Images of Mithra

240 Pages·2017·40.51 MB·english

by  Philippa Adrych

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IMAGES OF MITHRA
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VISUAL CONVERSATIONS
IN ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY
General Editor: Jas´ Elsner
Visual Conversations is a series designed to foster a new model of comparative
inquiry in the histories of ancient art. The aim is to create the spirit of a compara-
tive conversation across the different areas of the art history and archaeology of
the pre-modern world—across Eurasia, Africa, Australasia, and the Americas—in
ways that are academically and theoretically stimulating. The books serve col-
lectively as a public platform to demonstrate by example the possibilities of a
comparative exercise of working with objects across cultures and religions within
defined, but broad, historical trajectories.
Forthcoming titles
Word as Image
Nadia Ali, Robert Bracey, Katherine Cross, Jas´ Elsner,
Maria Lidova, and Rachel Wood
Altars
Katherine Cross, Dominic Dalglish, Maria Lidova,
and Rachel Wood
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Images of Mithra
PHILIPPA ADRYCH,
ROBERT BRACEY,
DOMINIC DALGLISH,
STEFANIE LENK,
and
RACHEL WOOD
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© Philippa Adrych, Robert Bracey, Dominic Dalglish, Stefanie Lenk, and Rachel Wood 2017
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 25/02/17, SPi
FOREWORD
Jas´ Elsner
Images of Mithra is the first volume of a new and experimental series of
multi-authored books published by the Oxford University Press. The series,
Visual Conversations, brings together groups of scholars with different areas of
expertise to work collectively on a single project. The idea is to produce not a
conventional edited book where there is one editor and various authors who
write more or less related papers, nor the normal scholarly fare of the single-
authored monograph. Rather, it is about people working together and bringing
together skills and ranges of knowledge greater than any individual can com-
mand, but doing so with the coordinated and integrated thrust that is much
more characteristic of a single-authored book than a collection.
In the current era, the ancient material cultural disciplines—within art history,
archaeology, and ancient history—have a collective identity in engaging with
objects via ways that push beyond and at the same time reflect with a different
perspective upon the evidence of texts, documents, and literary survivals. One of
the real desiderata is a comparative conversation based on shared methodological
concerns, that include the archaeological basis of so many of the materials from
pre-modern periods and geographical contexts, the complex relations of under-
standing our objects in reference to the evidence of surviving texts in ancient
languages, and the problematic partiality of the surviving evidence—the fact
that such a small percentage of what made up the ancient world is known to us.
That conversation, in an era of globalization and cross-cultural interest, has a
public resonance beyond academia. Even within relatively specific subject fields
(e.g. Classical art or pre-Columbian archaeology) a real interest has developed
over the last generation in looking at comparative material from other worlds and
contexts—Persia, India, Egypt, Ethiopia, China, Mesopotamia, the Americas. . . .
The antiquities that survive from these cultural contexts may not belong in the
same place within the same absolute dating system (especially in cultures that had
no knowledge of one another—like Mesoamerica and Eurasia, until the Spanish
conquest of the former). But their archaeological means of survival, and the fact
that they come from a context known to us through the artefacts themselves and
a relatively sparse selections of surviving texts, offers us many potential compari-
sons and conversations based on similar methodological explorations.
The writers of Images of Mithra have been working together for several years
in the ‘Empires of Faith’ project funded by the Leverhulme Trust and based
between the British Museum and Wolfson College, Oxford. Their areas of
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vi FOREWORD
expertise range from ancient India and pre-Islamic Iran to the Roman Empire
and the early Christian west, all of them working on material and visual culture
in archaeologically embedded contexts, as well as museum collections (notably
that of the British Museum). The book arose from a series of conversations and
arguments between them and within the group about the nature of ancient reli-
gion and the place of visual culture in writing its narratives. This book’s energy
is thus the energy of a vibrant and still continuing series of discussions, of which
this volume is a first stage in a long conversation. As the principal investigator of
‘Empires of Faith’, it has been a wonderful experience for me to observe the
process and the pyrotechnics along the path, not to speak of the way in which the
volume has grown from a short collective seminar paper, via a half-day collo-
quium, and an international conference with external respondents, to a book.
Images of Mithra does two things—first, as a collection of papers that span Asia
and Europe within antiquity (in this case a period covering the first century bc to
the fourth century ad), the volume challenges what has become the normative
scholarly approach to the (now no longer practised) religions associated with
Mithra. That normative approach has, in the last half century, been to regard the
cults, myths, texts, and images associated with the name ‘Mithra’ in Asia outside
the Roman Empire as an entirely different phenomenon from the cults, myths,
texts, and images associated with the name ‘Mithras’ in the Mediterranean world
ruled by the Romans. Given that some of the finest and most thoughtful schol-
arship in all the history of ancient religion has been devoted to what has been
called ‘Mithraism’, this normative approach has the backing of an extremely
powerful and impressive academic constituency. But its starting position, divid-
ing Europe and Asia and assuming the cult should be treated entirely differently
in these contexts because it was entirely different in each, at the very least needs
some reconsideration. The appeal of a god bearing the name ‘Mithra’ in both
western and Asian religious and visual culture begs the question of whether there
are any connections beyond a name; and the increasing impetus in scholarship in
the last decade to look comparatively at phenomena on a more global or at least
trans-cultural level demands that we be at least open to the possibility for more
interconnections than the standard approach to Mithraism has allowed.
One of the particular problems of studying the religions connected with
Mithra is that our textual sources—the normative evidential and empirical base
for exploring religion—are much more exiguous, fragmentary, and frankly
inconclusive than the extremely rich material-cultural, archaeological, and art-
historical remains. The use of texts also involves applying literary evidence from
one cultural context (for instance, ancient Iran) to archaeology from a different
context (for instance, the Roman Empire). This is not only methodologically
problematic, but it also represents a theoretical and theological presupposition—
not one that is provable—to the effect that Mithra in these different contexts is
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FOREWORD vii
in fact the same entity. One of the great challenges facing this book has been to
put the material culture first, to find ways to make it speak (sometimes in the
absence of texts), to take it across the borders between the Roman world and the
empires of Iran and India, and to attempt to make some comparative conclusions
on the basis of the visual evidence. In this, the volume attempts to pioneer a new,
more material-culturally embedded approach to the study of ancient religion.
But more broadly still, and moving beyond simply the question of Mithra, and
indeed beyond issues of ancient deity-worship in the Roman, Parthian, Sasanian,
and Kushan Empires, the book broaches the fundamental problem of what a
name may imply about a god. This is a question in which visual culture confronts
epigraphy, in defining iconographic form through naming, and in which material
culture confronts literary evidence, raising issues that—at any rate in the history
of religions—have ramifications well beyond the ancient world and indeed
Eurasia. The volume includes, in the response by Claudia Brittenham, the
thoughts of an historian of Aztec art and religion, working with entirely different
material in an entirely different cultural context, on this fundamental intellectual
issue in the study of religion—which is equally valid and equally problematic in
thinking about Mesoamerican deities. The Aztec material, in the context of an
entirely different god, Quetzalcoatl, raises precisely analogous problems of the
use of texts from different contexts (in this case, some colonial and some from
non-Aztec pre-Columbian cultures) to throw light on the material culture, and
of visual and archaeological evidence of different kinds and from different places,
linked only by the naming of the deity.
As the series editor of Visual Conversations, it is my hope that Images of Mithra
will be a beacon and an inspiration to other groups of scholars who want to try
to move beyond the lone expert into a world of collaborative discussion and
pooling of intellectual resources to tackle big and complex questions that may be
beyond the single researcher. Clearly, such collaborations need not be restricted
to material culture, although it is in the arena of comparative art history and
archaeology that this particular project began, and clearly they need not be
restricted to the ancient or the late antique worlds. This Foreword is thus not
only an introduction to a series and to its inaugural volume, but it is also an
invitation to readers to approach the series editor with proposals of their own.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The ‘Empires of Faith’ research project, of which this book is an outcome, owes
its existence to the generous funding of the Leverhulme Trust, and the collabor-
ation between the British Museum and Wolfson College, Oxford. We are also
grateful to the ERC-funded research project ‘Beyond Boundaries’, which
allowed Robert Bracey to continue his work on this volume in 2015.
Working collaboratively is never easy, but although the writers of this book
have endured seemingly endless meetings, late nights, and drawn-out conversa-
tions on the topic of Mithra, the people that have suffered the most are undoubt-
edly our friends and family who have had to put up with us. Chief amongst the
victims are our colleagues on the ‘Empires of Faith’ project, Nadia Ali, Belinda
Crerar, Katherine Cross, Maria Lidova, Georgi Parpulov, and especially our
indefatigable leader Jaś Elsner. This book would not have been possible without
their support, encouragement, and criticism, and for that we owe them all an
enormous debt.
As will be elaborated upon later in the volume, this work is the result of a collab-
orative process. A collective voice was a target we strove towards and hope to have
achieved. Yet, owing to the concomitant need for specialist knowledge in such an
endeavour, each chapter is also the work of a primary author. Chapters 1 and 6
were written by Dominic Dalglish, Chapter 2 by Philippa Adrych, Chapter 3 by
Stefanie Lenk, Chapter 4 by Rachel Wood, and Chapter 5 by Robert Bracey.
Over the course of 2014 and 2015, the authors gave collaborative presenta-
tions on Mithra to four different audiences in four different formats, which
helped to shape this final work. In our first outing we were hosted by the Oxford
Centre for Late Antiquity, which was followed by a presentation at the British
Museum to a public audience. The latter two appearances were international,
when we were grilled by colleagues including Hannah Baader and Gerhard Wolf
at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and displayed the work in its final incarna-
tion at the ‘Empires of Faith’ conference, generously hosted by the Divinity
School of the University of Chicago. We are deeply indebted to the organizers
and funders of these events, and to all of those who attended and offered us their
thoughts; they have helped us in innumerable ways. Particular thanks are due to
Bruce Lincoln and Claudia Brittenham, both from Chicago, who both inde-
pendently provided us with exceptional combinations of encouragement and
critique. We are especially grateful to Claudia for providing the Epilogue to this
book, a contribution that broadens this project’s reach considerably and in which
we hope the reader finds as much enjoyment as we have.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
The thorough feedback and suggestions from our anonymous reviewers was
invaluable. Additionally, the individual chapters were read by or discussed with
colleagues at The British Museum, Oxford University, and beyond. While we
cannot name them all here, we would like to thank in particular Bruno Bijađija,
Jelena Bariman, Manfred Clauss, Joe Cribb, Charles Crowther, Vesta Sarkhosh
Curtis, Lucinda Dirven, Elizabeth Errington, Ted Kaizer, and Peter Stewart.
We thank them for their insightful comments; any remaining errors are our own.
Further thanks go to Charlotte Loveridge and Lisa Eaton at OUP, and all
those involved in the production of the final manuscript, particularly Gail
Eaton, Tim Beck, and Elizabeth Foley. For granting us permission to use their
images, we are grateful to the Trustees of the British Museum, Herman Brijder,
Bruno Bijađija, Charles Crowther, Jas ́Elsner, Dževad Hadžihasanovic,́ Klearchos
Kapoutsis, Akadémiai Kiadó, Miguel Versluys and Engelbert Winter. Richard
Kelleher and Fabrice Weexsteen provided assistance with the maps and allowed
us to modify and re-use them in this publication.