up:

Isidore knows that Latin draws on other languages: [he writes] "the tiger (tigris) is so called because of its rapid flight, for this is what the Persians and Medes call an arrow."

And Isidore added helpfully, "The Tigris River is named after the tiger because it is the fastest of all rivers."

This conflation of tiger (the beast) and Tigris (the river) continues to this day and so does their supposed derivation from the Persian for 'arrow' (check your dictionary: most, but not all, still give it; and it's all over the internet as well). The idea first appeared in Greek in Strabo's Geography (early 1st C. AD), when he says of the river Tigris (Gr. Tigris) :

because of its swiftness ... whence the name Tigris, since the Median word for "arrow" is "tigris."

And it is picked up in Latin in Pliny's Natural History (mid-1st C.), who describes the river:

as soon as it begins to flow, though with a slow current, has the name of Diglito. When its course becomes more rapid, it assumes the name of Tigris given to it on account of its swiftness, that word signifying an arrow in the Median language.

But why, I asked myself, should anyone believe that the name of a river which runs back in its history to the Sumerians should have a Persian name, and one so far-fetched as ''arrow''; and why would an Indian animal, albeit one that ranged into Persian territory, share the same etymology of 'arrow'?

I fretted. This way lies madness ... but I had to go on. Here is what I've come up with in my quest.

I don't question, of course, that the Greeks may have actually learnt both words in Persia or that, if they did, in that sense they do come from Persian. But that is all I accept.

Let's start with the river. It's the easier of the two. What we know:

The Sumerian name for the river was Idigna, which seems simply to have meant 'running water' or possibly 'river with high banks'. When the Semitic-speaking Akkadians arrived in the region they borrowed the name, turning it into (I)Diq/gla(t) -- and note how close that is to the word Pliny recorded for the higher stream. The Semitic trail continues via the biblical Hebrew Hiddekel (one of the rivers running through Eden, Genesis 2:14) and the later Aramaic Deglath or Diglat, eventually to become Arabic Diğlä -- which is today pronounced in Iraq, I'm told, as Dijla.

At first sight, the Old Persian Tigrā seems to stick out like a sore thumb, looking completely different. But I'd bet a couple of Sassanian drachmas that Tigrā comes from a form rather like DIG-LA: where D shifts to a T sound and L to R. In short, the Persians, too, seem to have adapted a name going back to Sumerian -- via the intermediary of local Semitic languages.

So the Greeks were wrong to derive the river's name from Persian tigra- "sharp, pointed", Avestan " tigri- "arrow", and to imagine that the river ran at the speed of an arrow. Perhaps this is what they were told once they arrived in Persia, for folk etymology is always beguiling and words of unknown origin inevitably yield to a play of known words.

But what about the animal, the tiger? Could Isidore of Seville have possibly got this part right?

I doubt it. But it is a tough one.

The beast is Babr (or Bebr) in Middle Persian. Surprisingly, this does not descend from any of the early Indian words for tiger (vyAghra, pRdAku, zArdUla). Note that the Sanskrit vyAghra means 'who tears apart', rather a better name for a ferocious animal than an anodyne 'sharp, pointed' or 'arrow' ("How, Daddy, did the tiger get its name?" "It's faster than a speeding arrow, son." Just so.)

So I went back and looked at the Greek history of the tiger. I suspect that we've been looking in slightly the wrong direction: I can see no reason that the Greeks would have first met up with the tiger in Persia.

The animal only enters Greek writings after the Indian campaigns of Alexander the Great (who died in 323 BC). Alexander's general, Nearchus, we are told, saw a tiger skin during the Indian campaign, but no tiger. King Seleucus 'the Victor', first Seleucid ruler of Mesopotamia, sent a live tiger to Athens around 300 BC. This might have been an animal captured during his own Indian wars around 305 BC or, more likely, a royal gift sent to him by an Indian prince some time before his death in 297. Since, even in antiquity, the western range of the tiger seems limited to eastern Turkey, north Iran, and the wild lands between the Caspian and Black Seas, Seleucus' tiger need not have been of Persian origin; so where would Seleucus have learnt what the beast was called?

We have two clues: tiger is vagr in Armenian (Armenia then, remember, was roughly today's Kurdish territory), and vigr in Georgian. Somewhere up that way, perhaps, on the roads to Bactria and Afghanistan, the Greeks first came across live tigers. The all-knowing Pliny assures us that most tigers lived on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea (in Hyrcania) and in India.

But Pliny didn't know much about tigers.* On the contrary, he passed on this tall tale:

The tiger ... can run with terrific speed. To take the tiger's cubs, the hunter prepares a fast horse and steals the tiger's entire litter, and rides away, changing to fresh horses as necessary. The tiger, seeing that her cubs are gone, tracks them by scent and chases the hunter. When the hunter sees the tiger catching up, he drops one cub. The tiger stops to pick up the cub before resuming the chase. The hunter repeats this ruse until he reaches his ship; in this way he escapes with at least one of the cubs, leaving the tiger to rage impotently on the shore.

You will not be surprised to know that Isidore of Seville swallowed this story almost whole ... and then went one better: instead of dropping cub after cub, the hunter throws down a mirror or a glass sphere, whereupon the tiger, seeing its own reflection in the sphere and thinking it is her stolen cub, stops to nurse the supposed cub. This gives the robber time to escape.

Just so. As befits a Christian bishop, the mirror symbolizes the cost of vanity and pride. Beware ladies, the tigress loses her cubs for just such a sin. In any case, this became a favoured medieval theme, especially popular in the 12th-13th C illustrated beastiaries (a few of which are reproduced on this page).

I don't suppose it was for his Etymologies that Isidore was canonized in 1598, and certainly not for his tigrology.

Perhaps it was because, as Archbishop of Seville (600 - 636), he converted the Spanish Visigothic kings from Arianism to Roman Catholicism. Or was it because he presided over the Council of Toledo in 633, when they tried (as Emily Wilson remarks, not for the first and certainly not for the last time) to eradicate Jews and heretics from Spain? Either act was surely worthy of sainthood, even if that prize was put on hold for nearly 1000 years. Perhaps it was more banal, just politics as usual.** But I like to think that what tipped the scale was his enduring description of Britons: "Britannus comes from brutus (dumb brute)."

With one-liners like that, he is the perfect patron saint for the Internet .



* It's only in the time of Augustus at the beginning of our era that the first tigris is seen in Rome, though I haven't been able to find out when the Latin name was borrowed from Greek.

** In 1598, Pope Clement VIII had brought about a peace treaty between Spain and France. A new Spanish saint might have been part of the price.

My thanks to Esfandiar, Agnes Korn, Luis Mendieta, and Varun Singh and all those on the Parthia-List for their help.

Update 27/12/2017 

Six hundred years after Isidore of Seville's Etymologies,  Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri set out, as it were, to rival if not  surpass the enormousness of Isidore's encyclopaedia with a 9,000-page, 33-volume compendium of everything that exists as it appeared to a very learned man in 14th-century Cairo: in Nihayet al-Arab fi Funun al-Adab, or The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition,* the author (who boasted, in fact, 41 patronymics, and recounts them all) was not one to pass up any tidbit of information on any part of the universe -- though he claims to have restrained himself: "I have sought to be succinct but not overly so."  

And so, we get this story about the tiger.

It is said that the female tiger is impregnated by the wind, and for this reason it is said that it resembles the wind in speed when it runs, and nothing can hunt it.

And this tale, too, has good classical backing. The Latin poet Claudianus (397 A.D.) referred to both the wind's impregnation of the tiger and the hunter's ruse of dropping a mirror or glass sphere to aid his escape: 

Speedier than the West Wind that is her paramour, rushes the tigress, anger blazing from her stripes, but just as she is about to engulf the terrified hunter in her rapacious maw, she is checked by the mirrored image of her own form. (Rape of Proserpine, Bk. III)

Niether Claudianus nor al-Nuwayri had bothered to read the Greco-Roman poet Oppian who had already denied this story in the late second century:

Tiger, swifter is it than all wild beasts that are: for it runs with the speed of its sire, the West wind himself, yet the West Wind is not its sire; who would believe that wild beasts mated with an airy Bridegroom? For that also is an empty tale, that all of this tribe is female and mates not with a male .. marvels men tell us. ( Cynegetica III: 355 )

 But, then, a denial never gets the same press as the marvelous fable; does it?

* Elias Muhanna, The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition. Princeton University Press, 2017. And note the wonderful review of Muhanna's book by Anna Della Subin, 'If the hare sees the sea', London Review of Books, 30 November 201735-36.

How 'God's Wife Hatshepsut' became 'The Good Goddess Maatkare'

If you haven't read the previous post (Hatshepsut Cheek by Jowl with Judy Chicago), you might have a look at that first.

Or why she turns in her 'God's Wife' cartouche (left) for that of 'Goddess' (right)

[Thutmosis II] went up to heaven and was united with the gods. His son took his place as King of the Two Lands and he was the sovereign on the throne of his father. His sister, the God's Wife [of Amun] Hatshepsut, dealt with the affairs of the state: the Two Lands were under her government and taxes were paid to her.

And so begins Hatshepsut's regency as she takes over the tasks and prerogatives of ruling Egypt, as told by the high official Ineni (Overseer of the Royal Buildings, Overseer of the Granaries), who died before she mounted the throne in Year 7.

The first remarkable thing about his account (written, remember, by a courtier who lived through the recent events) is that the name of the new child-king is not even mentioned. The second thing is that Ineni does not list any of the queenly titles of Hatshepsut (who is named) but calls her by her most important religious rank instead: God's Wife. God's Wife was top of the religious pyramid, bringing with it independent property and wealth. This may have been one of the ways that the queen-regent built up her own authority before she claimed the throne. It would not be the first time -- and far from the last -- that a woman parlayed her religious position into political power. In any event, Hatshepsut only relinquishes the privileges of God's Wife when she takes on the full titles of a king.

Her Great Steward (and possible lover) Senenmut left more early evidence cut into the rock at Aswan, where he had gone in order to lead the works ... on the two great obelisks of millions of years; that is, to supervise the quarrying of a pair of obelisks in the red and black speckled Aswan granite to be erected at the great Temple of Amun in Thebes. Senenmut stands in the pose of admiration before his royal mistress. She is portrayed in female dress, wearing the double plume crown of chief queens; in her right hand she holds the sceptre of the God's Wife of Amun.

The inscription reads in part:

hereditary princess, great of praise and charm, great of love, one to whom Ra has given the kingship, righteously in the opinion of the ... gods, king's daughter, king's sister, god's wife, great king's wife ... Hatshepsut, may she live.

The text in bold is an undoubted claim to kingship, but are his words rank flattery or a pointer to the future? It looks to me (but I could be wrong) that Senenmut, a great and beloved friend of Hatshepsut and her great confidant, is simply the first to know and had no hesitation in spreading the word.

Now, across the length of Egypt, a stela (left) from the Temple of Hathor near the ancient turquoise mines in Sinai, shows Hatshepsut standing before the goddess attended by two unnamed officials. She is still dressed as a queen ... but her two cartouches name her, first , as 'God's Wife Hatshepsut' and, second, as 'Maatkare' -- the throne name which she would have taken upon her coronation. Her new eminence is underlined by the added title, 'King of Upper and Lower Egypt".

It's seems a gradual thing and, as I said, she is feeling her way. She is clearly experimenting with alterations to her formal titulary as well as with different ways of depicting herself, as Peter Dorman explains in his on-line paper Hatshepsut: Wicked Stepmother or Joan of Arc (the source of much information on the early years of her co-regency*).

She next stakes her claims in the heart of Egypt, at Karnak itself, where a limestone block (left) from a dismantled shrine in the Temple of Amun shows her making a wine offering to the great god, a very kingly thing to do. The scene illustrates in large what we already glimpsed in small on the seal in the Brooklyn Museum: she is portrayed on both in female dress and also wearing the tall atef-crown of male kings. This block gives more detail: crucially, she is no longer named 'God's Wife', but 'King of Upper and Lower Egypt' and, newly, 'Mistress of the Two Lands, Maatkare'.

Now she's just a step away from becoming a fully-fledged male king, adopting male clothing and the false beard of the pharaoh (and note: it's just as false a beard when stuck on a male chin). Once again, Senenmut first signals the move. Just prior to her accession, he writes these words on his cenotaph at Gebel Sisila, north of Aswan:

Live, the king's firstborn daughter, Hatshepsut, may she live, beloved of Amun, lord of the thrones of the two lands, king of the gods.

Just as she's no longer 'God's Wife', she's no longer queen of Thutmosis II. Instead, she has become the direct heir and chosen successor to her father, Thutmosis I. This is Year 7.

Yes, other women had ruled Egypt before Hatshepsut and one of them at least -- Sobekneferu at the end of the 12th Dynasty-- had adopted some pharaonic paraphernalia and titles. All power to them! Sobekneferu, like Hatshepsut (left) was shown sitting on the throne, wearing the nemes headdress, the striped head-cloth with the uraeus, the rearing sacred cobra, on her brow. But never before had a woman taken on all the attributes of a pharaoh. Only Hatshepsut surpassed her female condition to both rule and reign.

The royal role requires her to dress in male attire, not because she is a man but because she is a king. Both perfect goddess and perfect god, she strides in full royal regalia (as on the right) while the pronouns and adjectives of the texts are in feminine form.

In short, she is not a woman who rules but a female king.

And this is why I say that she was the only true female Pharaoh of Egypt.

Which brings us to the destruction of her monuments. Why did Thutmosis III do it? Now that we have to rethink the vengeance of a slighted, usurped stepson, there remain basically two lines of argument.

The first is simply that she was a woman, which might have detracted from his own glory or even legitimacy. In a stronger version, he might have feared dynastic instability. Since Hatshepsut showed that a woman was as capable at governing Egypt as a male king, her success could persuade future generations of strong women that being wife, sister and mother of a king wasn't quite the same as being king yourself. So he may have done it to warn off other uppity women.

A second possibility is that he was engaged in personal propaganda, giving Hatshepsut a place below him, as queen regent rather than king. By eliminating the more obvious traces of her as pharaoh, he could claim all of her achievements as his. I rather like this idea, and wonder if we can't take it a little further. Thutmosis III had a very long (and brilliant) reign of 53 years -- a co-regency with Hatshepsut of 22 years and more than 30 years as sole pharaoh. Could it have been plain megalomania, such as comes even to 'gods' who live too long?

As many other things in Egyptian history, much is based on the assumptions we make. We've come a long way from my starting point, that his early statues look so much like hers that experts can hardly tell them apart. That doesn't make sense if he hated her. His destruction of her memory, towards the end of his reign, could have been a cold calculation, or, he wouldn't be the first-- and far from the last -- great dictator to have a master-of-the-universe kind of end.


* More information on Hatshepsut's early years can be found on Dr Karl H. Leser's webpages: see especially his critical discussions of her history, date of coronation, and death and persecution.

Hatshepsut Cheek by Jowl with Judy Chicago

Having now visited the Pharaohs, Queens, and Goddesses exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, I have a few updates on what I wrote in the post Hatshepsut Meets Judy Chicago and some odd musings stimulated by this very enjoyable show.

First things first.


Hatshepsut or Thutmosis III?

The unisex granite head (below, right) is 'unisex' no more, for the Museum has decided that it is the head of Hatshepsut after all. Though it is admittedly difficult to distinguish her images from those of her half-nephew and stepson, Thutmosis III, they have plumped for her, citing "the overall facial structure with its tilted eyes and delicate chin" as characteristic traits of her portraits and not his. I'm not convinced by the chin, most of which is missing, but I'm willing to suspend disbelief about the tilt of the eyes.

Or rather, I would have been willing ... had not the British Museum decided that their 'unisex' head (below left) - which had been up for grabs - is now to be Thutmosis III . In a straw poll of eminent Egyptologists, three (Newberry, Carter, and Brunton) had thought it was Hatshepsut, two (Hall and Capart) voted for Thutmosis III and two (Schäfer and Garis Davies) compromised on an idealized image of Thutmosis III.

I have no desire to insert myself into such eminent company (and as a cruel if imprecise 'Anonymous' remarked after my last Hatshepsut post, I am no Egyptologist), but, for the life of me, I see little difference in the tilt of the eyes.

Is the British Museum head perhaps a bit more square-jawed, and thus presumably more masculine?

I leave that to you to decide.

What I left the show thinking about, however, is the extraordinary resemblance between the portraits of the female Pharaoh and her half-nephew. They were, of course, related by blood, so it's possible that the son of her half-brother by a secondary wife truly did look like his 1/2-aunt. But there seems more at work than that. Some Egyptologists think it results from simple artistic habit. After all, sculptors had spent 20 years turning a female face into that of a king; after her death, they might have unwittingly softened the masculine face of a male ruler.

That's hard for me to believe of such master craftsmen.

So I asked myself: what if Thutmosis III wished to be portrayed this way? Just as some of Hatshepsut's early statues resembled those of her adored father, Thutmosis I, could he, too, have wished to illustrate continuity through similarity? But this makes no sense if it is true that, on her death, Thutmosis III obliterated her name on statues and monuments to erase her name from history forever. In that case, he must have hated his aunt (who was also his stepmother, and thus falls willy-nilly into a cliché). Perhaps the idea of the antipathy between the two rulers needs to be reexamined:

New evidence, especially from Karnak, shows that the persecution of Hatshepsut's memory did not begin immediately after her death: her monuments were visible until her stepson’s 42nd year – over 20 years after her death! This changes how we look at the relationship between the two monarchs, and his motive for attacking her monuments: 20 years or more is too long to hold such a grudge before carrying out destructive measures because of it.

In other words, Thutmosis III might have had quite different reasons for destroying her monuments and erasing her name. It's causing a rethink.


The Hathor amulet

In saying that this amulet was inscribed with Hatshepsut's name, I implied that it belonged to her. Wrong. It belonged to Senenmut, Hatshepsut's Great Steward during her kingship, who also held the lucrative post of steward of the temple of the god Amun.

The five lines of text on the top and back of the amulet read:

the good god Maatkare [Hatshepsut's throne name], beloved of Iuynt [a serpent goddess identified with Hathor]

the hereditary prince , steward of Amun, Senenmut.

Both Hatshepsut and Senenmut were devoted to Hathor. Five of Senenmut's statues were adorned with symbols of this goddess , two of them royal gifts from Hatshepsut: Given as a favour of the king to the hereditary prince, and further inscribed :

he lifts Hathor who resides in Thebes ... that he might cause her to appear and elevate her beauty on behalf of the life, prosperity, and health of the king of upper and lower Egypt Maatkare [Hatshepsut], living forever.

The inscriptions go on to list Senenmut's many titles and offices, which - mightily snipped - sums him up as the chief of chiefs and noblest of dignitaries.

Or, as his own scribe put it, writing on a sherd of pottery (ostracon), one of the greatest of the great of the whole land.

Naturally, the scribe did not add that he was also very likely Hatshepsut's lover.

There is, of course, no proof of that -- other than that he conducted himself almost as a member of the royal family, enjoying privileges and prerogatives never before extended to a mere official, particularly to one who was of the humblest origin.

He was, for example, allowed to represent himself at least 70 times in Hatshepsut's mortuary temple, and to excavate for himself a long, sloping coridor tomb, totally unlike those of his fellow officials but strikingly similar to Hatshepsut's own tomb, and to place in it a quartzite sarcophagus of royal type, perhaps a gift from the female king.

It is uncertain if he died before or after Hatshepsut. At his death, however, he was not buried in his great new tomb, which was abandoned unfinished, and sealed with his empty sarcophagus within. Many of his images were then defaced or smashed to pieces, but the motive behind this destruction remains an enigma. The attack against his monuments, in any case, must have begun earlier than the proscription of Hatshepsut (20 years after her own death!), since her cartouche remains intact on some monuments where Senenmut's name and face have been erased!

So, here too, the simple explanation of Thutmosis' white-hot anger against her 'ruthless usurpation' of his throne (abetted by Senenmut) does not seem to fit the facts. For, in truth, the usurpation -- if that is what it was -- was neither ruthless nor rapid. Left by the sudden death of her husband, Thutmosis II, as regent for a young child-king, Hatshepsut was clearly feeling her way....

Seal of Hatshepsut before Amun-Re

The carnelian seal stamp reproduced at the top of the post is from the Hatshepsut-Judy Chicago show at the Brooklyn Museum (and my thanks to the Museum for the photograph). Although broken, Hatshepsut can just be seen dressed as a woman and performing the royal task of making an offering to the chief god, Amun-Re -- a ceremony reserved for the king, who was normally the chief actor in all divine rituals. She wears the ceremonial Atef-crown and a dress rather than male attire. Above is her royal cartouche and the words: May she live!

This seal joins a very small group of images which shows Hatshepsut in female garb but with kingly accoutrements and throne name. Ancient observers must have found this an astonishing combination of woman's costume and kingly protocol. During the early years of the reign, Hatshepsut will clearly be experimenting with different titles as well as different ways of depicting herself as she sets about acquiring royal dignity.

What she is doing and perhaps even 'why' in the Years 1 - 7 , after which she adopts full male garb, will be the subject of my next post.

And, yes, Senenmut is right there with her.

I hope also to have time to comment on Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party which was stunningly installed cheek by jowl with Haptshepsut.

Zenobia Salutes Riverbend

I've been reading Riverbend's blog since The Beginning on August 17 2003:

So this is the beginning for me, I guess. I never thought I'd start my own weblog... All I could think, every time I wanted to start one was "but who will read it?" I guess I've got nothing to lose... but I'm warning you- expect a lot of complaining and ranting. I looked for a 'rantlog' but this is the best Google came up with.

A little bit about myself: I'm female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That's all you need to know. It's all that matters these days anyway.

Riverbend

And thus Baghdad Burning became a part of my life. For four years, I clicked to hear her special voice, an educated young woman watching her world being destroyed. I wish I knew her personally, and feel as if I did.

Last week, Riverbend and her family finally fled Baghdad and she wrote a post that is simply heartbreaking. It's called Leaving Home.

Perhaps half of the Iraqi middle class are now refugees in Syria and Jordan.


... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend...

Update: On Monday, 22 October, Riverbend came on-line again with Bloggers Without Borders. If you want to know how it feels to become a refugee, read it: "No matter how wealthy or educated or comfortable, a refugee is a refugee. A refugee is someone who isn’t really welcome in any country- including their own... especially their own."

Why the Romans Always Seem to Get in First Licks

And I [Shapur I] possess the lands: Persis, Parthia, Khuzistan, Maishan, Mesene, Mesopotamia, Adiabene, Arabia, Atropatene, Armenia ... Balasgan up to the Caucasus and to the 'gate of the Alans' and ... Media, Hyrcania, Margiana, Aria, and all of the eastern Parthian provinces, Kirman, Sakastan, Turgistan, Makuran, Paradene, Sind and to the borders of ... Sogdia and Tashkent and of that sea-coast Oman.

Shapur ruled an empire that stretched over the vast lands between the Euphrates and Indus Rivers. I do not know if anyone has ever measured the extent of Sassanian territories -- not that that remained constant, of course, from the time Ardashir overthrew the Parthians in 226 AD to 651, when their empire fell to the armies of Islam. But I'd be curious to know how it compared at any given time, mile for mile, with that of Rome:, the one essentially built around the Mediterranean and growing out from that (with Britain, as expected, odd man out) and the other, in a sense, following the logic of the routes of the Silk Road.

The vast extent of the Sassanian Empire was both its strength and its weakness.

When a Sassanian king took the field at the head of his army, he had, contrary to Roman reports, a standing army (Mid. Pers. spāh) under his personal command and its officers were separate from his satraps and local princes and nobility. The backbone of the spāh was its heavy-armoured cavalry "in which all the nobles and men of rank" underwent "hard service" and became professional soldiers "through military training and discipline, through constant exercise in warfare and military manoeuvres". Another elite cavalry group was the Armenian one, whom the Persians accorded particular honour. In due course the importance of the heavy cavalry increased and the distinguished horseman assumed the meaning of "knight" as in European chivalry; if not of royal blood, he ranked next to the members of the ruling families and was among the king's boon companions .

The Sassanians did not form light-armed cavalry but extensively employed, as allies or mercenaries, troops from warlike tribes who fought under their own chiefs. "The Sagestani were the bravest of all; the Gelani, Albani, and the Hephthalites, the Kushans and the Khazars were the main suppliers of light-armed cavalry. The skill of the Dailamites in the use of sword and dagger made them valuable troopers in close combat , while Arabs were efficient in desert warfare."

Battles were usually decided by the shock elite cavalry of the front line charging the opposite ranks with heavy lances while archers gave support by discharging storms of arrows. The centre, where the commander-in-chief took his position on a throne, was defended by the strongest units. The chief weakness of the Sassanian army was said to be its lack of endurance in close combat (but that could be the toll taken by repeated charges wearing heavy armour). Another reputed fault was their too great a reliance on the presence of their leader: the moment the commander fell or fled his men gave way regardless of the course of action.

But perhaps the greatest problem was the frequent need to move such troops from one end of the empire to the other (without the benefit of sea-borne transport). If the King of Kings was campaigning in India, say, when the excellent military messenger service brought news that Alexander Severus or Gordian III or or Julian the Apostate had led a great Roman army across the Euphrates in the Far West, the Romans would be deep inside Persian territory before the king could respond.

And so the Romans would have their early victories, and ecstatic reports would be sent to Rome and triumphs declared. Persicus maximus! But then, inevitably, somewhere near the Persian capital of Cteisiphon (aka Baghdad):

...smoke or a great whirling cloud of dust was seen; so that one was led to think that it was herds of wild asses, of which there is a countless number in those regions.... But no sooner had the first light of day appeared, than the glittering coats of mail, girt with bands of steel, and the gleaming cuirasses, seen from afar, showed that the king's forces were at hand.

The rest is history.



Filed in haste before flying off to New York tomorrow morning. Light posting (or none) until the end of the month.

I am indebted to the excellent The Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies website, and to its article on the Sasanian Army, by Prof. A. Sh. Shahbâzi.

Hatshepsut Meets Judy Chicago

Not exactly hot-off-the-press news, but unbeknown enough to me to put Sassanian Stuff aside for a bit: the show Pharaohs, Queens, and Goddesses is now on at the Brooklyn Museum (extended to January 20, 2008). This exhibition is dedicated to powerful females from Egyptian history. It's a little cheeky to imply female Pharaohs in the plural, for there was, as far as I know, only King Hatshepsut (ruled ca. 1473-1458 BC) .

But why quibble.

There were other female regents who ruled in all but name.

The central object of the exhibition is this unisex granite head. I say 'unisex' because the Brooklyn website correctly captions it as "Head of Hatshepsut or Thutmose III ", so it's either the female 'King' or her nephew who ruled after her. That's what happens when you have no word but 'Pharaoh' -- so she is confusingly 'His Majesty' -- and no ruler iconography except male.

Hatshepsut is featured in Brooklyn "alongside other women and goddesses from Egyptian history, including queens Cleopatra, Nefertiti, and Tiye and the goddesses Sakhmet, Mut, Neith, Wadjet, Bastet, Satis, and Nephthys."

Now I will quibble. Where is Hathor?

Hathor was not only one of the most important divinities of Egypt and 'Chieftainess of Thebes', but also a goddess revered by Hatshepsut. In some ways, we can say, Hatshepsut identified herself with this great goddess. The carnelian Hathor-head amulet on the right is inscribed with Hatshepsut's name. [Come to think of it, this amulet is in the Brooklyn Museum ... so Hathor must have quietly slipped away from their press release. Perhaps I shouldn't be quibbling after all. ]

Hatshepsut dedicated a beautiful little chapel to Hathor as part of her mortuary temple at Deir el Bahri ( south end of the middle terrace). The chapel's inner courtyard is supported by round columns with Hathor-head capitals (pictured above left), probably the earliest example of this form, which then sweeps north and south and soon will be found in all parts of Egypt. The female head with cow ears is topped with a crown and the curved sides ending in spirals are suggestive of cow horns.

The chapel also preserves painted reliefs of Hathor as the divine cow, protecting and nurturing Hatshepsut. The wall relief below shows the goddess licking the hand of Pharaoh Hatshepsut, who is sitting on the throne clad in male royal dress.

During Hatshepsut's reign, this chapel was a focus for popular religion, where women often left offerings in the hope of conceiving a child. Male and female devotees alike flocked to her shrine to beg for her favours. On the way they bought from a hawker at some roadside booth a string of beads or a little pottery cow to offer with their prayers, and others carried blue faience platters of fruit or flowers.

Archaeologists found countless symbols of Hathor everywhere in the area: The ground was literally sown with such such offerings. Sometimes she was the cow carved on plaques of limestone, copper, or faience; or again she was represented by the primitive symbol of a post with a woman's head atop which gave the inspiration for the Hathor-head columns of her temples. She was a protectress, and tablets engraved with a pair of eyes or ears would assure her seeing and hear a supplicant:

Tell your requests to the Cow of Gold, to the Lady of Happiness...may she give us excellent children, happiness, and a good husband...If cakes are placed before her, she will not be angry.

Breads and cakes are piled high for the gods and goddesses to feast on, as another wall relief from Hatshepsut's great temple shows.

Divine Hatshepsut (as Pharaoh, she too was a god) enjoyed a good nosh.

The Queen's plate is disappointingly empty on Judy Chicago's monumental 'The Dinner Party', the centerpiece around which Pharaohs, Queens, and Goddesses is organized. An icon of 1970s feminist art, The Dinner Party is a massive ceremonial banquet, arranged on a triangular table with 39 place settings, each in honour of an important woman from history or mythology. The settings consist of embroidered runners, gold chalices and utensils, and china-painted porcelain plates with raised central motifs that are based on vulvar and butterfly forms in styles supposedly linked to the individual women.

I don't know what this vulvar pattern has to do with Hatshepsut -- she's not just Every Woman -- but I'm glad to see her at the feast (Hathor was not invited to dine; instead, she is one of the 999 entries written on the floor. Beware, Judy Chicago: Hathor gets angry if left unfed).

Chicago has this to say about the piece: "Because we are denied knowledge of our history, we are deprived of standing upon each other's shoulders and building upon each other's hard earned accomplishments. Instead we are condemned to repeat what others have done before us and thus we continually reinvent the wheel. The goal of The Dinner Party is to break this cycle."'

Bravo! Or, rather, Brava!

Chicago's gallery describes The Dinner Party as 'seminal', and you can't say fairer than that.

I'll be in New York next week and will certainly make it up to Brooklyn. If for no better reason than to search out Zenobia, also relegated to the floor; true, inscribed in gold, but not where an Empress should be. Perhaps I'll drop some blue faience grapes on Hatshepsut's plate....

Next, right back to Sassanian Stuff.

Sassanian Stuff

Emperor Philip the Arab will have to wait a bit. It's about time that I take a break from Rome and write instead about the Persians.

Not that I’m a specialist in Sassanian Persia, far from it; but, when writing the Chronicle of Zenobia: the rebel queen , I had to learn much more about ‘the enemy’ on the other side of the Euphrates than I ever did when I studied Classical Archaeology. Even so, I confess to having a very one-sided view: to me, the Sassanians are always the enemy of Palmyra and Rome.

There’s something wrong with seeing an entire nation and culture as an enemy -- even if the devil, in this case, is ancient Iran. It is limiting, to say the least. It also enforces a very military outlook. For example, I can write at length, about the Persian heavy-armoured cavalry (one such warrior pictured above in a rock relief from Taq-e Bustan), more generally known by their Latin name of clibanarii. I shall now tell you a bit about them, but briefly.

Eye-witnesses have left descriptions of this formidable new force, but some of the best reporting is from Heliodorus, a 3rd C novelist from Emesa in Syria, who writes :

They were clad in iron,and all parts of their bodies were covered with thin circles of iron plates fitted to the curves of their bodies, completely covering their limbs. So dexterously were the joinings made that whichever way they had to move, their garments fitted.

In the 4th C, Ammianus Marcellinus accompanied the Emperor Julian [known, alas, as Julian 'the Apostate' when he would have wished to be remembered as the philosopher emperor] on his Persian expedition. Ammianus' history makes clear that Sassanian clibanarii were clad from top to toe:

All the companies clad in iron, and all parts of their bodies were covered with thick plates, so fitted that the stiff joints conformed with those of their limbs; and forms of the human faces were so skillfully fitted to their heads, that since their entire bodies were covered with metal, arrows that fell upon them could lodge only where they could see a little through tiny openings opposite the pupil of the eye, or where through the tips of their noses they were able to get a little breath.

When the time for battle came, the warrior gave his equally-armoured horse the reins "and spurred him with his heels and rode upon his enemies at full tilt like a man made of iron or a statue fashioned with hammers. He carried a great lance that ran though every man it hit, and often carried away two men together pierced by one stroke.”

'Two men at one stroke' is probably poetic license, but a formation of 1,000 onrushing clibanarii must have been an awesome sight:

The Persians opposed us serried bands of mail-clad horsemen in such close order that the gleam of moving bodies covered with closely fitting plates of iron dazzled the eyes of those who looked upon them

Daunting, to put it mildly. However, they did have an Achilles heel (so to speak). The rider sat in a low saddle with low saddle-bows that made it difficult to maintain balance. Also, unlike medieval knights, they were riding and fighting without the benefits of stirrups: note the position of the foot on this sculptured plaque of an anonymous Sassanian king:


A fully armoured rider dislodged from the saddle was defeated. He couldn't rise from the ground and would lie there until an enemy trooper put him out of his misery with a knife thrust through the throat, where the helmet met the body armour.

Generals always fight the last war.

Throughout most of the third century, despite the Persian danger, the Roman army essentially remained an infantry force; the legions supported by light cavalry only and - in the east - by Syrian horse archers, also light skirmishers, probably without armour. After the destruction of the army of Alexander Severus in 232/3 AD and, again, when the young Gordian III tried to restore the situation in the east in 243/4, the Roman army still consisted mostly of foot soldiers (which is why I assume that the number of Gordian's cavalry in the Apocalypse of Elijah, cited in the previous post, is an anachronism).

The Palmyrans - but not the Romans - drew the lesson: at some point around mid-century, they began forming their own units of heavily-armoured mounted cavalry. Surely the man responsible for these developments was Odenathus, the husband of Zenobia.

Graffiti from Dura Europos give us a glimpse of what the Palmyran heavy cavalry looked like.

That's not a 'dunce's cap' he's wearing but most probably a crude rendering of a Sassanian-type helmet, looking something like the helmet on the right. His horse appears to be protected by long armour extending almost to its hooves. Specimens of iron and copper plates discovered at Dura Europos and dating to the mid-3rd C, however, are not long and extend only to the horse's belly. Perhaps these finds were not meant for clibanarii but to protect horses of the archers of the XXth Palmyrenes; or perhaps the grafitti artist got carried away. This is hardly the first time that 'art' and archaeology diverge but a close look at the (admittedly later) Taq-e Bustan horse -- at the top of the post -- does seem to show the beast covered as far as its hocks.

Between mid-century and 272 AD, when Zenobia led the Palmyran troops into battle against the Romans, the Palmyran clibanarii had become a force to be remembered. Festus, a Byzantine historian, writing in ca. 370 tells us that

[Zenobia] you see, following her husband’s death held the empire of the East under female sway. Aurelian defeated her, supported as she was by many thousands of clibanarii and archers, at Immae, not far from Antioch....

Some Palmyran clibanarii even managed to survive the fall of the city itself. At the close of the 3rd century or early in the 4th, the 'Register of Dignitaries' (Notitia Dignitatum), which lists all the official posts and military units of the later divided empire, mentions a cunea equitum secundorum clibanariorum Palmirenorum.

The Romans still had need, it seems, of Eastern skills -- even when detached from their ruined homeland. By then, the Roman army had started to recruit units of clibanarii from elsewhere in the Empire and, at much the same time, begun state production of armament for the heavy armoured horsemen in Antioch and other eastern centres.

Slow starters, I would say.

Next: Why the Romans Always Seem To Get In First Licks

Little Gordian Goes to War, Part II

Scroll down, please, or click, and read Part I first if this sequel is to make any sense.

While the Roman soldiers were still girding their loins, in April 239 AD the Persians made their first assault on the walls of Dura Europos, an outpost on the middle Euphrates and Palmyra's nearest eastern neighbour (its citadel pictured left). If once the enemy got onto the hills above the city, there would be no further natural obstacle nor fortified place that could check their advance between those heights and Palmyra itself. So, when the Persians attacked Dura, it must have sent shock waves right across the empty desert: if Dura were taken, could Palmyra be far behind?

Life in Dura was dominated by the presence of a large Roman garrison, which took over the entire northern part of the town, but its economy was based on the caravans that crossed the river there: this prosperity was already being undermined by constant wars and the severing of trade down-river in what was now Persian territory.

Still, the city presented an amazingly cosmopolitan appearance. In addition to the established mix of Syrians (especially Palmyrans), Mesopotamians, and passing nomads, some of whom probably already thought of themselves as Arabs, there were also Greeks, Parthians, and a thriving community of Jews with strong connections to the major Jewish centres across the Euphrates in Babylonia.


They constructed a rich synagogue, with stunning wall-paintings of Biblical scenes [the above panel shows the Exodus and Crossing of the Red Sea; all 28 panels illustrated at the Yale Divinity School website] -- and this despite the Jewish prohibition on graven images; but, hey! 3rd-century Dura was a tolerant, easy-going place. As witness, too, the nearby Christian house-church and baptistry, an evidently open presence in the middle of a major Roman garrison town, despite the on-again, off-again persecution of Christians elsewhere in the empire.

There is no evidence for Roman legions guarding the middle and lower Euphrates or policing the desert against nomads ever ready to ambush caravans and loot their goods. The whole area, it seems, was militarily dependent on Palmyra. A regiment of horse archers, the XXth Palmyrenes, protected the city. One of the officers who served in this regiment in the late 230s has a real presence for us.


He is Julius Terentius, shown in the centre of this wall painting from Dura's own Temple of Bel, leading his men in an incense sacrifice to the personified Fortunes (Tychai) of Palmyra and Dura and three other Palmyran gods. Julius Terentius is also named in the Greek verse epitaph which his wife put up for him when he died in battle: brave in campaigns, mighty in wars, dead -- a man worthy of memory, Aurelia Arria buried her beloved husband, whom may the divine spirits receive. That was perhaps the moment in April 239 when "the Persians descended upon us", as a graffito records. Perhaps this was no more than a Persian spring raid, taking advantage of the abundant fodder for horses on this side of the Euphrates, and it was beaten off, no doubt by the brave XXth Palmyrenes.

The First Campaign of Shapur against the Roman Empire

In Mesopotamia, too, Roman arms were successful: in 241/2, the emperor's father-in-law, the Praetorian Prefect Timesitheus led the army against the Persians on what had been, if only recently, Roman provincial territory. His first objective was to restore the lost province (roughly now northern Iraq and SE Turkey). He met up with the enemy near a town called Resaina (not far from modern Mosul), where he won a decisive victory. The cities of Carrhae and Nisibis were retaken:

Indeed, the king of the Persians became so fearful of the Emperor Gordian that, though he was provided with forces both from his own lands and from ours, he nevertheless evacuated the cities and restored them unharmed to their citizens.

The news was sent to Rome, and an exultant Senate decreed a Persian triumph for Gordian with chariots drawn by four elephants, and a six-horse chariot and triumphal car for Timesitheus. So, once again, the Romans, initially, were victorious - but it is much easier to invade Mesopotamia than to extricate oneself, and harder still to maintain one’s conquests.

Such felicity could not endure.

Gordian, of course, had not yet arrived at the front lines. All this had been accomplished by Timesitheus. It was only in 242 that the emperor set off on his own expeditio Orientalis, so Gordian's Mesopotamian campaign must belong to 243/4. Meeting up with his army near the Persian frontier, the Romans went over to the offensive. They marched southward to the borders of Babylonia, apparently having the Persian capital Ctesiphon (near Baghdad) as their campaign objective.

The Jewish Apocalypse of Elijah puts their numbers at 100,000 cavalry, 100,000 foot, and 30,000 men from ships. While we needn't take this too seriously, an army of anything like that size needs massive provisions for men and beasts, an effort made more difficult by their having begun their march much earlier than the normal campaigning season. Making matters worse, the retreating Persians surely carried out a scorched earth policy, which aggravated the problems of supplies.

At this crucial point, Timesitheus died under mysterious circumstance, whether of fever, as reported, or poisoned, as suspected. A sensible emperor might have read the omens, called it a day, and withdrawn with honour into Roman territory. Instead, the campaign against the Sassanians continued and the Roman army proceeded to march down the Euphrates during the fall and early winter.

That was a bad mistake.

The surviving Praetorian Prefect, Julius Priscus, convinced the emperor to appoint his brother Philip as Timesitheus' successor. Another bad mistake: Philip proved to have higher ambitions. The Historiae Augustae does not like Philip (any more than it liked Gordian's mother):

This Philip was low-born but arrogant, and now could not contain himself in his sudden rise to office and immoderate good fortune, but immediately, through the soldiers, began to plot against Gordian, who had begun to treat him as a father.

What Hist. Aug. oddly does not mention is that Philip was from the Nabataean-Arab region of the Hauran (the grim black basalt hills on today's Syrian-Jordanian border); and that, as a Byzantine historian tells us, was

a nation in bad repute, and [Philip] had advanced his fortune by not very honourable means, and once he had assumed office he began to aspire to imperial dignity.

So he is remembered in history as 'Philip the Arab' (ruled 244-249).

As if Gordian need more bad luck, he was about to clash in battle with one of the great warriors of history, the second Sassanian King of Kings, Shapur I .


Early in 244, the Roman and Sassanian armies met again near the city of Misikhe (modern Fallujah in Iraq: isn't it marvellous how such place names have become familiar to us? as the saying goes, 'War is God's way of teaching Americans geography'). In the ensuing battle, the Roman army was obliterated.

The Persian version of events, carved in stone with a trilingual inscription (at Naqsh-e Rustam near Persepolis in Iran) , claims that Gordian III was killed in the battle:

When at first we [Shapur] had become established in the Empire, Gordian Caesar raised in all of the Roman Empire a force from the Goth and German realms and marched on Babylonia against the Empire of [Persia] and against us. On the border of Babylonia at Misikhe, a great frontal battle occurred. Gordian Caesar was killed and the Roman force was destroyed.

An elaborate rock carving of Shapur's triumph at Bishapur in the Shiraz region of Iran, pictured above, makes the same point: it shows Gordian III trampled under the hooves of Shapur's horse (you might have to enlarge the photograph to see clearly the young emperor's writhing body beneath its forelegs). And, finally, to rub salt in the wound, the city of Misikhe was renamed Peroz-Shapur, "Victorious [is] Shapur."

Roman sources do not mention this battle at all ('media spokesmen' controlled the press in the ancient world too!). But Philip is universally blamed for causing Gordian III's death, either having him murdered or stirring up mutiny by deliberately cutting off the troops' food supplies. In these truncated editions, it was only after the Roman army (or what was left of it) retreated up the Euphrates that Gordian was assassinated and Philip took his place.

Then Philip Caesar came to us for terms, and to ransom their lives, gave us 500,000 denarii, and became tributary to us.

Whether or not Shapur is truthful in reporting that Philip acknowledged his suzerainty (he's the one seen kneeling before the Persian king), a peace of sorts was concluded. What is certain at least is that the Romans built a cenotaph for Gordian at a place on the Persian side of the Euphrates river, some 50 miles north of Dura Europos, and then Philip departed for Rome.

He took with him the ashes of the 19-year old Gordian, who had been, by all accounts, a cheerful, good-hearted lad. The Senate may (or may not) have placed the third Gordian among the gods, a suitably uncertain end to a murky reign.


The photo's of the citadel at Dura Europos and Julius Terentius fresco from University of Leicester . Main sources include F. Millar, The Roman Near East, and the websites of Simon James, and De Imperatoribus Romanis.