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Dura-Europos
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> | Dura-Europos ("Fort Europos") was a Hellenistic, Parthian and Roman border city built on an escarpment ninety meters above the right bank of the Euphrates river.
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Dura-Europos ("Fort Europos") was a Hellenistic, Parthian and Roman border city built on an escarpment ninety meters above the right bank of the Euphrates river. It is located near the village of Salhiyé, in today's Syria .
Dura-Europos is extremely important for archaeological reasons. As it was abandoned after its conquest in 256-7, nothing was built over it and no later building programs obscured the architectonic features of the ancient city. It's location on the edge of empires meant for a co-mingling of cultural traditions, much of which was preserved under the city's ruins. Some remarkable finds have been brought to light, including numerous temples, wall decorations, inscriptions, military equipment, tombs, and even dramatic evidence of the siege that brought about the city's end.
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Hellenistic Era
It was founded in 303 BC by the Seleucids on the intersection of an east-west trade route and the trade route along the Euphrates. The new city, commemorating the birthplace of Alexander's successor Seleucus I Nicator, controlled the river crossing on the route between his newly founded cities of Antioch and Seleucia on the Tigris. Its rebuilding as a great city built after the Hippodamian model, with rectangular blocks defined by cross-streets ranged round a large central agora, was formally laid out in the 2nd century BC. The traditional view of Dura-Europos as a great caravan city is becoming nuanced by the discoveries of locally made manufactures and traces of close ties with Palmyra (James).
During the later second century BC it came under Parthian control and in the first century BC, it served as a frontier fortress of the Arsacid Parthian Empire, with a multicultural population, as inscriptions in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Hatrian, Palmyrenean, Middle Persian and Safaitic Pahlavi testify. It was captured by the Romans in 165 and abandoned after a Sassanian siege in 256-257. After it was abandoned, it was covered by sand and mud and disappeared from sight.
Archaeology
Although the existence of Dura-Europos was long known through literary sources, it was not rediscovered until British troops under Capt. Murphy made the first discovery during the Arab Revolt in the aftermath of World War I. On March 30, 1920, a soldier digging a trench uncovered brilliantly fresh wall-paintings. The American archeologist James Henry Breasted, then at Baghdad, was alerted. Major excavations were carried out in the 1920s and 1930s by French and American teams. The first archaeology on the site, undertaken by Franz Cumont and published in 1922-23, identified the site with Dura-Europos, and uncovered a temple, before renewed hostilities in the area closed it to archaeology. Later, renewed campaigns directed by Michael Rostovtzeff continued until 1937, when funds ran out with only part of the excavations published. World War II intervened. Since 1986 excavations have resumed in a joint Franco-Syrian effort under the direction of Pierre Leriche.
Not the least of the finds were astonishingly well-preserved arms and armour belonging to the Roman garrison at the time of the final Sassanian siege of 256. Finds included painted wooden shields and complete horse armours, preserved by the very finality of the destruction of the city that journalists have called "the Pompeii of the desert".
Culture
Dura-Europos was a cosmopolitan society, controlled by a tolerant Macedonian aristocracy descended from the original settlers. In the course of its excavation, over a hundred parchment and papyrus fragments and many inscriptions have revealed texts in Greek and Latin (the latter including a sator square), Palmyrenean, Hebrew, Hatrian, Safaitic, and Pahlavi. The excavations revealed temples to Greek, Roman and Palmyrene gods. There was a Mithraeum, as one would expect in a Roman military city.
The synagogue
The Jewish synagogue, located by the western wall between towers 18 and 19, was dated by an Aramaic inscription to 244. It is the best preserved of the many ancient synagogues of that era that have been uncovered by archaeologists. It was preserved, ironically, when it had to be infilled with earth to strengthen the city's fortifications against a Sassanian assault in 256. It was uncovered in 1932 by Clark Hopkins, who found that it contains a forecourt and house of assembly with frescoed walls depicting people and animals, and a Torah shrine in the western wall facing Jerusalem. At first, it was mistaken for a Greek temple. The synagogue paintings, the earliest continuous surviving biblical narrative cycle, are conserved at Damascus, together with the complete Roman horse-armour.
The house church
There was also the earliest identified Christian house church, located by the 17th tower and preserved by the same defensive fill that saved the synagogue. "Their evidently open and tolerated presence in the middle of a major Roman garrison town reveals that the history of the early church was not simply a story of pagan persecution". The surviving frescoes of the baptistry room are probably the most ancient Christian paintings. We can see the "Good Shepherd" (this iconography had a very long history in the Classical world), the "Healing of the paralytic" and "Christ and Peter walking on the water". These earliest depictions of Jesus Christ ever found anywhere date back to 235 A.D.
A much larger fresco depicts two women (and a third, mostly lost) approaching a large sarcophagus, ie. probably the three Marys visiting Christ's tomb. The name Salome was painted near one of the women. There were also frescoes of Adam and Eve as well as David and Goliath. The frescoes clearly followed the Hellenistic Jewish iconographic tradition but they are more crudely done than the paintings of the nearby synagogue.
Fragments of parchment scrolls with Hebrew texts have also been unearthed; they resisted meaningful translation until J.L. Teicher pointed out that they were Christian Eucharistic prayers, so closely connected with the prayers in Didache that he was able to fill lacunae in the light of the Didache text.
In 1933, among fragments of text recovered from the town dump outside the Palmyrene Gate, a fragmentary text was unearthed from an unknown Greek harmony of the gospel accounts — comparable to Tatian's Diatessaron, but independent of it.
The Mithraeum
Also partially preserved by the defensive embankment was the Mithraeum, located between towers 23 & 24. It was unearthed in January 1934 after years of expectation as to whether Dura would reveal traces of the Roman Mithras cult. Although little remained of the artificial cave, the sanctuary area proved to be highly interesting. There was the typical relief showing the slaying of the bull, found in most Roman mithraea, but all images of Mithras portray him dressed in Parthian costume: "trousers, boots, and pointed cap". Hopkins surmises that "the Dura Mithraeum as it stands provides our best example of the intermediate, Parthian cult, brought to Dura under Parthian domination and continued in Roman times." (Although it had roots in Iran, the Mithras cult is generally seen as a Roman phenomenon.)
The earliest traces of a temple are from between 168 and 171 CE, ie during the Roman occupation, yet the paintings on the walls are decidedly in the Parthian style. The end of the sanctuary features an arch with a seated figure on each of the two supporting columns "in Parthian costume and pose". One conjecture, reported by Hopkins, is that these figures are Zoroaster and his most famous student Osthanes, though he doesn't support the notion. Inside and following the form of the arch is a series of depictions of the zodiac.
The Fall of Dura
The reason for the good state of preservation of these buildings and their frescoes was due to their location, close to the main city wall facing west, and the military necessity to strengthen the wall. The Sassanid Persians had become adept at tunneling under such walls in order to undermine them and create breaches. As a countermeasure the Roman garrison decided to sacrifice the street and the buildings along the wall by filling them with rubble to bolster the wall in case of a Persian mining operation, so the Christian chapel, the synagogue, the Mithraeum and many other buildings were entombed. They also buttressed the walls from the outside with an earthen mound forming a glacis and sealed it with a casing of mud brick to prevent erosion.
There is no written record of the siege of Dura. However, the archaeologists uncovered quite striking evidence of the siege and how it progressed.
Undermining
The buttressing of the walls would be tested in 256 CE when Shapur I besieged the city. True to fears, Shapur set his engineers to undermine what archaeologists called Tower 19, two towers north of the Palmyrene Gate. When the Romans became aware of the threat, they dug a countermine with the aim of meeting the Persian effort and attack them before they could finish their work. The Persians had already dug complex galleries along the wall, when the Roman countermine reached them. They managed to fight back the Roman attack and when the city defenders noticed the flight of soldiers from the countermine it was quickly sealed leaving the wounded and stragglers trapped inside where they died. (It was the coins found with these Roman soldiers that dated the siege to 256 CE.) The effect of the countermine was interestingly successful, for the Persians abandoned their operations at Tower 19.
Next, the Sassanids attacked Tower 14, the southernmost along the western wall. It overlooked a deep ravine to the south and it was from that direction that it was attacked. This time the mining operation was successful in that it caused the tower and adjacent walls to subside. However the Roman countermeasure which bolstered the wall prevented it from collapsing.
This brought a third approach to entering the city. A ramp was raised again attacking Tower 14, but, as it was being built and the garrison fought to stop the progress of the ramp, another mine was started near the ramp. Its scope was not to cause a collapse of the wall -- the buttress had been successful --, but to pass under it and penetrate the city. This tunnel was built to allow the Persians four abreast to move through it. It eventually entered the city and pierced the inner embankment and, when the ramp was completed, Dura's end had come. As Persian troops charged up the ramp, their counterparts in the tunnel would have invaded the city with little opposition, as nearly all the defenders would have been on the wall attempting to repulse the attack from the ramp. City survivors would have been marched off to Ctesiphon and there sold as slaves. The city, once pillaged, was never rebuilt.
Chemical warfare
In January 2009, researchers claimed they had found evidence that the Persian Empire used poisonous gases on Dura against the Roman defenders during the siege. Excavations at Dura have discovered the remains of 20 Roman soldiers at the base of the city walls. An archaeologist at the University of Leicester suggested that bitumen and sulphur crystals were ignited to create the poisonous gas which was then funnelled through the tunnel with underground chimneys and bellows. Such tactics have been aluded to in previous centuries, with similar compounds possibly employed by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War (400 BC) and described in The Art of War (China, 500 BC).
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