Yale University Art Gallery
“Abuna,” funerary relief, limestone with trace of paint, from around 170-230 A.D.
As the world frets about whether ancient sculptures will survive the sledgehammers of the newly arrived conquerors of Palmyra, Syria, a sense of what’s at stake can be found here in New Haven.
Five moving Palmyrene funerary reliefs are on permanent view at Chapel Street’s Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG), part of its world famous Dura-Europos exhibition.
So is a little chapel dedicated to the god Mithras, erected by a detachment of Palmyrene archers stationed with the Roman army in a little garrison town called Dura-Europos, 150 miles from Palmyra.
The news that has the art world fretting — this week’s conquest of Palmyra by ISIS — sent a chill through YUAG Assistant Curator of Ancient Art Lisa Brody. Palmyra is, as this New York Times article noted, “home to some of the world’s most magnificent remnants of antiquity. ISIS has made a point of destroying such artifacts after its conquests.
As she followed the news with mounting concern, Brody introduced a visitor to Abuna, a stunning, elegant first-century woman memorialized in one of the reliefs.
Allan Appel
“It’s such a horrible situation [in Palmyra], we can be a little glad we have these things here we can preserve,” said Brody (pictured).
Brody introduced a visitor to Abuna, a stunning, elegant first-century woman memorialized in one of the reliefs (pictured at the top of the story).
YUAG’s five 2nd century A.D. reliefs, all of sharply cut limestone, live in a little room off the main Dura-Europos gallery.
Click here for the gallery’s full descriptions and official images of the pieces.
Brody, an archeologist by training, said that compared to the approximately 10,000 people, including many soldiers, who likely inhabited the military outpost of Dura-Europos, Palmyra was a much larger cosmopolitan place in antiquity, a major stopping point and trading center.
It would have hosted merchants on the caravan and commercial route up the Euphrates river.
From there, goods made their way west to what is now Syria and Lebanon.
Still-painted shields, helmets and other cool military gear were preserved from Dura-Europos, because many of the walls came down in a siege in the third century.
Fewer items of domestic, military, or personal use from Palmyra survive.
Dura-Europos though tiny, was a multicultural place, with Greeks, Romans, Persians, early Christians, and even Jews, evidenced by colorful remains of a synagogue. Brody speculated that Palmyra likely had the same kind of diverse profile, only larger.
“I’m sure Palmyra had that multicultural history. That’s one of the reasons why ISOL [aka ISIS, or the Islamic State] is targeting it, because they are into ‘cultural cleansing,’” Brody said.
The main languages spoken in these two centers were not Latin but Greek and Aramaic, Brody added.
Next to Abuna’s proud visage you can see the Aramaic letters (on the right in the photo) looking a lot like Hebrew, retaining a touch of the red paint with which the busts were decorated, and spelling out, in translation: “Abuna, daughter of Nabuna, son of Anini. Alas!”
In another corner of the hauntingly lit gallery you can ride time’s arrow in reverse for a fleeting connection to the detachment of archers, hailing from Palmyra, yet serving Rome in her Dura-Europos fort.
They were devotees of neither the old Roman gods nor the new-fangled Christian faith — pieces of a 3rd century “storefront” church are also in the exhibition—but their mystery cult or god Mithras.
One of their leaders, a soldier named Zenobias, led an ancient crowd-sourcing campaign by which he and his mates built a chapel to honor Mithras.
As a frontier commercial city where the edge of the Roman empire met the edge of Asian cultures, Palmyra, like the protecting garrison nearby, seems to have had precisely the live-and-let-live quality — at least for some centuries — that ISIS stands against.
Sharply carved, frontally posed Palmyrene portraits busts are not rare, Brody said. In addition to Yale’s five on display there are another five to ten in storage, and similar holdings are in museums around the world.
Still there may be other such works and maybe some surprises under the ground still and un-excavated at Palmyra. Those, along with the standing temples and colonnades, are all in jeopardy.
Brody said all her colleagues involved in Syrian digs are now outside of the country, so she has no firsthand knowledge of what is going on there, or in Dura-Europos.
Yet the feeling is not good. Comparing recent aerial photographs of the Dura-Europos site to those of the 1930s, when the original major excavations took place, reveals lots of disturbances, destruction, and signs of looting, she said.
A Danish archeologist, Prof. Rubina Raja, at Aarhus University, is making a digital database of all Palmyrene busts, Brody added.
Brody said she is unaware of any attempts on the part of her colleagues to intervene. She is as painfully aware as the rest of the world of ISIS’s aim to provoke the West through art desecration.