by Simon Schama
At which point, aside from the odd Christian hermit drawn to the barely protruding ruins, and the occasional mule and camel train plodding along by the river, Dura-Europos stayed uninhabited and unexplored. Had the Sassanians made it a Persian city again, they might have radically altered Dura but, as it was, it slept intact beneath its mantle of dirt. The logistics of its last sieges had buried it alive. The city had twice changed hands between Romans and Persians with defenders and attackers alike building enormous ramped earthwork embankments, within and without the western desert-facing walls, filling in buildings abandoned by their civilian occupants. Sandstorms completed the shrouding of what Dura-Europos had once been, so that it stood as an enormous sand-mound high between the Euphrates and the Syrian sky.
In 1920, C. M. Murphy, a British army officer, poked at it with his swagger stick and met resistance. Shovels were imperially summoned for the fellahin, the farmers and villagers, and before long eroded foundation forms of mud-and-plaster buildings emerged, followed by standing walls bearing rudimentary paintings which, Murphy thought, looked very ancient. His senior officer was alerted; the senior officer wired the formidable Gertrude Bell, then busy concocting a constitution for the British-created kingdom of Iraq. Official support was offered – on the usual parsimonious and hum-hawing terms – and the tentative work of uncovering began. But Dura-Europos – halfway between Mesopotamia and Palmyra – fell within the Syrian territory mandated to French control by the League of Nations. Slow to the holster in the duels of colonial archaeology, the French had been beaten to the draw by an American Egyptologist, James Breasted, who began digging in earnest in 1921. Asserting their excavation rights the French took over, but from 1928 they pooled their resources with the Americans in a joint expedition organised under the auspices of Yale University.
For five seasons jaw-dropping splendours were revealed: eleven pagan temples and shrines – Roman, Greek and Mithraic – some with murals. Armour, papyri, ceramics, jewellery were scooped up as the dirt was brushed away from them in dwelling after dwelling. Inscriptions were found in a babel of languages: Greek most of all, but also Aramaic (of many local dialects), Parthian and non-Parthian Persian, Latin, Semitic-Arab and Hebrew. Most astonishingly, the earliest known Christian building of any kind: a baptistery chapel dating from the early third century BCE and thus well before the Roman Empire adopted Christianity in the reign of Constantine. The chapel too was painted, albeit crudely, with scenes from both the New Testament – the healing of the paralytic, the three Marys at the tomb of Christ – and the Old – stories like the slaying of Goliath by David, which were read as prophetic prefigurations of the coming of Christ and the victory of the Gospel.
The Yale director of Dura-Europos, Professor Michael Rostoftzeff, had assumed – and certainly hoped – that the discovery of pre-Byzantine Christian iconography would astonish the world. To his dismay the world beyond the recondite groves of academic archaeology didn’t seem to care that much. Greece and Rome were still the big draws and Egypt, archaeologically colonised by the British, got all the headlines. What could you do with narrow-minded unimaginative Christians? Now the Jews, they were a different story . . . If only, he confided to Clark Hopkins, a synagogue could be unearthed at Dura-Europos in the upcoming sixth season, then the vital significance of the site would be grasped at last, and due acclaim given to the unearthers.
And lo, came November 1933.
A little unfortunately, Hopkins compared his epiphany to his experience of a train crash:
I had no recollection of the moment between the shock when I was thrown from my seat and when I began to pick myself up from the bottom of the overturned car. So it was at Dura. All I can remember is the astonishment, the disbelief, as painting after painting came into view. The west wall faced the morning sun which had risen triumphantly behind us revealing a strange phenomenon. In spite of having been encased in dry dust for centuries the murals retained a vivid brightness that was little short of the miraculous . . . Aladdin’s lamp had been rubbed and suddenly from the dry, brown bare desert appeared paintings not just one nor a panel nor a wall but a whole building, scene after scene, all drawn from the Old Testament in a way never dreamed of before.1
That they were looking at a synagogue, one of the earliest known, created just a century and a half after the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, seemed inconceivable. For this building had something unknown in any other ancient synagogue: paintings. All four walls of a spacious chamber – the largest public room in the entire city – were packed, end to end, floor to ceiling with frescoes. How was this possible? Surely the Jews didn’t do pictures, especially not in their place of worship. Exodus 20:4, repeated by Deuteronomy 5:8, had proscribed the making of graven images ‘of anything that is in heaven above and the earth below’. Rabbis, cultural critics, much of the received wisdom of the Gentile and Jewish worlds would have echoed that assumption. The only exception, it was commonly said (notwithstanding one of the richest traditions of manuscript illumination in the world, including daily and festival prayer books and the Talmud), was the Passover Haggadah, and none of those were known before the tenth century CE, nor printed ones of course before the sixteenth. It seems odd, in retrospect, that more scholars never bothered to consider what exactly the Hebrew text of the Second Commandment meant.
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when it became a truism inside and outside Jewish opinion that the Torah flatly proscribes picturing, especially of human forms. Even by the fourth century CE, writers and codifiers of the Talmud were still interpreting the Second Commandment to mean a ban only on objects, mostly three-dimensional, of idolatry. And for good reason. Exodus 20:4 and Deuteronomy 5:8 use two Hebrew words to characterise the forbidden objects: pesel and temunah. The first, from a root meaning to carve, without any question means not paintings or mosaics but wrought figures – sculptures and reliefs – precisely the category of cult objects, common in the ancient Near East and the classical world, that a religion of a formless deity would want to reject. Temunah is more complicated, as it derives from min meaning a species, a class of things sharing identical defining characteristics. Extended somewhat, then, it seems to have come to be used as ‘likeness’ or ‘copy’, not unlike the sense of the Greek eikon. The ban was on such ‘likenesses’ of things ‘existing in heaven and earth’, which again strongly suggests fashioned objects of idolatrous devotion. The very next verse in Exodus (20:5) makes it clear that the criterion of their offensiveness was their capacity to command vain worship.
A famous, lovely aggadah (exemplary story) from the second/ third-century CE law code of the Mishnah – in the tractate dealing with idolatrous objects – makes exactly this distinction between incidental ornament and devotional images. The patriarchal sage Rabban Gamaliel is splashing away in ‘Aphrodite’s Bathhouse’ in Ptolemais (Acre), when a know-it-all Greek, Peroqlos (Pericles) Pelopsos, calls him out for not obeying the Torah’s strictures on shunning places with statues. ‘Answers aren’t given in a bathhouse,’ says the rabbi and goes on scrubbing. But as the two men exit he tells the Greek, artfully, ‘I never went into her bathhouse. She came into mine! They don’t say, “Let’s make a bathhouse as an ornament for Aphrodite”; they say, “Let’s make Aphrodite as an ornament for the bathhouse.”’ And just in case he hasn’t made it clear that since the bathhouse is scarcely a temple no one could accuse him of idolatry, he adds, ‘Even if someone gave you a lot of money you’d never walk into a temple stark naked . . . and take a piss in its [the statue’s] presence . . but look there it is [the statue] . . . and everyone’s pissing away right in front of her.’2 Point taken, Rabbi. In a culture where statues were everywhere, one could scarcely avoid them when going about one’s business.
But the paintings at Dura were not in a bathhouse; they were in a synagogue where the pictures and the Bible text lived inseparably as objects of devotion. The Torah itself was surrounded by them. Projecting from the south wall – that is, facing Jerusalem
as all synagogues now did – is an arched niche, flanked by twisted ‘Solomonic’ columns, almost certainly modelled on those of classical and oriental paganism. Clark Hopkins’s wife posed for a photograph seated on what she imagined was a sort of stone bench or throne. There is some evidence of ‘seats of Moses’ in early synagogues but this was probably a low stone shelf. In the pagan temples the shelf would have been used as a pedestal for a statue of the venerated deity. At Dura, the niche functioned as an Ark to hold the scrolls of the law. Holes drilled above it suggest that curtains hung down over it, in direct emulation of the purple-crimson ‘veil’ protecting the impenetrable sanctity of the Temple Holy of Holies. The flat surfaces of the ‘Ark’ were decorated with images meant to sustain the memory of the destroyed Temple and faith in its rebuilding (perhaps at the hands of the oncoming Persians who had made this happen before!). That Temple itself was described by the painting of a recessed-columned portico. A seven-branched candlestick was pictorially recovered from its Roman captivity and painted in yellow to suggest the gold. Close by were symbols of the pilgrimage festivals embodied in the ‘four species’ – the palm spear, the citron, sprigs of myrtle and willow – that had been brought to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles. And, as elsewhere in early synagogues, the akedah appears: Abraham’s binding of his son Isaac in obedient preparation for the appalling sacrifice demanded by YHWH as a loyalty test. The 120 Jews who could easily have been accommodated in the Dura assembly hall would have grasped the complicated resonance of the sacrifice, averted by the outstretched hand of God and the providential supply of a ram ‘caught in a thicket’ as an alternative. The cult of animal sacrifice in the Temple (as well as the ban on consuming animal blood) was the affirmation of abhorrence at human sacrifice, but Abraham’s act of blind faith was to be repaid by the sealing of a covenant between YHWH and His people, symbolised by the nick of the knife on the foreskin. A promise had been made. If Jews kept their side of it, then the further promise of a liberating, redeeming messiah and the rebuilding of the Temple, would be assured. So at the very edge of the Roman Empire, what Rome had wrought on Jerusalem, was undone in the synagogue painting.
Many of the biblical subjects lining the walls may well have been chosen to carry this message promising of an eventual redemption. Two key figures in the furthering of that promise – Moses and David – are shown at the beginnings of their prophetic roles. David is anointed by Samuel, both of them wearing togas and Roman haircuts.
In a wonderful painting, Pharaoh’s daughter holds the infant Moses, standing amid the Nile waters, its reeds and rushes indicated by curls of the painter’s brush. The picture is at once naturalistically humanised and formally ceremonious, as befits so fateful a moment. The young woman, who after all has been bathing, is clad in nothing more than a transparently wet himation, in contrast to the modestly clothed figures of Moses’ mother Jochabed and his sister Miriam, looking anxiously on behind her. Before the princess is the bobbing crib – designed like a little ark, also typical of the cradles of its time and place – in which the child had been found. Not realistic at all are the expansive open-armed gestures, one made by the princess, the other by the infant, the mutual echo almost an anticipation of Madonna and Child – but in this case open to the awareness of the destiny that will unfold from this moment in the waters. The picture is at once formal and informal, hieratic and popular, mysterious and accessible, literary and iconic. If you were a Jewish father or mother in Dura-Europos and you were with your children in that synagogue there would be much to tell them, pointing this way and that at the painting.
The two human pillars of the Judaic story reappear again and again: Moses at the Burning Bush and, as an Aramaic inscription makes clear, ‘cleaving the sea’; David enthroned as a Jewish Orpheus, holding creation spellbound, and defeating the Philistines.
The principal patron-benefactor of the Dura community – the first Maecenas of the diaspora – was one Samuel, hence the prominence given to his namesake in the anointing of David. As was often the case in this earliest period, the synagogue (like Christian chapels of the time) had begun within his house. Samuel must have been wealthy enough to have afforded the ambitious expansion which followed, requiring the demolition of exterior walls and the creation of a fine roof-ceiling embellished with painted ceramic tiles. But socially, the Jews of Dura would have been as mixed a bunch as those of Elephantine half a millennium earlier. Like their Egyptian forebears they were mercenary soldiers, artisans and tradesmen, and some were even local officials, tax collectors – though unlike in Elephantine, some of them would have been slaves or ex-slaves made bondsmen by the Roman conquerors. Few, however, would have been ignorant of their Bible, certainly not while they could practically learn it from the glowing, brilliant frescoes. At Dura they had, through images, both synagogue and place of Judaic study all in one. It was a people’s Beit Hamidrash, an academy of study as well as a place of prayer, but visual, accessible, instinctive.
For those who were already more learned, every one of the chosen biblical scenes would have resonated with specific messages of consolation and hope. Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones become breathing fresh life was a prophecy of the moment a dead Jerusalem would be resurrected. The humbling of the Persian Judeophobe Haman, forced to lead Mordecai’s horse (albeit painted in lustrous Persian colours in a strikingly different hand from the finding of Moses), proceeds in a lightly made-over version of a Roman triumph, while a resplendent, heavy-browed Queen Esther sits enthroned behind a Persian-trousered King Ahasuerus. This too was an immediately recognisable image of hope. Though the painting was almost certainly done while the Roman legions were still holding off the Persians, it made an obvious appeal to the latter’s history in rebuilding the Jerusalem Temple. The ascendant Sassanians liked to claim they were the second coming of the ancient Achaemenid dynasty of Cyrus, Darius and Artaxerxes himself, so should they get the upper hand, the festival of Purim might yet turn out to be prophecy as well as history. It all fitted together, past and present, mourning and festivity, exile and return.
And this was 240 CE: the beginning, or very close to it, of what synagogues were meant to be for a post-destruction, diaspora community. For that matter, Dura was placed right between the two poles of Jewish rabbinic learning – Palestine and Mesopotamia – so there is no possibility that the painted synagogue in Syria was some sort of heretical aberration of which the sages would have disapproved. Everything suggests, on the contrary, that this was an exemplary synagogue.
It was also a response to the neighbouring religions that were themselves flourishing at Dura and thus evidence of how observant Jews lived among pagans and Christians. The synagogue was situated directly opposite a Temple of Adonis; there was another devoted to Zeus a few blocks away; there were also shrines to the Roman sun-cult of Mithras. And all of these would likely have featured the late-Roman painting from which the synagogue unmistakably borrowed its figurative style, as well as the Parthian ‘frontal’ convention of lining figures parallel to the picture plane all staring in the same direction, outward at us.
But if the synagogue designers and artists were borrowing from the pagans to confound them, they also had in mind the more immediate competition of the Christians, who, in a chapel that also began as a private house, had used Jewish characters – like David standing over the fallen Goliath – to declare in images that the Hebrew Bible had been the prophecy of their Messiah, and that Christianity was, in effect, the fulfilment of Judaism, not its opposite. In a figurative version of the spirited back-and-forth of the theological disputations between Christians and Jews that had already begun, in the Dispute between Justin Martyr and the Jewish ‘Trypho’ (who may or not have been the Rabbi Tarfon of the Talmud), the synagogue paintings responded to the iconic challenge. Since the very word Christ meant ‘anointed lord’ in Greek, what could be a more pointed way to reclaim David for unrepentant Judaism than to show him anointed by the prophet Samuel? Even more strikingly ther
e is something about the heroic stature of the frontal Moses, bearded, virile and princely – clad moreover in an imperial toga, significantly ornamented with a single purple stripe – that seems to act as a kind of counter-Christ for the Jews; the giver of laws, the maker of the Jews, touched by the presence of the Almighty yet emphatically not celestial himself. Significantly, the bush itself, flames behind it, is green and sprouting, a symbolism already freely used by Christianity to suggest the New Life which here, however, begins with the first revealed law.
Inscriptions made on the surface of the paintings have been read as suggesting that the splendour of the Dura-Europos synagogue was enough to draw admirers from afar – perhaps from Palmyra where there was a substantial Jewish community, some of whom were converts, or even from the Mesopotamian cities to the south-east. The painted synagogue might well have been a kind of pilgrimage place for the Jews of the whole region. If so, they must have made haste, for all those painted promises of redemption were of no avail. The enlargement of the synagogue and its painted decoration were in place for scarcely more than a decade before the Sassanian Persian king conquered Dura and left it abandoned to the drifting sand.