Dura-Europos was a Hellenistic, Parthian, and Roman border city built on an escarpment 90 metres above the southwestern bank of the Euphrates river. It is located near the village of Salhiyé, in present-day Syria. Dura-Europos was founded around 300 BC by Seleucus I Nicator, who founded the Seleucid Empire as one of the Diadochi of Alexander the Great. In 113 BC, Parthians conquered the city, and held it, with one brief Roman intermission, until 165 AD. Under Parthian rule, it became an important provincial administrative centre. The Romans decisively captured Dura-Europos in 165 AD and greatly enlarged it as their easternmost stronghold in Mesopotamia, until it was captured by the Sasanian Empire after a siege in 256–257 AD. Its population was deported, and the abandoned city eventually became covered by sand and mud and disappeared from sight.
Septimius Odaenathus was the founder king (malik) of the Palmyrene Kingdom who ruled from Palmyra, Syria. He elevated the status of his kingdom from a regional center subordinate to Rome into a formidable state in the Near East. Odaenathus was born into an aristocratic Palmyrene family that had received Roman citizenship in the 190s under the Severan dynasty. He was the son of Hairan, the descendant of Nasor. The circumstances surrounding his rise are ambiguous; he became the lord (ras) of the city, a position created for him, as early as the 240s and by 258, he was styled a consularis, indicating a high status in the Roman Empire.
The study of Roman sculpture is complicated by its relation to Greek sculpture. Many examples of even the most famous Greek sculptures, such as the Apollo Belvedere and Barberini Faun, are known only from Roman Imperial or Hellenistic "copies". At one time, this imitation was taken by art historians as indicating a narrowness of the Roman artistic imagination, but, in the late 20th century, Roman art began to be reevaluated on its own terms: some impressions of the nature of Greek sculpture may in fact be based on Roman artistry.
Malakbel was a sun god worshipped in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, frequently associated and worshipped with the moon god Aglibol as a party of a trinity involving the sky god Baalshamin.
Hellenistic art is the art of the Hellenistic period generally taken to begin with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and end with the conquest of the Greek world by the Romans, a process well underway by 146 BC, when the Greek mainland was taken, and essentially ending in 30 BC with the conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt following the Battle of Actium. A number of the best-known works of Greek sculpture belong to this period, including Laocoön and His Sons, Venus de Milo, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. It follows the period of Classical Greek art, while the succeeding Greco-Roman art was very largely a continuation of Hellenistic trends.
The National Museum of Damascus is a museum in the heart of Damascus, Syria. As the country's national museum as well as its largest, this museum covers the entire range of Syrian history over a span of over 11 millennia. It displays various important artifacts, relics and major finds most notably from Mari, Ebla and Ugarit, three of Syria's most important ancient archaeological sites. Established in 1919, during King Faisal's Arab Kingdom of Syria, the museum is the oldest cultural heritage institution in Syria.
Heroic nudity or ideal nudity is a concept in classical scholarship to describe the un-realist use of nudity in classical sculpture to show figures who may be heroes, deities, or semi-divine beings. This convention began in Archaic and Classical Greece and continued in Hellenistic and Roman sculpture. The existence or place of the convention is the subject of scholarly argument.
Roman portraiture was one of the most significant periods in the development of portrait art. The surviving portraits of individuals are almost entirely sculptures, covering a period of almost five centuries. Roman portraiture is characterised by unusual realism and the desire to convey images of nature in the high quality style often seen in ancient Roman art. Some busts even seem to show clinical signs. Several images and statues made in marble and bronze have survived in small numbers. Roman funerary art includes many portraits such as married couple funerary reliefs, which were most often made for wealthy freedmen rather than the patrician elite.
Parthian art was Iranian art made during the Parthian Empire from 247 BC to 224 AD, based in the Near East. It has a mixture of Persian and Hellenistic influences. For some time after the period of the Parthian Empire, art in its styles continued for some time. A typical feature of Parthian art is the frontality of the people shown. Even in narrative representations, the actors do not look at the object of their action, but at the viewer. These are features that anticipate the art of medieval Europe and Byzantium.
Yarhibol or Iarhibol is an Aramean god who was worshiped mainly in ancient Palmyra, a city in central Syria. He was depicted with a solar nimbus and styled "lord of the spring". He normally appears alongside Bel, who was a co-supreme god of Palmyra, and Aglibol, one of the other top Palmyrene gods.
The Grave Stele of Hegeso, most likely sculpted by Callimachus, is renowned as one of the finest Attic grave stelae surviving today. Dated from c. 410 – c. 400 BCE, it is made entirely of Pentelic marble. It stands 1.49m high and 0.92m wide, in the form of a naiskos, with pilasters and a pediment featuring palmette acroteria. The relief, currently on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens was found in 1870 in the Kerameikos in Athens, which now houses a replica of it.
Anna Sadurska was a Polish Classical philologist, epigrapher, and archaeologist who taught at the University of Warsaw.
Palmyra is an ancient city in the eastern part of the Levant, now in the center of modern Syria. Archaeological finds date back to the Neolithic period, and documents first mention the city in the early second millennium BC. Palmyra changed hands on a number of occasions between different empires before becoming a subject of the Roman Empire in the first century AD.
Malcolm Andrew Richard Colledge was a British archaeologist who specialized in the art of Palmyra. He made numerous visits to the Middle East and conducted extensive research in the region. Colledge faced arrests during his archaeological work in Jordan and Turkmenistan.
The Kerameikos steles are a collection of sculptures used as grave-markers in the Kerameikos necropolis of Attica. Kerameikos is located outside the Themistoclean Wall's Dipylon Gate. Stelai come in various shapes/designs and depict images varying from pottery to narrative scenes. They were often marble or limestone, and were carved or sculpted to depict the person being memorialized sometimes with relatives or slaves. Reliefs decorating the graves were meant to show the dead in their best light, using imagery to recognize their bravery in battle, or pathos, or wealth. These monuments marked the graves of Athenian men, fallen warriors, as well as non-citizens. Women were also included in Kerameikos but typically it was the wealthiest or prominent women who were given stele. In many vase paintings of grave scenes wreaths are seen resting at the base of stele. This was likely a popular way to adorn the graves of loved ones.
The Hypogeum of Yarhai is a hypogeum from the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra which flourished in the second and third centuries AD. It is considered one of the finest examples of Palmyrene funerary art. It's a mass grave which was built to contain the remains of the Yarhai family who commissioned it to be built in 108 AD.
Rubina Raja is a classical archaeologist educated at University of Copenhagen (Denmark), La Sapienza University (Rome) and University of Oxford (England). She is professor (chair) of classical archaeology at Aarhus University and centre director of the Danish National Research Foundation's Centre of Excellence for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet). She specialises in the cultural, social and religious archaeology and history of past societies. Research foci include urban development and network studies, architecture and urban planning, the materiality of religion as well as iconography from the Hellenistic to Early Medieval periods. Her publications include articles, edited volumes and monographs on historiography, ancient portraiture and urban archaeology as well as themes in the intersecting fields between humanities and natural sciences. Rubina Raja received her DPhil degree from the University of Oxford in 2005 with a thesis on urban development and regional identities in the eastern Roman provinces under the supervision of Professors R.R.R. Smith and Margareta Steinby. Thereafter, she held a post-doctoral position at Hamburg University, Germany, before she in 2007 moved to a second post-doctoral position at Aarhus University, Denmark. In 2011–2016, she was a member of the Young Academy of Denmark, where she was elected chairwoman in 2013.
The Temple of the Gadde is a temple in the modern-day Syrian city of Dura-Europos, located near the agora. It contained reliefs dedicated to the tutelary deities of Dura-Europos and the nearby city of Palmyra, after whom the temple was named by its excavators. The temple was excavated between 1934 and January 1936 by the French/American expedition of Yale University, led by Michael Rostovtzeff.
The Temple of Bel, also known as the Temple of the Palmyrene gods, was located in Dura Europos, an ancient city on the Euphrates, in modern Syria. The temple was established in the first century BC and is celebrated primarily for its wall paintings. Despite the modern names of the structure, it is uncertain which gods were worshipped in the structure. Under Roman rule, the temple was dedicated to the Emperor Alexander Severus. In that period, the temple was located within the military camp of the XXth Palmyrene cohort.
Odaenathus, the king of Palmyra from 260 to 267 CE, has been identified by modern scholars as the subject of sculptures, seal impressions, and mosaic pieces. His city was part of the Roman Empire, and he came to dominate the Roman East when in 260 he defeated Shapur I, the Sasanian emperor of Persia, who had invaded the Roman Empire. Odaenathus besieged the Sasanian capital Ctesiphon in 263, and although the city did not fall, the campaign led to a full restoration of Roman provinces taken by Shapur I. In the aftermath of his Persian war, Odaenathus assumed the title King of Kings, which was a challenge to the Persian monarch's claims of authority in the region. Odaenathus ruled the Roman East unopposed with imperial consent. In 267, he was assassinated alongside his eldest son Herodianus while conducting a campaign against Germanic raiders in Bithynia; he was succeeded by his son Vaballathus under the regency of the widow queen Zenobia.
