Roman
Mithraism: the evidence of the small finds
(preview)
by
Dr. Richard
Gordon
Introduction
With
the recent discovery of a small wooden mithraeum in the Grijpenveld just outside
the modern town of Tienen/Tirlemont in the Belgian province of Flemish Brabant a
circle was completed. For, although it is not the most northerly mithraeum ever
found (which is at Krefeld-Gellep, on the Rhine north of Cologne), the Tienen
mithraeum is the first to be discovered in the land of the founder of the modern
study of the Mysteries of Mithras, Franz Cumont (1868-1947). The year of the
discovery, 1998, straddles the centenary of the publication of Cumont’s Textes
et monuments relatifs aux mystères de Mithra (1896-1900), which inaugurated
the method of systematically cataloguing archaeological and epigraphic materials
as the essential preliminary to the scientific study of ancient religions; and
all but coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of his death. The conference
subsequently held in Tienen in November 2001, whose proceedings are presented in
this volume, and which was organised by Prof. Guy de Boe, Staf Thomas and
Marleen Martens, can properly be seen as one of the several commemorative
gatherings, in Belgium, France and Italy, in Cumont’s honour. Yet the
coincidences also mark a massive theoretical and disciplinary distance. In
Cumont’s day, the Tienen mithraeum would have been dismissed as uninformative,
if it had even been recognised for what it was: there are no monuments of any
kind, no inscriptions, it was built of timber, and apparently contained nothing
of any interest. Virtually none of the inferences which Marleen Martens and her
co-workers have been able to make about the cult of Mithras in this rural vicus
of the civitas Tungrorum could have been made in 1898: not simply because
none of the necessary infrastructural knowledge had then been accumulated - the
cataloguing, sourcing and dating of coarse-wares, the classification of the
archaeofloral and -faunal record - analysis of timber, pollens, food-remains and
animal by-products (‘ecofacts’), the results of archaeozoology in general
and taphonomic site-histories in particular -, but because the very aims of the
study of ancient religion at that time excluded the possible contribution of
such knowledge-fields. Studying religion meant learning about gods,
reconstructing theologies, perhaps even ethics, inferring subjective meanings
and aspirations. Ritual, and especially sacrifice,which is now considered the
crucial hinge between ideological representations and the social order, was of
minor importance, and hardly investigated.
The
discovery of the mithraeum at Tienen can serve as a symbolic marker in other
ways too. Vermaseren’s Corpus lists 73 Mithraic temples discovered and published prior to
1945; many of them were simply raided for monuments, in others virtually nothing
was found; of the most important, the temple at Dura-Europos, only a preliminary
account has ever been published, while the great majority of its numerous
graffiti are probably permanently lost to the scientific world. The only
excellent publication among these was R. Forrer’s account of the mithraeum at
Königshoffen, now a suburb of Strasbourg (1913), although patient recovery-work
by I. Huld-Zetsche on the Frankfurt-Heddernheim mithraea has subsequently
revealed the importance of some of the ceramic finds of that earlier period. By
contrast, 54 new mithraea have been published since the Second World War, no
less than 33 (61%) of them discovered since the publication of volume II of the Corpus
in 1965 (omitting the new mithraeum at Perge in Pamphylia, which has not yet
been excavated). Of this latter group, the temples at Hūarte in Syria,
Caesarea Maritima in Judaea/Palestina, Marino, the Castra Peregrinorum in Rome,
Ponza, Vulci, Aquincum V, Novae – perhaps Martigny - contained
conventionally-important monuments or internal arrangements, and about some,
such as the cellar in Naples and the building belonging to a villa nr. Königsbrunn
(Lkr. Augsburg/Raetia), virtually nothing is known. But many of the others, and
particularly the 17 new mithraea in the NW provinces, are significant not for
their architecture or their monuments, but because of their ‘small finds’:
the taphonomic material, food-remains, ceramics, glass, coins and other small
metal objects. Prior to the routinisation of the new archaeology, and the
provision by local authorities of laboratory techniques and support-personnel,
none of this material would have been attended to with the required precision,
and most of its potential value would thereby have been lost. (The presentation
of such material in Vermaseren’s Corpus – scrappily listed, where noted at all, at the end of the
entries for mithraea, and virtually unillustrated – is extremely indicative of
the attitude of the traditional history of religions towards such ‘mundane’
finds. Yet Vermaseren represents a considerable advance on Cumont in this
respect.) The mithraea at Pons Aeni (Pfaffenhofen am Inn), discovered in 1977/8,
and Künzing (1998), both in ancient Raetia, are cases in point. Very little of
these temples could be recovered – the floor-plan of Künzing indeed is
largely conjectural, inferred from the location of post-holes – yet they are
among the most important recent finds: Pons Aeni because a quite unexpectedly
early date for its foundation (ca 100 AD) could be established through analysis
of the sigillata-ware from the Pfaffenhofen potteries, and because of its
situation at the heavily-used bridge over the Inn on the main road from Iuvavum
(Salzburg) to Augusta Vindelicum (Augsburg-Oberhausen); Künzing because of the
34 kg of animal bones, originally deposited in external refuse pits but
subsequently washed into the mithraeum, and analysis of which shows that the
animals consumed, principally chickens (cocks or capons), were killed, and
presumably therefore prepared and cooked, on site.
It
is however the mithraeum at Tienen which most strikingly underscores the need to
call upon the full range of detailed artefact- and ecofact-studies of
‘minor’ or ‘small’ finds if Roman provincial archaeology is to move away
from its traditional ‘service’ orientation in relation to ancient religion
in general, and Mithraism in particular. New monuments certainly can provide new
facts for the historian; but ‘small’ finds can do so on a still larger
scale, and in relation to entirely new questions, if the archaeologists can
drawn upon sufficient technical support, from ceramicists, archaeozoologists,
palynologists and so on to create these new facts. This involves moving away
from mere recording and listing of finds towards the active construction of new
hypotheses which ‘small’ finds can support or disprove. One obvious example
is the comparison between the taphonomic finds in the mithraeum at Künzing and
the pattern of meat-consumption in the neighbouring fort of the ala
V Bracaraugustanorum, or the wider patterns of such consumption in the
North-Western provinces. Another is the inference from the pit-refuse at Tienen
that the piglets were all killed at roughly the same time, at the end of June or
the beginning of July, and that the festival must have involved at least one
hundred people, who cannot possibly all have fitted into a building measuring
12.5 x 7.5m, so that the feast must have ben held in the open air. As Nicholas
J. Saunders has observed: ‘Archaeology cannot hope to reconstruct the
life-ways of past societies on the basis of an assumed inability to understand
the resulting patterns of past activities. Archaeologists need to consider how
and why certain events might have occurred in the past, suggest their possible
archaeological correlates, and develop a methodological framework to interpret
them’.
Marleen
Martens’ main aim in organising the conference on small finds at Tienen was
less to make her team’s extraordinary finds more widely known within the
scholarly community, though we were all very impressed with their range and
novelty – above all because of the remarkable Schlangengefäß
with an internal pipe, which, when filled with wine and then heated, was
evidently intended to spurt warmed wine from the snake’s mouth, a cultic
invention which suggests an entirely new, indeed revolutionary, interpretation
of the lion-krater-snake motif, but also the lid with the man-faced lion appliqué
– than to assert the need for what we might call an ‘artefactual turn’ in
the study of the ancient religions of the NW provinces. Here she is striking the
same path as a number of younger French, German and Swiss archaeologists, in
particular S.Lepetz, W. van Andringa, M. Poux, M. Witteyer, and C. Olive, who
have been stimulated to fresh thinking by the large-scale taphonomic deposits in
a religious context at various Gallo-Roman sites, and in the recently-discovered
sacred enclosure of Isis and Mater Magna in Mainz. These specifically
archaeological challenges happen to coincide with the now-familiar recognition
of the centrality of sacrifice in Greek and Roman religion (a recognition shared
by the historical school represented by Walter Burkert, and the ‘School of
Paris’), and more broadly with the recognition that the diversity of these
religious cultures is in some ways better understood by attending to their
concrete transactions with the Other World (their cultic practices) than by
concentrating solely upon pantheons, ‘beliefs’, claims, or even votives –
transactions which are in many cases surprising, or unexpected, and which
challenge received understandings. Archaeologists, particularly Roman provincial
archaeologists, need to develop new methods and hypotheses if they are to
contribute effectively to these altered concerns.
The
papers of the Tienen conference are to be seen in the light of this concern for
methodological innovation. The title ‘Small Finds’ was intended as a
pragmatic stimulus to this end, and as a deliberate contrast to earlier Mithraic
conferences, whose orientation has been exclusively towards the history of
religions. It also however marked the desire to pull the Mithraic finds of the
NW provinces out from the shadow of the more dramatic and splendid sites in
Italy, or, now, Syria, and highlight the distinctive contribution that the new
archaeology can make to the re-construction of the cult in this region. The
conference however also offered the opportunity of drawing attention to some
very recently-discovered Mithraic temples – apart from Tienen itself, those at
Bornheim-Sechtem near Bonn (C. Ulbert), in the grounds of the well-known villa
at Orbe-Boscéaz, SW of Lac de Neuchâtel, Canton Vaud (T. Luginbühl et al.),
and the temple in the Crypta Balbi in the southern Campus Martius in Rome (M. Ricci, L.
Saguì)– it was unfortunately not possible to obtain reports about the two
temples at Güglingen (SW of Heilbronn), or Künzing, or M.-A. Gaidon-Bunuel’s
further work on the temple at Septeuil. We may add to this group the
presentations of accounts of old excavations of mithraea (A. Hensen on
‘Lopodunum II’; M. Clauss & A. Hensen on the ‘Eiskeller’ at
Bliesdalheim).
The
opening paper by A. Schatzmann, building on his admirable report on the ‘small
finds’ from older excavations which can be used to reconstruct ritual action
(to be published in the BAR International Series), calls attention to the
fundamental issue of norm versus local peculiarity, and sketches the variety of
different ways in which ‘small finds’ can add to our understanding of
Mithraic ritual. This approach is picked up by L. Allason-Jones in her paper on
the mithraea of Hadrian’s Wall. There follows a group of papers mainly devoted
to the taphonomy and/or the ceramics of particular temples, and the inferences
concerning ritual practice that can be drawn from them: Tienen (M. Martens, A.
Lentacker et al.), Bornheim-Sechtem (J.-C. Wulfmeier), Orbe-Boscéaz (J. Monnier,
Y. Mühlemann), Martigny (F. Wiblé, C. Olive), Crypta Balbi (J. de Grossi
Mazzorin). A second group concentrates on different aspects of specialised
Mithraic ceramics: incense-burners (J. Bird), the waste from the Rheinzabern
potteries (M. Thomas), the reconstruction of the now well-known Wetterau-ware Schlangengefäß
from the Ballplatz-Mainz (I. Huld-Zetsche), and the issue of the specific
character of these snake-decorated vessels as represented by older finds from
Carnuntum (V. Gassner). A final paper in this group tackles the finds from an
analogous, non-Mithraic, complex in Apulum (C. Höpken). A third group can only
be described as ‘miscellaneous’, since the papers approach the issue of
small finds in unrelated, though defensible, ways (R. Gordon, G. Dorin Sicoe, M.
Marquart, M. Weiß, E. Sauer, K. Sas). Finally, it was felt that it would be
useful to add a fairly complete bibliography of publications on Mithraism since
Roger Beck’s ‘Mithraism since Franz Cumont’ (1984), a list which itself
indicates something of the shifts of interest which have occurred within the
field over the past vicennium.
Lastly,
however, I would like, in the name of all participants at the conference, to
thank the organisers, and Marleen Martens in particular, for arranging such an
innovative and stimulating contribution to Mithraic studies.
Contents
Möglichkeiten
und Grenzen einer funktionellen Topographie von Mithrasheiligtümern
Andreas Schatzmann
The
Mithraeum in Tienen
(Belgium): small finds and what they can tell us
Marleen Martens
The Symbolic Meaning of the Cock. The Animal Remains from
the Mithraeum at
Tienen (Belgium)
An
Lentacker, Anton Ervynck & Wim Van Neer
Das Mithraeum von
Bornheim-Sechtem bei Bonn: Baubefunde und Fundumstände
Cornelius Ulbert
Ton,
Steine, Scherben -
Skulpturen und Reliefkeramiken aus dem Mithraeum von Bornheim-Sechtem
Johann-Christoph Wulfmeier
Das ‚zweite‘
Mithräum von Heidelberg
Andreas Hensen
Le mithraeum de la
villa d’Orbe-Boscéaz (Suisse): du mobilier aux rites
Thierry
Luginbühl, Jacques Monnier & Yves Mühlemann
Les petits objets du mithraeum de
Martigny/Forum Claudii
Vallensium
François
Wiblé
La faune exhumée des mithraea de Martigny (Valais) et d'Orbe-Boscéaz (Vaud) en Suisse
Claude Olive
Il mitreo della Crypta Balbi a Roma
(note preliminari)
Marco Ricci
Il mitreo della Crypta Balbi e i
suoi reperti
Lucia Saguì
I resti animali del mitreo della Crypta
Balbi: testimonianze di pratiche cultuali
Jacopo De Grossi Mazzorin
Mithras on Hadrian’s Wall
Lindsay
Allason-Jones
Incense in Mithraic ritual: the evidence of the finds
Joanna Bird
Kultgefäße
in Terra Sigillata aus Rheinzabern
Manuel Thomas
Der Mainzer Krater mit den sieben Figuren
Ingeborg Huld-Zetsche
Snake-decorated
vessels from the canabae of Carnuntum – evidence for another mithraeum?
Verena Gassner
Die
Funde aus Keramik und Glas aus einem Liber Pater-Bezirk in Apulum (Dakien). Ein
erster Überblick
Constanze
Höpken
Small and miniature reproductions of the Mithraic icon:
reliefs, pottery, ornaments and gems
Richard Gordon
Lokalproduktion
und Importe. Der Fall der mithraischen Reliefs aus Dakien
Gabriel Dorin Sicoe
Mithras aus
Bronze
Markus Marquart
Die Mithras-Brosche im Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Maria Weiß
Not just small change – Coins in Mithraea
Eberhard
Sauer
Der “Eiskeller” von
Bliesdalheim – ein Mithräum?
Manfred
Clauss & Andreas Hensen
Mithras
and Roman jewellery in Belgium
Kathy Sas
Bibliography of Mithraic Studies
since 1984
Marleen
Martens & Guy De Boe (eds.)
