Tag: Information access

I’ve just added a page to my new Mithras site for CIMRM 1083.  This monument is perhaps the most complicated and well-preserved example of a carving of Mithras killing the bull.  It shows all sorts of events from his (unknown) mythology in side panels.  In other words, it’s a gem.  Vermaseren states that just about every book that ever mentions Mithras includes a photograph of it.  It’s famous.  It’s the classic representation.  It comes from the Nida-Heddernheim Mithraeum no 1, and apparently it’s in a museum in Wiesbaden.

Yet … I have been quite unable to find any photographs of it on the web!  Yes, the internet doesn’t have the classic relief of Mithras doing his Mithras-act.

It is worth reminding ourselves that what is online may be very skewed.  We tend to judge by availability.  Yet here we have an example where the internet is distorting the message, by omitting something really, really important.  It leads to the general question: how is the internet misleading us?

Here’s Vermaseren’s image of it, for your reference:

I have flu and can’t do anything!  Rats!  But I did manage to add CIMRM 335 to my Mithras pages.  It’s a marble relief of Mithras killing the bull, with some quite clear images of the other figures that hang around while the Persian guy is sticking it to the bull.  So it gets referenced quite a bit.  I noticed David Ulansey referred to it, while discussing the meaning of Cautes and Cautopates.

What’s interesting about this relief is … it’s lost.  Indeed it’s long since been turned into lime and pasted between some renaissance bricks.  Franz Cumont, in his collection of 1894, could do no more than reproduce the  line-drawing given by Montfaucon in the 18th century.  Which is not great, since the original was found and published in 1564.

One of the marvellous things about the web is that you can find original materials.  In the days when we all had to rely on libraries, you’d be very lucky if your research library even had the book.  The chances were that you wouldn’t be allowed to handle a book of that era.  As for getting a copy of a page… oh no!  Ask and the librarian would look down their long nose and make quite clear that you were not likely to be allowed to do that.  Dear me, no!  At the most you might get a very poor quality reproduction.

Today I just typed the stuff into Google, and in seconds came to the University of Chicago site, found the original, downloaded it — thoughtfully they indicated their permissions policy — uploaded it and was all done in less time than it took an old-type clerk to purse his lips and look distasteful.

Magic!

I found a picture of Mithras killing the bull online today.  There’s loads of photos on the web, of various monuments, all slightly different.  Identifying them is fun!

Anyway, using the lettering “Alexander”, that I could see on the photo, I did a search in the PDF’s I have of Vermaseren’s CIMRM– collection of all the monuments.  I found it fairly easily.  It’s CIMRM 603.   So I created a page on the new Mithras site for CIMRM 603 and 604.  I included the image.

Anyone searching for CIMRM 603 ought to find it, although, as yet, Google doesn’t seem to pick my site up.  Wonder why.

Vermaseren’s entry, tho, was interesting.  Because he obviously hadn’t seen the monument!  All he had was a literature search.  He reckoned that it was probably the same as an item published in 1746 in Museum Romanum.

Here’s the good bit: I thought it might be fun to find the 1746 publication.  And I did.  It took a bit of faffing around, but then it all just worked.  And I grabbed that engraving, and included that as well.

You know, we are so blessed to live in an age when books are freely available.  Despite the best efforts of German publishers to screw it all up, we can get hold of stuff that previous scholars — like Vermaseren — could only dream of.

The limit is your imagination…

Anyone who searches for “Mithras” in Google images is confronted with a mass of photographs by all sorts of people from all sorts of sites across the web.  There’s a lot of good images there, clear and useful … but the site owners rarely give the CIMRM reference number, and usually have no real information on what you’re looking at.

I’ve started to address this on my new Mithras site.  I’ve created a gallery of selected monuments, and an upload wizard that allows me to create new entries fairly easily.  Each monument has a page with an image or two, the CIMRM text, and whatever else is to hand.

The idea, simply, is that if you find a reference in the scholarly literature to “CIMRM 593”, you don’t just sigh and rub your eyes.  Instead you can go to the gallery, find out what it looks like, find links to a couple of images, and then, if need me, hunt down some more photos yourself.

CIMRM 593 is a good example.  That’s it, on the right.  It’s an item which must be photographed dozens of times every day, because it lives in the British Museum in London, on public display.

What makes it important is that it seems to be one of the very earliest tauroctonies – monuments of Mithras killing the bull.  The two chaps at the back are Cautes and Cautopates, the torch bears, in an unusual position.  Unfortunately the statue was restored at some remote date.  Various bits are not original: the head should be facing towards us, and there are other bits that are not right.  But now … you can get details of what is not authentic from my page above.

And suddenly, you don’t have to be a specialist in order to know anything about the monument.  We can all look, even if we don’t have the training of a professional, once we know what those images on Google Images are.  We can all see what the argument is about, at least.

Which is what I want to make possible.