Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
A correspondent drew my attention to this interesting statement in a current handbook. He also added some glosses (in square brackets) to make it generally comprehensible: Cumont’s [late-19th- and early-20th-century] reconstruction suffered a mortal blow at the first conference of Mithraic studies, held in Manchester in 1971 (GORDON, 1975), and has not been revived since. […]
In the Budapest National Museum, there is a rather splendid bronze plaque depicting a tauroctony. Julianna Lees has uploaded to Picasa this photo, which I came across this evening. (I hope that link works, by the way: for some reason it isn’t at all obvious what the URL is). She gives the date of the […]
Like most people online, I first encountered references to Mithras in the kind of rather crude atheist polemic that goes, “Jesus is really Mithras! Har har!”. A correspondent has written to me about this, and it turns out that he has been reading into the scholarly literature as I have. An interesting paper by a […]
Mithras, the subterranean sun, must be the most unfortunate of ancient deities. There is so much twaddle talked online. A correspondent today drew my attention to what must easily be the most ignorant statement about him that I have ever seen. And there is considerable competition for that title, you know! As usual, it is […]
Looking around Picasa, I came across the following fascinating photograph by John Bartram of a pair of tauroctonies (click on the image for a larger view): Now the resolution is a little low but … what is the script on the lower tauroctony? The upper inscription is Greek, plainly enough, although I can’t quite […]
An email from my old Wikipedia account alerted me to some pointless dispute going on there. So this evening I went onto the account and shut off further emails and made sure the account was dead. There is no purpose in sensible people attempting to contribute to Wikipedia, since it is really a collection of hearsay edited […]
I came across a reference yesterday to an inscription referring to a “babylonian priest of mithras”, here.: Amar Annus, The soul’s ascent and Tauroctony: On Babylonian sediment in the syncretic religious doctrines of late antiquity, Studien zu Ritual und Sozialgeschichte im Alten Orient, 2007, p.1-54. On p.31 we find this interesting statement, after noting that “Chaldean” […]
In the Vita Pompeii Plutarch tells us that the Cilician pirates, originally equipped by Mithradates VI of Pontus, as we learn from Appian 63 and 92, worshipped “Mithra”. They were accustomed to offer strange sacrifices on Olympus and to observe certain secret rites, of which that of Mithra is maintained to the present day by […]
Turkey is a land of many interesting archaeological sites, and I would very much like to go there some day! One of them is a curiosity — a site in the minor Hellenistic kingdom of Commagene, at a place today known as Nemrud Dag in South-Eastern Turkey, adjoining Syria. There is a website for an […]