Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
I’ve been looking at another story about Mithras originating with Franz Cumont. In the process, I find that the PDF’s I have of his master-work, Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra, 2 vols, 1899- are not that good where the pictures are concerned. A Google Books search reveals nothing. But I suspect this is […]
You can learn quite a lot from looking at non-English versions of Wikipedia. For instance the German Mithras article is quite a bit superior to the English one in several respects, handling the Mithra-Mithras dichotomy well. It lacks the heavy referencing that I added to the English one; but since all that work did not save the article from […]
A truly interesting article at Past Horizons: Temple of Mithras to be restored to its original location. Plans to dismantle and move the reconstructed Roman Temple of Mithras to temporary storage, ahead of a more faithful reconstruction, will begin on the 21 November 2011 by Museum of London Archaeology. The temple, which is located at […]
I’ve been thinking about Mithras and Mithra, Roman and Persian. Some of the comments on my recent post, Why Cumontian Mithras studies are dead, suggested that Roman syncretism could not be left out of account, and that any eastern cult that entered the Roman world was likely to undergo modification. There is much truth in […]
An idle search in Google images for “Mithra Zoroastrianism” brought up precisely NO images of the Zoroastrian god. It’s quite interesting, really, not least because I have no idea how he was depicted — if he was depicted — in reliefs. It also brought up a number of unfamiliar tauroctonies of Mithras. The need for […]
A post in an online forum queried whether an English translation existed of the “Halkin Vita” of Constantine. I had never heard of this item, but a little searching revealed that it is a medieval Greek Saint’s “Life”, mostly fictitious, of the Emperor. A reference to a medieval patriarch dates it to after the iconoclast disputes, […]
Over the weekend I was thinking about the ancient information that has reached us about the cult of Mithras. There is a considerable quantity of not-very-useful literary testimonies, but the majority of the material is inscriptional or in the form of reliefs and statuary. All this was sparked by thinking about a depiction of the […]
Another item I spotted via AWOL is that the British Museum (upon whom be blessings) has made its database of what it holds available on the web. You can search it here, and an advanced search is here. Welcome to the British Museum collection database online. Search almost two million objects from the entire Museum […]
A couple of interesting articles have come my way today. Tommaso Leoni has written an overview of the textual transmission of the works of Josephus.[1] This reads rather like a summary of secondary literature, rather than a piece of new research, but, since much of that literature is in languages which anglophone scholars tend to […]