From my diary

I’ve started to look at the material on the earliest Mithraic monuments.  This is frustrating, because of what I know is online and cannot see!  Thus I cannot see pp.34-35 of Beck on Mithraism, even though I know it is online.  If you can, and feel like sending me some screen grabs, I would be grateful.*

Meanwhile my attention has been drawn to the mysterious Kerch plaques, which show a bull-killing but not a familiar one.  This led me to look at the CIMRM.  From this I learn that Derewitzky, Das Museum der Kaiserlich Odessaer Gesellschaft, vol. 2, 1898, contains useful material on p.10 f., and plate V, 1.  Again … I can’t access the dratted thing.  I wonder whether that is because I am in the UK, and so “Outside The Wall of Knowledge”; or whether the book simply isn’t online.  Rats!

Not that I am the only one to have this problem.  Vermaseren himself, in CIMRM 10, describes a report of a find of a Mithraeum at Aitador in the Crimea, and adds:

This sanctuary of the Persian god is said to have been published by Rostovtzeff in IIKA^[1] 40, 1911, 1 ff;, but up to now we have not yet succeeded in consulting this article.

I suspect Vermaseren would envy my access to materials online, tho.  A little searching, a bit of Google “did you mean to search for” something incomprehensible in Russian, a list at AWOL, and I find that vol. 40, 1911, here.

Wonder if I can get much out of this, using Google Translate…!

UPDATE: Blasted thing is in DJVU format, and with a website name as “watermark”.  So I can’t export the thing for character recognition.  Let me try printing it – I have the Adobe PDF driver installed and should be able to “print to PDF”.

The table of contents says that the article is about “Thracian gods”.

UPDATE: Sadly the resolution in the DJVU is too low to get any OCR to work.  Rats!

* Got it – thanks!

1. ^[1]=”Izvesti ja imperatorskoi kommissii archeologiceskoi. See also CR Comm. Arch. Petersbourg”, or so Vermaseren says.↩