{"id":971,"date":"2009-02-20T11:22:43","date_gmt":"2009-02-20T11:22:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/?p=971"},"modified":"2009-02-20T11:22:43","modified_gmt":"2009-02-20T11:22:43","slug":"recreational-use-of-a-nymphaeum-in-ancient-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/2009\/02\/20\/recreational-use-of-a-nymphaeum-in-ancient-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Recreational use of a nymphaeum in ancient times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p align=\"justify\">A few weeks ago the <a href=\"http:\/\/libaniusredux.blogspot.com\/2009\/01\/reservoiramphitheatre-conundrum.html\" target=\"_blank\">Antiochepedia site\u00a0mentioned<\/a> that an unspecified Arabic source <sup>1<\/sup>\u00a0suggested that skin diseases could be cured by bathing in the town water supply.\u00a0 This rather horrible idea seemed unusual; but I wonder.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">When I was in Leptis Magna, I saw the nymphaeum there.\u00a0 The temple was essentially a facade onto a massive concrete storage tank, which collected water from the rivers and stored it for use by the city.\u00a0 Temples of the nymphs are associated with springs, and sources of water in general, and thus with the urban water supply.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">This leads me to wonder if this is what we are looking at here in Antioch as well; the miraculous supply of life-giving water being associated with the gods &#8212; the nymphs, here &#8212; and curative powers associated with the latter?\u00a0 If so, the procedure above would make more sense.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Note: 1.\u00a0 Antiochepedia doesn&#8217;t say what it is, other than &#8216;Guidi&#8217;, but a google search on Antioch and Guidi says that this seems to be a short early Islamic text, much of it fanciful.\u00a0 I. Guidi, &#8216;una descrizione araba di Antiocheia&#8217;, <em>Rendiconti della R. Accademia dei Lincei, Cl. di scienze morali, storiche e filolgiche<\/em>, ser. 5, vol 6, pp. 137-161 (1897).\u00a0 It&#8217;s only 24 pages, half of which at least is an Italian translation.\u00a0 I wish this existed in English.\u00a0 I wonder what it would cost to translate.\u00a0 Not a lot, I would guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago the Antiochepedia site\u00a0mentioned that an unspecified Arabic source 1\u00a0suggested that skin diseases could be cured by bathing in the town water supply.\u00a0 This rather horrible idea seemed unusual; but I wonder. When I was in Leptis Magna, I saw the nymphaeum there.\u00a0 The temple was essentially a facade onto a massive [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[191,1207,1287],"class_list":["post-971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ancient-world","tag-antioch","tag-nymphaeum","tag-patristics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}