Material Culture and Women's Religious Experience in Antiquity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium 9781793611932, 9781793611949, 1793611939

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Between the Holy and the Ordinary: Women’s Lives in Early Christianity
The Inviolable Holy
Prophecy and the Ascetic Life
A Different View
Deacons
What Does a Title Tell Us?
Flavia Vitalia Presbytera Sancta
The Cult of Thecla
The Lure of Holy Ground and the Part Played by Women
A Step Back
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 2: Transferring and Transforming Religious Identity Abroad: The Personal Adornment of an Egyptian Woman in Canaan
Jewelry
Cosmetic and Grooming Items
Textiles and Attire
Conclusions: Transferring and Transforming Identity
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Besieged Maternity: Reading Textual Cannibalism in the Hebrew Bible through Material Culture
Theoretical Framework
Child Consumption during Famine in the Bible and the Ancient Near East
2 Kings 6:24–31
Lamentations 2:20, 4:9–10
Material Culture and Maternal Precarity in the Ancient Near-Eastern World
Reading 2 Kings 6 and Lamentations 2, 4 with Material Culture
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Material Expression and Mantic Performance: An Examination of Women’s Religious Experience at the Time of Josiah
From Fiber to Article
Sanctuary Weavers
Weaving’s Connection to a Female Deity
Sites
Kuntillet ‘Ajrud
Kadesh Barnea
Tel eṣ-Ṣafî/Gath
Other Significant Discoveries
Women Weavers, Asherah, and the Jerusalem Temple
Huldah
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 5: “Part of the Same Miracle”: Women and Visual Art in the Dura Europos Synagogue
Spatiality in the Ancient Synagogue
Images of Women in the Synagogue
Sacred Space and Images of Women
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 6: Female Experience at the Tomb: Ritual Commemoration and Sarcophagus Imagery
The Female Gaze, Garlands, and Light/Lighting
Garlands and Lamps/Lighting
Sarcophagi in Their Funerary Contexts
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 7: Assessing the Roles of Women in New Syrian Funerary Reliefs in Japanese Collections
Life and Death in Palmyra
The Roles of Women in Palmyra
Pudicitia
Keys
A New Palmyrene Female Funerary Relief Sculpture
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Source Abbreviations and Sigla
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 8: Foreseeing the Divine Bridal Chamber: A Household of Mosaics from Shahba-Philippopolis
Household Mosaics in Context
The Shahba-Philippopolis Mosaics in Vision
Euteknia Panel
Peleus and Thetis Panel
Nuptial Banquet Panel
Three Mosaics, One Context
Reading the Iconography
Graeco-Roman Philosophy and Christian Signs
Christianities and Ritual Practice
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 9: Reimagining and Reimaging Eve in Early Christianity
Literary Comparanda: Women’s Own Narratives about Eve
A Woman and Her Lamp: claraque in luce refulsit
A Woman and Her Gold-Glass Dish: Juxtapositions, Assertions, and Hopes
Two Women and Their Graves: Eve and Visual Eulogy
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 10: Female Materialities at the Altar: Mary’s Priestly Motherhood and Women’s Eucharistic Experience in Late Antique and Byzantine Churches
Mary’s Priesthood
Women’s Diaconate
The Decline of Female Clergy and the Rise of Mary’s Eucharistic Role
Women in the Euphrasian Basilica
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 11: Rings on Her Fingers: Merovingian Rings and Religion in Late Antiquity
Rings as Material Evidence
Property and Marital Status
Religious Identification
Berteildis and Arnegundis: “Queens” and the Use of Two Names
Use in Burial and Thoughts of the Afterlife
Decline of Use?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Contributors

Citation preview

Material Culture and Women’s Religious Experience in Antiquity

Material Culture and Women’s Religious Experience in Antiquity An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Edited by Mark D. Ellison, Catherine Gines Taylor, and Carolyn Osiek

LEXINGTON BOOKS/FORTRESS ACADEMIC

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic Lexington Books is an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2021 by Mark D. Ellison, Catherine Gines Taylor, and Carolyn Osiek All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. Cover image credits: Top: The infancy of Moses panel, west wall, Dura-Europos synagogue. Scanned image, Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europos Collection. Bottom, left: Palmyrene funerary relief, ca. 50–150 CE. Public domain, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org. Bottom, right: Veneranda fresco, Domitilla catacomb. Public domain. From Josef Wilpert, Die Malereien der Katakomben Roms (Freiburg: Herder, 1903), Taf. 213 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-1-7936-1193-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-7936-1194-9 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Introductionvii Mark D. Ellison, Catherine Gines Taylor, and Carolyn Osiek 1 Between the Holy and the Ordinary: Women’s Lives in Early Christianity Carolyn Osiek

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2 Transferring and Transforming Religious Identity Abroad: The Personal Adornment of an Egyptian Woman in Canaan Krystal V. L. Pierce

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3 Besieged Maternity: Reading Textual Cannibalism in the Hebrew Bible through Material Culture Susannah M. Larry

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4 Material Expression and Mantic Performance: An Examination of Women’s Religious Experience at the Time of Josiah Amanda Colleen Brown

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5 “Part of the Same Miracle”: Women and Visual Art in the Dura Europos Synagogue Sarah E. G. Fein

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6 Female Experience at the Tomb: Ritual Commemoration and Sarcophagus Imagery Sarah Madole Lewis

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7 Assessing the Roles of Women in New Syrian Funerary Reliefs in Japanese Collections Kerry Hull and Lincoln H. Blumell

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8 Foreseeing the Divine Bridal Chamber: A Household of Mosaics from Shahba-Philippopolis Catherine Gines Taylor 9 Reimagining and Reimaging Eve in Early Christianity Mark D. Ellison 10 Female Materialities at the Altar: Mary’s Priestly Motherhood and Women’s Eucharistic Experience in Late Antique and Byzantine Churches Maria Evangelatou 11 Rings on Her Fingers: Merovingian Rings and Religion in Late Antiquity Isabel Moreira

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Index337 About the Contributors

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Introduction Mark D. Ellison, Catherine Gines Taylor, and Carolyn Osiek

Scholars and students of religion, as well as members of religious communities, face a common problem: the underrepresentation of women’s voices, activities, and experiences in the literary record. The written sources historians use to study the religious past were produced almost entirely by men and focus on men’s activities and concerns; anyone interested in seeking an understanding of the lives and contributions of women confronts almost exclusively men’s representations of women.1 Over the past century, the rise of materialist studies, professionalization in the fields of archaeology and art history, and resulting interdisciplinary dialogue have given rise to new possibilities and questions: To what extent can material evidence supply women’s own perspectives and experiences that are lacking in the literary record?2 In what ways might material evidence complete, challenge, or correct the picture of women as represented in texts? Can art and material artifacts present us with insights into women’s devotional lives that are simply absent from the textual record? Such questions bring to the fore still other questions of methodology: How is material and visual evidence to be interpreted? How can scholars identify women’s patronage of physical artifacts (or authorship of texts)? When artifacts were commissioned by women, or for women, how do patronage and audience inform interpretation? The chapters in this volume present a variety of case studies exploring these questions, in pursuit of the overarching quest to recover women’s religious lives, perspectives, and experiences. These essays are, of course, not exhaustive but suggestive of the potential their authors find in taking up physical realia to recover women’s experience, often as represented by women themselves. All but one of the authors presented earlier drafts of their papers at a symposium held March 8–9, 2019, at Brigham Young University. The idea, subject, and title of the symposium were the work of Catherine vii

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Gines Taylor. We were delighted with the enthusiastic response to the call for papers and the variety of scholars and students who gave presentations, a selection of which appear in revised form in this volume. The contributors comprise a diverse group: women and men, senior scholars, mid- and earlycareer academics, and accomplished graduate students from across the United States, with specializations in religious and social history, archaeology, art history, philology, linguistics, and papyrology. Their research encompasses a broad range of religious traditions, historical periods, and geographical regions spanning the Near East and ancient Mediterranean world. The revised papers, as they appear in this volume, incorporate feedback and new insight gained from the lively discussion among symposium participants, subsequent peer reviews, and further research and refining of arguments. We noticed during the symposium that successive papers seemed to build upon each other in interesting ways, and many of the papers shared important points of contact. The resulting volume, like the symposium that preceded it, conveys this sense of dialogue and overall unity, even as its individual chapters explore very different case studies. In this respect, we hope it will make for worthwhile reading as a whole, in addition to providing individual chapters that may be of special interest on their own. We also hope that the volume’s consideration of a broad range of religious traditions—ancient Egyptian, ancient Israelite, early Jewish, Greco-Roman, and early/late ancient Christian—will give readers access to the valuable contextualization and insight that a comparative approach to ancient religion provides. Some of the contributors foreground material evidence and proceed to interpretation; others pursue a topic or theme and bring material evidence into the discussion. All the authors, however, approach archaeological data and physical artifacts as valuable, relevant primary source evidence in its own right, rather than as the handmaid of the written word (used merely to illustrate what is found in texts).3 This volume embraces the reality that material evidence may stand in some tension with the literary sources that historians have often favored in their reconstructions of the past—that it may challenge or complicate the picture obtained from literary sources. Material evidence represents the activities and views of a broader portion of society than that which produced texts. Ultimately, the interdisciplinary examination of material evidence contributes to a fuller, richer historical reconstruction that casts new light on the lives of women in antiquity, their religious activities, and religion in general.4 Illustrating the importance of archaeological sources, Ramsay MacMullen observes that the authors of early Christian texts count as no more than a hundredth of one per cent of the Christian population at any given moment. It is not to discount their influence, then, that we may

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fairly ask: How may we catch some glimpse of the great mass of Christians, the commonality? Answer must be chiefly sought underground; for Christians as a population are best known to us not by the written word, except occasionally inscribed. Instead, it is only by excavation . . . that their lives and behavior can be drawn up for our inspection. Literary evidence can only represent the upper stratum among the Christian population.5

The authors in this volume, aware of how literary evidence also represents predominantly men’s perspectives, have sought to catch some glimpse of women’s religious lives in a variety of ancient traditions by employing art and material as vital, primary evidence. The term material culture refers not only to physical artifacts, objects, archaeological finds and features, visual images and symbols, and other realia of daily life but also to their dynamics and functions within their broader social context, including the purposes of materials as people used them to perform certain actions, behaviors, or rituals. Material culture also considers the agency and perspectives of the commissioners, creators, users, and viewers of material, including modes of seeing and interpreting.6 Readers of this volume will be introduced to a variety of material artifacts relevant to the recovery of women’s religious activities and experiences in antiquity, including some artifacts that have not previously been published (e.g., Hull and Blumell, chapter 7) and others that are not well known. Readers will also be introduced to a range of methodological approaches to the examination and interpretation of this material. The approaches used in this volume are interdisciplinary, often bringing textual evidence and theoretical frameworks into conversation with the material evidence. In our use of the term religious experience, we have in mind a broad meaning encompassing women’s activities, perspectives, beliefs, and perceptions in the realm of religion. This meaning would include, potentially, a phenomenological consideration of the transcendent, mystical, or pneumatic that is often in mind with the term religious experience.7 While this volume cannot comprehensively cover the diverse forms of ancient religious experience, each chapter does present a compelling look at selected cases, enabling readers to appreciate women as agents and efficacious contributors to the landscape of religious life. The chapters are presented in roughly chronological order, as were the original papers in the symposium that preceded this volume. After our keynote lecture (Osiek, chapter 1), we travel back to the late second millennium BCE (Pierce, chapter 2) and journey forward into late antiquity (sixth to eighth centuries CE; Evangelatou and Moreira, chapters 10–11). Thus, we are also employing the term antiquity in a broad sense, encompassing about two thousand years.

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Like an orchestral overture, Carolyn Osiek’s keynote address (chapter 1) introduces themes interwoven throughout the rest of the volume: the interdisciplinary examination of literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence; the articulation of diversity in the ways women in antiquity pursued religious life. Specifically, Osiek traces different ways early Christian women sought, expressed, and enacted an ideal of holiness. These findings have implications for paradigms offered in recent years for reconstructing women’s lives in the ancient Mediterranean and in early Christianity. Osiek argues that both a revolutionary model (a primal radical vision of equality, agency as resistance, celibacy as liberation) and a more traditional strand (agency and fulfillment in expected roles) must be held in tension. As women in antiquity chose among diverse ways of religious life, they would have confronted a particular challenge when crossing geographic and cultural boundaries—how would they maintain their sense of religious identity in their new settings? Such is the case with an Egyptian woman of the thirteenth–twelfth centuries BCE who was interred in the cemetery at Deir el-Balah in southern Canaan. Krystal Pierce (chapter 2) examines artifacts found in the woman’s grave, comparing them to contemporaneous funerary and religious practices associated with women in the Egyptian homeland. Pierce identifies material strategies by which the expatriate woman at Deir el-Balah transferred and transformed her religious identity as an Egyptian woman while abroad in Canaan. Women in antiquity sometimes faced exigencies and dilemmas where the stakes were unbearably high—a reality illustrated perhaps no more starkly than in contexts of violence and warfare. Susannah Larry (chapter 3) tackles this subject head-on, taking an unflinching and perceptive look at siege warfare in ancient Israel and the disturbing motif of cannibalism in certain passages of the Hebrew Bible (including references to mothers eating their children). Bringing the literary record into dialogue with archaeological and art historical evidence, Larry advances existing scholarship by pointing to crucial resonances and disjunctures. Though material evidence does not support literary suggestions of a widespread practice of anthropophagy during sieges, it does illuminate the extreme precarity of women in times of warfare, enable a more sympathetic view of their plight, and allow readers to appreciate ways the literary trope of maternal cannibalism functions rhetorically. In the biblical authors’ imagining of the siege, “maternal precarity becomes an opportunity for literary outcry to more powerful constituencies for help: the king (in 2 Kings) and God (in Lamentations),” and cannibalism of children becomes a vivid means of expressing extremes of human suffering in conditions where women faced “impossible choices” (page 66). Another consideration of women in ancient Israel focuses on a period of religious change, the era of Josiah’s reforms in the late seventh century BCE.

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Amanda Colleen Brown (chapter 4) looks at the activities of women in both pre-reform practices (women who wove textiles for Asherah) and in the new orthodoxy (the prophetess Huldah) as well as the roles each played in approaches to worship that were, respectively, more material or more scribal and metaphysical. Brown’s discussion of material and literary evidence yields appreciation for a form of religious expression some Israelite women once enjoyed and for the loss women experienced when an iconoclastic reformation suppressed their former activities of weaving for a cult object and the memory of the feminine deity it had once represented. Stepping from the world that made biblical narratives to the worlds those narratives made, Sari Fein (chapter 5) next examines wall paintings of the third-century-CE synagogue at Dura-Europos, particularly three panels depicting women: the Purim panel (Esther), the Infancy of Moses (pharaoh’s daughter and attendants), and the Healing of the Widow’s Son. Informed by theories of sacred space, Fein explores how women members of the synagogue congregation might have interacted with these images and the narratives they represented. Like Pierce’s essay on the Egyptian woman in Canaan, Fein’s consideration of Jewish women on the Syrian frontier gives insight into strategies women employed to assert and maintain their religious identity and community ties in a setting far from their ancestral homeland. The religious activities of women took place not only among congregations that worshiped in community but also within households whose practices of familial piety included funerary observances. Sarah Madole Lewis (chapter 6) examines this sphere of women’s religious experience in a discussion of iconography on Roman sarcophagi and its mimetic resonances with women’s activities in funerary rituals (second to third centuries CE). With attention to “the female gaze,” Madole Lewis takes up the case study of a sarcophagus depicting the death of Niobe’s children, looking particularly at the iconographic details of garlands, torches, and bereaved women. In the process, Madole Lewis lights her own figurative lamp illuminating women’s work in funereal observance and their experiences of loss and grief. In their work of grieving and commemorating, women interacted with the sarcophagus and its images as a model and mirror of their own losses. In another investigation of women and funerary artifacts, Kerry Hull and Lincoln Blumell (chapter 7) present findings of their research on Palmyrene relief portraits and inscriptions held in Japanese collections, contributing new data to a corpus of nearly 1,500 portraits of women that constitutes a valuable resource for understanding women in ancient Palmyrene society (first century BCE to third century CE). Hull and Blumell’s epigraphic and iconographic study identifies the representation of Palmyrene women in connection with virtues of propriety, elegance, industriousness, and spiritual fortitude associated with the Roman matrona. Their findings also indicate that Palmyrene

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women were “involved in building monumental tombs, commissioning funerary reliefs, honoring relatives, buying and selling properties, offering inscriptions to gods, and restoring religious buildings” and that some may have engaged in scribal activity (page 158). The essay by Catherine Gines Taylor (chapter 8) joins those by Fein and Hull and Blumell in examining material culture from Syria—an undertaking of special importance given the violent destruction of Syrian cultural heritage we have witnessed in the past decade. (In view of such heartbreaking losses, we are grateful that this volume provides readers with three essays on Syrian archaeology.) Taylor looks at early fourth-century-CE floor mosaics discovered in 1925 in a house in Shahba-Philippopolis. Three mosaic panels depict, in turn, a triad of female personifications, the marriage procession of Peleus and Thetis, and a large triclinium with a nuptial banqueting scene. While acknowledging the value of previous interpretations of the mosaics as Hellenistic-style decoration of a “pagan” (traditionally Greco-Roman) house expressing ideals of marriage, children, paideia, and domestic life, Taylor reaches further to identify Neoplatonic themes that were elements of Thomas and Valentinian Christianities popular in Syria at the time. In a fascinating weaving together of many iconographic and textual strands that might otherwise seem unrelated, Taylor proposes that the three panels may be read in a sequence as references to the delivery of gnosis, and applies theories of visuality to explore ways women viewers of the panels would have interacted with the images. The discussion sets forth new possibilities for thinking about the physical settings of gnostic Christianities (about which little is known) and, like Madole Lewis’s chapter, advances consideration of women’s religious experience in domestic contexts. Turning from the religious frontiers where Christianity, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism formed hybrid interrelations to spheres that came to be seen as more orthodox Christianity, the next two chapters by Mark D. Ellison (chapter 9) and Maria Evangelatou (chapter 10) take as their subjects Eve and Mary, respectively—the two biblical women who became antitypes in early Christian thought and served in diverse ways as paradigms of womanhood. Though the juxtaposition of Eve and Mary has a long tradition, Ellison and Evangelatou recover new and empowering readings of both figures. Ellison surveys diverse iconographies of Eve in Christian art of the third and fourth centuries CE, with attention to the female gaze (like Madole Lewis) and to four case studies of objects commissioned by or for women. Comparing these iconographies to women’s counternarratives about Eve that were more complex, sympathetic, and redemptive than those dominant in patristic literature, Ellison demonstrates that many early Christian women personally related to the figure of Eve as they thought about matters of piety in their own lives, and

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that they deployed images of Eve on objects they commissioned or used in order to make visual assertions about their own religious self-understanding. In turn, Maria Evangelatou (chapter 10) considers ways women may have related to the figure of Mary in Byzantine Christian worship settings. Focusing on the sixth-century-CE mosaics of the Euphrasian basilica in Poreč (modern Croatia), which prominently feature Mary and other women, and informed by literary sources, Evangelatou identifies for Mary a Eucharistic role that was framed as motherhood with aspects of priesthood (“priestly motherhood”). Evangelatou considers possible reactions women may have had to this picture of Mary at a time when they were excluded from priesthood and the sanctuary space Mary occupied. The mosaic program of the Euphrasian basilica reflected and promoted women’s perspectives about the Eucharist, Mary, and women’s role in the Christian community. In contrast to the large, decorated church spaces that women would see were the small items of personal jewelry, such as finger rings, that women would wear. In particular, monogram rings, customized as they were for their owners, were made to order and might reflect the preferences of the women who owned them. Isabel Moreira (chapter 11) examines Merovingian monogram rings (Gaul, mid-fifth to mid-eighth centuries CE) as items women used for a variety of purposes, including not only the representation of status, occupation, or ownership but also religious functions. Women who used monogram rings were participating in a “religious aesthetic that connected them to a world of Mediterranean Christianity” (page 305), and their rings could assert religious identity and hopes for a blessed afterlife, especially when the ring was buried in a grave with its deceased owner. *** We wish to thank the authors who participated in the original symposium and have generously contributed their revised papers to this volume, as well as the peer reviewers whose expertise and feedback have improved the quality of each essay. We also express our heartfelt thanks to the dedicated editors and staff at Lexington Books who have made this volume possible. We acknowledge with gratitude the image providers (credited in photo captions) as well as Ryann Bailey Wawro, Tyler Alexander, George Pierce, Austin Simkins, and Reilly Jensen, who produced drawings especially for this volume. For their encouragement and funding of the symposium and aspects of the production of this volume, we thank Brigham Young University’s Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Eric Huntsman and the BYU program in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Dana Pike and the BYU Department of Ancient Scripture, BYU’s Kennedy Center for International Studies and its

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center on Global Women’s Studies, and the BYU Religious Studies Center. We also wish to thank Aaron Ostler, Kim Sandoval, and other staff members at BYU Faculty Publishing Service for their excellent assistance in copy editing, format checking, and index preparation. NOTES 1. Much work has been and is being done to correct this imbalance. Elizabeth A. Clark, Women in the Early Church (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1983), provided critical introductions to selected patristic texts and the writings of one early Christian woman, Egeria, in a pioneering work of recovery of women’s religious lives. I. M. Plant, ed., Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome: An Anthology (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), presents a collection of the comparatively rare writings of women in antiquity. For a proposed methodology for identifying women’s authorship of ancient texts, see Ross Shepard Kraemer, “Women’s Authorship of Jewish and Christian Literature in the Greco-Roman Period,” in “Women Like This”: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the GrecoRoman World, ed. Amy-Jill Levine (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), 221–42 (another pioneering volume whose essays explore literary constructions and social realities of women in Judaism, Greco-Roman religions, and Christianity in the Hellenistic and Roman periods). Kraemer presents more recent thoughts on recovering women’s perspectives in her sourcebook of primary source texts dealing with women’s religious activities and experiences in antiquity: Ross Shepard Kraemer, Women’s Religions in The Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For studies of women in various religious traditions, past and present, see Leona M. Anderson and Pamela Dickey Young, eds., Women and Religious Traditions, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). An outstanding single-volume reference is Sharon L. James and Sheila Dillon, eds., A Companion to Women in the Ancient World (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2012). 2. Art historian Thomas F. Mathews noted: “Written sources so seldom preserve the reflections of women in the Early Christian period. But perhaps what is lacking in literary sources has been made up in the visual sources” (The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art, revised and expanded edition [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993], 140). Representative explorations of the recovery of women’s lives through material culture include Averil Cameron and Amélie Kuhrt, eds., Images of Women in Antiquity (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1983; London: Routledge, 1993); Elaine Fantham, Helene Peet Foley, Natalie Boymel Kampen, Sarah B. Pomeroy, and H. A. Shapiro, eds., Women in the Classical World: Image and Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Shelby Brown, “‘Ways of Seeing’ Women in Antiquity: An Introduction to Feminism in Classical Archaeology and Ancient Art History,” in Naked Truths: Women, Sexuality, and Gender in Classical Art and Archaeology, ed. Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow and Claire L. Lyons (London: Routledge, 1997), 12–42; Janet Tulloch, “Art and Archaeology as an Historical Resource for the Study of Women in Early Christianity: An Approach

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for Analyzing Visual Data,” Feminist Theology 12, no. 3 (2004): 277–304; Nicola Denzey, The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007); Carol Meyers, Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Janet H. Tulloch, ed., A Cultural History of Women in Antiquity (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 3. The rueful label of archaeology as “the handmaiden of history” seems to have been used first by Ivor Noel Hume, “Archaeology: Handmaiden to History,” North Carolina Historical Review 41, no. 2 (1964): 214–25. 4. This approach yields a richer, more nuanced understanding of religious traditions. As Anderson and Young rightly observe, “No religion can be reduced to the ‘official’ version presented by (usually male) spokespersons” (Women and Religious Traditions, xii). 5. Ramsay MacMullen, The Second Church: Popular Christianity A.D. 200–400 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), xi. 6. For introductory discussions of materiality and visual culture in the study of ancient religions, see Robin M. Jensen, “Visuality,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Mediterranean Religions, ed. Barbette Stanley Spaeth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 309–43; Maia Kotrosits, The Lives of Objects: Material Culture, Experience, and the Real in the History of Early Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 2–6. 7. Our broad usage of experience resonates with that used in Pamela Dickey Young, “Women in Christianity,” in Women and Religious Traditions, 3rd ed., 203: “In 1960, Valerie Saiving wrote what is usually considered the first article in contemporary feminist theology, ‘The Human Situation: A Feminine View,’ in which she raises the question of experience that becomes central to feminist theology. She opines that women do not experience the world in the same way that men do.” For discussions of religious experience, see Robert H. Sharf, “Experience,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 94–116; Luke Timothy Johnson, Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity: A Missing Dimension in New Testament Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 1–37.

Chapter 1

Between the Holy and the Ordinary Women’s Lives in Early Christianity Carolyn Osiek

In this chapter, we will pursue the questions “How was holiness understood in early Christianity?” and, more specifically, “How did women share in this elusive quality?” In the West today, holiness is usually understood as the exercise of heroic virtue, including dedication to the needy (e.g., Mother Teresa). However, if we understand holiness in its traditional sense of separation and dedication for the use of God, our perspective looks different. The expanding development of this ideal enabled new understandings that empowered women as well as men. My starting point is a passage that has intrigued me for some time— 1 Corinthians 7:14: ἡγίασται γὰρ ὁ ἀνὴρ ὁ ἄπιστος ἐν τῇ γυναικὶ καὶ ἡγίασται ἡ γυνὴ ἡ ἄπιστος ἐν τῷ ἀδελφῷ· ἐπεὶ ἄρα τὰ τέκνα ὑμῶν ἀκάθαρτά ἐστιν, νῦν δὲ ἅγιά ἐστιν. For the unbelieving husband is made holy through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy through her husband. Otherwise, your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. (NRSV)

Or more literally: The man who is not a believer has been made holy in the woman, and the woman who is not a believer has been made holy in the [believing] brother. Otherwise, your children are unclean; now, however, they are holy.

This astounding declaration occurs in the context of Paul’s deliberations about preserving a “mixed marriage” between a believer and an unbeliever (vv. 12–16). He asserts that he has a saying “from the Lord,” making this our 1

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earliest attestation of the Synoptic prohibition of divorce attributed directly to Jesus (vv. 10–11; cf. Matt. 5:31–32; 9:3–9; Mark 10:2–12; Luke 16:18). However, Paul recognizes that what he has received by tradition regarding marriage does not account for a troublesome union between believer and unbeliever, and the Corinthians have asked him what he thinks about it (7:1). He is not in favor of dissolving the marriage if it can be saved; yet, he states that the marriage can be ended if necessary because of incompatibility of belief and practice (v. 15). Though Paul makes this point clear, he cannot let this be the last word. He ends the subject by moving from the quality of holiness to the possibility of the wife (referenced first) saving the husband, and vice versa. Paul concludes the passage with the hope that the believing partner, whether woman or man—but the case of the woman is addressed first— may be able to save her or his spouse, probably not only in an eschatological sense but also in the sense of ongoing life in faith (v. 16; cf. 1 Pet. 3:1–7). Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 7:14 is at the center of an inclusionary structure that runs from verses 12–16, taking up the question of a “mixed marriage” that may or may not be preserved. However, Paul is suddenly no longer talking about marriage arrangements but about holiness. The spouse of the believer, she or he, “has been made holy” (ἡγίασται), a perfect passive, normally intended to convey an action that has happened but whose effects continue into the present. Paul seems to be saying that the presence of the baptized believer gives the marriage a quality that it would not otherwise have. Just four chapters from here, he will argue that the husband is the head of the wife, as God is the head of Christ and Christ is the head of the man—but he does not include in this set of analogies that Christ is head of the church (11:3). When he makes this analogy, Paul does not yet have a successor who has written Ephesians 5, comparing husband and wife to Christ and the church. We are not dealing here with ecclesial typology but with actual marriage understanding and practices of the time.1 The presence of just one believer in the family has the same effect on the children as it has on the unbelieving spouse: they, too, are made holy, Paul says. In this statement, Paul is surely not talking about infant baptism, though the power of baptism is certainly at play here. Rather, Paul is likely talking about the consciousness of identity, on the part of at least one parent who has accepted the demands of baptism, that passes on that identity to the children. The children, consequently, participate in this quality of holiness that is carried forward into life. THE INVIOLABLE HOLY Paul’s assertion of the holiness of the children of believers, and, by extension, the holiness of the parents, is perhaps an echo of the Roman ideal of

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the inviolability of the home. This ideal is famously represented in the wellknown statement of Cicero that contributed to the rise of the Victorian adage “A man’s home is his castle.” Cicero makes this remark after he is banished from Rome in 58 BCE. During his exile, his house is destroyed and a temple to the goddess Libertas is erected in its place. Following his triumphant return to Rome the next year, Cicero persuades the pontifices to deconsecrate the temple and allow him to return to his former property. He plays on the word groups religio, binding duties of the pious person, and sanctus, whose primary meaning is a declaration of inviolability—precisely what his home with its household gods had been denied by Libertas2: Quid est sanctius, quid omni religione munitius quam domus unius cuiusque civium? Hic arae sunt, hic foci, hic di penates, hic sacra, religiones, caerimoniae continentur; hoc perfugium est ita sanctum omnibus ut inde abripi neminem fas sit. What is there more holy, what is there more carefully fenced round with every description of religious respect, than the house of every individual citizen? Here are his altars, here are his hearths, here are his household gods: here all his sacred rites, all his religious ceremonies are preserved. This is the asylum of everyone, so holy a spot that it is impious to drag any one from it.3

Like Cicero, Paul is also thinking of the inviolability of the home, but he further extends that inviolability to the holiness residing—through baptism— in individual members of Christ’s community. It is a significant move, though not unknown, to speak of holiness that usually inheres in objects or places and to posit it instead in persons. However, Paul has already done this in the metaphor of the community as God’s holy temple (1 Cor. 3:16–17; 6:19). The following two older translations of 1 Corinthians 7:14 help us better understand Paul’s idea of holiness, as they carry more traditional English terms related to the idea of holiness as dedication to God: KJV: For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now are they holy. RSV: For the unbelieving husband is consecrated through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is consecrated through her husband. Otherwise, your children would be unclean, but as it is they are holy.

The semantic field of ἅγιος, holy, did not principally have to do with virtuous or heroic behavior, as it more often connotes today. Any close reading of 1 Corinthians indicates that Paul did not think there was much virtue or heroism in the Corinthian community. Rather, Paul would start from the other end:

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because you are holy, that is, dedicated to God, act accordingly. This is the ethos of the covenant between God and Israel, and what Paul means when he declares his people holy. In Paul’s experience, the primary context of this Hebrew semantic domain of ‫ שדק‬is cultic, so something or someone is holy because he or she pertains to the sanctuary or is prepared for its use, for example, the priest and his clothing (Exod. 29:21); animals for sacrifice (Jer. 12:3); the temple itself (1 Kings 9:3); and silver, gold, and bronze spoils of war that are dedicated to God (2 Sam. 8:10–11). The identification of the holy further extends to the Sabbath (Deut. 5:12), by widening extension in the prophetic tradition, from the temple to the city Jerusalem (Joel 3:17) and then to the whole “Holy Land,” the land of Israel (Zech. 2:16). The people of Israel are declared a priestly people and a holy nation (Exod. 19:6) belonging not to themselves but to God, dedicated to God’s own use and therefore bound to the observances enjoined on them (e.g., Exod. 22:31; Lev. 11:44–45; 19:2; 20:7).4 Paul knows the scriptures well. He knows that the basic meaning of ‫שדק‬ does not describe the moral state of a person; its root meaning suggests that someone or something is withheld from ordinary use and, therefore, is distinct from the ordinary. Moses, for instance, must remove his shoes and go no farther toward the burning bush because he stands on holy ground (Exod. 3:5). Such holiness can actually be deadly to the unaware, as it was to Uzzah who reached out to steady the ark and paid with his life (2 Sam. 6:6–8). This danger of the holy mixing with the unholy emphasizes the importance of a prophet—one who is dedicated in a unique way to the work of God. The prophet Jeremiah received this holy identity from the womb: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations” (Jer. 1:5 NRSV). With this understanding, Paul can call his congregations “the holy ones” (ὁι ἅγιοι) over and over again, both those to whom he writes and those who are present with him and send greetings (Rom. 1:7; 15:25, 31; 1 Cor. 1:2; 2 Cor. 1:1; 13:12; 16:15; Phil. 1:1; 4:22). He compares the community to the temple of God, which is holy (1 Cor. 3:17; 6:19). He inveighs against Corinthian engagement in lawsuits, since the holy ones (and that is you, he says) will judge the world in the eschatological age (1 Cor. 6:20). Closest to the original sense of cultic consecration, he urges the Roman congregation to present their bodies as a holy living sacrifice, pleasing to God (Rom. 12:1). Ephesians 1:1 and Colossians 1:1 echo the same address many times: set aside, consecrated for God’s use. Moreover, Paul often emphasizes that they are called to this holy identity. Interestingly, these passages generally do not ascribe holiness to women with regard to sexual status, even if Paul does give preference to the virginal or at least unmarried state for women (1 Cor. 7:34).

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The trouble is that the people of Paul’s communities are not set aside any more than were the Israelites before him. The people to whom Paul writes are not in monasteries or ascetic communities, as ideals of holiness would soon favor. They live daily lives, with family and work concerns. They marry, raise children, and try to make a living. They have dinner parties, accept invitations to dinner at friends’ homes and in temples, and take lawsuits to court. People could enter a house for the weekly meeting of the community and trip over the children’s toys left in the peristyle, or be participants in the Lord’s Supper while a woman gives birth in a back room.5 These kinds of verbal images may be startling to modern readers who would idealize early Christian life, but they are probably realistic. After all, the families in these houses were living real lives.6 As with the Pharisees, who aimed to bring the holiness of the Jerusalem temple into everyday life, Paul the Pharisee offered holiness to everyone who belonged to the holy community. In recent years, New Testament scholars have attempted an accurate description of these people based on what we know of life in Mediterranean cities in the first and second centuries. These community members were not, for the most part, among the elites, but they were not the dregs of society either. If we look at ordinary life in places where we do have some knowledge about lifestyle, notably Pompeii and Herculaneum,7 we see modest houses, businesses, public services, and community involvement. As this was a kinship-based society, most people were organized into some kind of kinship structure, whether by blood, marriage, or informal relationship. Sometimes whole households worshipped in the same religious tradition, though this was not the norm. There were differences of belief and religious practice within marriages and families and in slaveholding patterns. First Corinthians 7, among other sources, gives evidence of such differences. In spite of popular philosophical ideals of the authoritative father who effectively rules over everyone in his household, for example, and in spite of patterns of total household conversion in Acts (the house of Cornelius [10:47–48] and the house of the jailer at Philippi [16:33–34]), free women as well as enslaved persons, female or male, could and did make their own choices about religious affiliation. Early Christian writers argued that the communities of Jesus believers were like everyone else, yet for Paul, there was supposed to be a difference that inscribed their call to holiness—the idea of being “set apart for God’s use.” Paul expresses this most clearly in Philippians 3:20: “Our πολίτευμα is in heaven, and it is from there that we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our poor bodies into something like his glorious body.” As argued perhaps a century later by the anonymous author of the Epistle to Diognetus, Jesus’s followers are just like anyone else, with no particular

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customs or language. They participate in everything as citizens but also as resident aliens, aware of belonging to another citizenship (Diognetus 5.1–10). Shepherd of Hermas Parable 1 (50) takes it further: believers live in a foreign land that is not their true home, and they will be unable to return to their homeland if they are too invested in this one. Of course, differences in Christian practice developed over time. For example, Jesus’s believers had difficulty participating in some social and family celebrations. A glimpse into developing differences in Christian practice, and hence difficulties of “mixed marriages” as envisioned in 1 Corinthians 7:12–16, is shown more than a century later in Tertullian’s appeal against a Christian widow remarrying. The appeal is strengthened by the fact that the widow is marrying a husband who does not share her faith, which will make keeping her religious practices difficult. Keeping a statio (early morning fast and prayer) will be unlikely because her husband will want her to come at daybreak with him to the baths. On a day of fast, he will hold a banquet. If she is called on for a duty of charity, he will have urgent family business that will require her presence. Without a similar belief system, how will he accept her offering hospitality to visiting church members, rising at night to pray, and even going out at night to attend nocturnal vigils and feasts (To His Wife 2.4–5)? These differences are important to Paul. He believes both women and men not only are holy but also convey holiness into their families—to their spouses and children. It is not that you are holy if you act this way, but rather you are holy, therefore you act this way. Naturally, Paul has some very definite ideas about what “this way” means, which he spells out throughout the rest of 1 Corinthians, with regard to compromised food, lawsuits, incest, marriage, correct participation in the Lord’s Supper, and correct belief about resurrection. As mentioned, it is not that his people are holy because of what they do or how they behave; they are holy because God has offered them the gift of faith in Christ and they have responded to that divine initiative—more or less. Their presence in their everyday world is supposed to be lived with a sense that they have a distinct identity. They are to present their very selves as a living sacrifice (Rom. 12:1). Seen this way, members of the community who do not live up to this identity obstruct the flow of holiness to their spouse, their children, and their world. In this perspective, Paul’s vehement objection to the behavior of some members of the Corinthian community is understandable. It explains why the disagreement between Euodia and Syntyche in Philippi is such a concern for Paul; the quarrel seems to have sparked the appeal for unity and harmony in Paul’s letter to that community. Paul’s appeal to an agreement between the two women (or possibly between the women and Paul) does not seem to be an afterword to his elaborate appeal for unity regarding a petty quarrel he

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has heard about (“Oh, by the way . . .”) but rather, the disagreement between the two women is at the center of the disharmony in the community of Philippi. Euodia and Syntyche must be important figures in the church who are obstructing the flow of holiness to the community by their lack of unity (Phil. 4:2–3). Over the years, more questions are raised about public conduct. For example, rather early and often references in Christian and contemporary Jewish sources condemn the practice of abortion and abandonment of newborns.8 By the time of Tertullian, questions are raised about attendance at the theater and the games. Questions are also raised about military service—not because of the violence it entails but because of the compromised religious loyalties necessitated by participation in public sacrifice to gods, which would constitute idolatry. However, Tertullian’s vehement argument against such practices does not mean that others heeded his prohibitions. Tertullian thought it was necessary to write a whole treatise arguing against Christian attendance at the games. The games were the major sporting events of the Roman world. We can suppose just as many sports addicts then as there are now. Though questions regarding the Christian lifestyle were arising, it is important to remember that the vast majority of believers in Jesus—and the number of believers began to increase exponentially by the end of the second century—continued to live rather normal lives. Perhaps these members occasionally experienced some difficulties with their unbelieving neighbors over their odd practices, but the Jews had already experienced that for several centuries. The rare years of outright persecution of Christians passed relatively quickly (until 303 CE) and were usually confined to certain regions. Still, they left scars in the collective memory, which inspired the stories that blossomed into gripping and often highly legendary accounts in the martyrdom literature that followed.9 These legendary stories are indications of a direction that began to change the perception of holiness in the community, leading to a rarified idea of holiness that no longer rested in everyone but rather primarily in the exceptional. PROPHECY AND THE ASCETIC LIFE Prophecy and the spiritual authority of prophets were essential ingredients in the formation of Christian life from the beginning (cf. Acts 13:1; 21:9–11; 1 Cor. 11:4–5; 12:28; 14:1). Accepted prophets were honored as holy, and prophecy was one role that was never denied to women. A number of women prophets are known from the era, including the Asia Minor Montanist prophets of the second half of the second century, Maximilla and Priscilla, through whom Tertullian in his Montanist phase says that the gospel was preached

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(Exhortation to Chastity 10.5). Eusebius named the revered but to us otherwise unknown Ammia of Asia Minor as an example of prophetic activity with no further need of an introduction to his readers (Church History 5.17.2–4). Other women prophets include Nanas of fourth-century Phrygia, who had visions of angels and heard heavenly voices,10 the visionary martyr Perpetua of Carthage in the early third century, and the visionary in Tertullian’s community to whom many flocked after liturgy to hear of her visions (On the Soul 9.4). By the fourth century, a strong tradition was evolving in favor of the ascetic life and the ascription of holiness to those who embraced it. There is ample evidence in the literature for the idealization of holiness in the developing practice of ascesis and celibacy. Names like Macrina, Paula, Eustochium, Marcella, and the Melanias are well known because of the portrayals of their ascetic lives, whether they began as wives and mothers then turned ascetic (Paula, Marcella, and the Melanias) or lived a lifetime as ascetics (Eustochium and Macrina). Paula, Melania, and Macrina, for example, are each repeatedly referred to as “the holy one.”11 Regardless of descriptives, however, by this time these women were revered as particularly venerable in view of their ascetic and virtuous way of life. A DIFFERENT VIEW The same literature, however, written by male family members, has an undercurrent not as well known that admiringly ascribes holiness to some married women of their own families. Examples are mothers like Macrina the Elder, grandmother of the famous ascetic (d. c. 340), and her daughter-inlaw Emmelia (d. 375), who was the wife of Basil the Elder and mother of the Cappadocians theologians Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Macrina the Younger (Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina). There are also the women of the family of Gregory Nazianzen: his sister Gorgonia (d. c. 370), married to Alypius, and his mother, Nonna (d. after 374), who converted her husband, also named Gregory. In Gregory’s funerary oration for Gorgonia, he describes her as surpassing all in the usual feminine virtues of modesty, prudence, and wisdom. He claims that she surpassed even men in the chanting of psalms and knowledge of scripture. Gregory wrestles with the accepted belief in the superiority of virginity over against his appreciation of his sister, in the genre of praise in her funerary oration: She blended the excellence of the married with that of the unmarried state, and proving that neither of them absolutely binds us to, or separates us from, God or the world … but that it is mind [νοῦς] which nobly presides over marriage and virginity, and arranges and works upon them as the raw material of virtue

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[ἀρετή] under the master-hand of reason [λόγος]. For though she had entered upon a union of flesh, she was not therefore separated from the spirit nor, because her husband was her head [1 Cor. 11:3], did she ignore her first head: but, performing those duties due to the world and nature, according to the law of the flesh, or rather of Him who gave these laws to the flesh, she consecrated herself entirely to God.12

Gorgonia lived her role in marriage with prudence and piety—no adornment—and charity to the needy. Gregory recounts two episodes in which she was injured and ill but was miraculously cured. Her brother writes that she died with a psalm on her lips, unfortunately before her husband and parents, who were present at her funeral. In his funeral oration for his father, Gregory praises his mother, Nonna, widowed and present at the funeral. Of his mother, Gregory says: I have heard the scripture say: Who can find a valiant [ἀνδρείαν] woman? [Prov 31:10] and declare that she is a divine gift, and that a good marriage is brought about by the Lord. Even those without are of the same mind; if they say that a man can win no fairer prize than a good wife, nor a worse one than her opposite. But we can mention none who has been in this respect more fortunate than he. For I think that, had anyone from the ends of the earth and from every race of men attempted to bring about the best of marriages, he could not have found a better or more harmonious one than this. For the most excellent of men and of women were so united that their marriage was a union of virtue [ἀρετή] rather than of bodies: since, while they excelled all others, they could not excel each other, because in virtue they were quite equally matched [ἰσόῥῥοπον καὶ ὁμότιμον]. But she who was given by God to my father became not only . . . his assistant [συνεργός], but even his leader [ἀρχηγός], drawing him on by her influence in deed and word to the highest excellence; judging it best in all other respects to be overruled by her husband according to the law of marriage, but not being ashamed, in regard of piety, even to offer herself as his teacher [διδάσκαλος]. Admirable indeed as was this conduct of hers, it was still more admirable that he should readily acquiesce in it ….

Nonna is presented as an ideal ascetic within the married life: she was drawn to prayer first thing in the morning, to fasting and vigil, to all-night singing of psalms. She was the patron of orphans and widows and a lover of virginity. Nevertheless, Gregory must reinforce her properly feminine role in the church: “So also in the holy assemblies, or places, her voice was never to be heard except in the necessary responses of the service. . . . It was also surely a great thing that she reverenced the sanctuary by her silence” (see

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1 Cor. 14:34).13 For a time and place when asceticism was strongly in the ascendancy, these are very interesting portrayals of Christian marriage and adaptation of ascetic ideals to married women. The search for holiness was not limited to the celibate ascetics. DEACONS While asceticism was being honored in women in some places, female deacons were functioning in the churches of the East, especially in those of Asia Minor. The ministry of these female deacons focused on helping women: not only in preparation for and assistance at baptism but also in instructing, chaperoning, visiting the sick, hosting at pilgrimage sites, and much more. Their dedication to the service of God reinforced the traditional idea of the holy as consecration, but they were also expected to exhibit the virtuous qualities that have come to be attached to the idea of personal holiness. The third-century Didascalia, incorporated into the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions, completes a Trinitarian allusion that commands honor to the deaconess (διακονίσσα) as a type of the Holy Spirit (Didascalia 9; Apostolic Constitutions 2.26.6). This analogy begins much earlier with Ignatius of Antioch. His early second-century Antiochene church seems not to have known of women deacons. He enjoins reverence for the bishop as God the Father, the presbyters as the council of the apostles, and the deacon as Christ, who carries out the will of the Father (Magnesians 6). Now, in the third- and fourth-century texts from churches that have female deacons, the deaconess is to be honored as the Holy Spirit; just as the Paraclete never does anything for self except to glorify the Son, so the deaconess does nothing without the deacon, the type of Christ. In each case, the Didascalia contains the Trinitarian analogy but not the further comment on the roles of deacon and deaconess that are added in the Apostolic Constitutions. The analogy continues with presbyters as apostles, now sent out to teach and baptize (Matt 28:19–20); widows and orphans as the altar of sacrifice14; and virgins as the altar of incense (Apostolic Constitutions 2.26.7–8). The allusion to the sacred objects of the temple reinforces the sense of sacredness in the roles played: The perennial linking of holiness for women with celibacy is not far behind, however: Προχείρεσɑι δὲ καὶ διάκονον πιστήν κɑί ἁγίαν εις τɑς τῶν γυναικῶν ὑπηρεσίας. Appoint a female deacon who is trustworthy and holy for ministry to women. (Apostolic Constitutions 3.16.1)

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A bishop, presbyter, or deacon should be married only once, while the deaconess should be a παρθένος ἁγνή … or … χήρα μονογάμος, πιστή και τιμία. A pure virgin … or … a once-married widow,15 faithful and honorable. (Apostolic Constitutions 6.17.1–4)

In the prayers for the ordination of deacons, the men are to be constant, without blame, to be filled with spirit and power like Stephen. In the prayer for the ordination of a deaconess: As you filled with the Spirit Miriam, Deborah, Hanna, and Huldah; and did not disdain to have your son born of a woman; who instituted women guardians of the gates of the Temple16; give her the Holy Spirit and cleanse her of all pollution [μολυσμός] of flesh and spirit, so that she may worthily fulfill this ministry. (Apostolic Constitutions 8.19–20.1–2)17

Lest we think that this kind of thinking about women and pollution was a later development in Christianity, however, let us return to Paul and recall another line from 1 Corinthians 7. Having earlier discussed the intricacies of married life among believers and of believers with nonbelievers, Paul advocates for no marriage at all in view of the eschatological situation in which he believes they are. The unmarried man can devote himself to the “things of the Lord” instead of to worldly things and to pleasing his wife. The unmarried woman or the virgin can then devote herself not to worldly things and to pleasing her husband but to pleasing the Lord, “and so to be holy in body and spirit” (1 Cor. 7:32–35). The focus on the chaste female body is not new with the later rise of Christian asceticism. Even though Paul in this chapter grants mutual regard to husband and wife with regard to marital rights, he still advocates for celibacy and puts one-sided stress on the bodily aspect of holiness for women. However, the incorporation of women deacons by the late third century into the ranks of the clergy in many of the Eastern churches, aided by gendered language, gave rise to their incorporation into a Trinitarian typology that drew on strands of Syrian spirituality depicting the Spirit as feminine.18 While women’s consecrated identity does not require specific language of holiness, that description is repeatedly used for some, for example, the deaconess Romana, to whom Pelagia is entrusted upon her conversion, and Marthana, friend of Egeria, whom she encounters at the sanctuary of Thecla in Isauria.19 WHAT DOES A TITLE TELL US? We now turn to archaeological evidence for some contemporary examples of women who were considered holy and who filled uncertain roles in the early

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church. The fourth-century Roman sarcophagi contain many depictions of a female so-called orant figure, with hands raised in prayer, or a female holding a scroll and depicted in the gesture of speaking, with two fingers extended and mouth open. More recent assessment of these figures suggests that they are not personified virtues, as sometimes thought, but educated women depicted on their own burial property.20 A number of known inscriptions of women given the title presbitera/presbytera also exist. Though the women bear such a title, it is unclear what that means in each given context. Of the two examples that follow, one contains the specific ascription of “holy.” By the time of these inscriptions, presbyters ordinarily constituted an advisory council to bishops, but they also went into places the bishop could not reach, such as the countryside, to fulfill pastoral and sacramental functions. Flavia Vitalia Presbytera Sancta Dominis nostris Thaeodosio consule XI et Valentiniano viro nobelissimo Caesare. Ego Thaedosius emi a Flavia Vitalia presbytera sancta matrona auri solidis III. Sub die. (CIL 3.14900) Under our Lord Theodosius, consul for the eleventh time, and Valentinian, most noble man of Caesar, I, Theodosius, bought [a burial place] from Flavia Vitalia, the holy presbytera matron for three golden solidi.

In Salona, now Croatia, in 425 CE, an otherwise unknown man named Theodosius purchased a rather expensive cemetery burial plot from the matron, Flavia Vitalia, who bears the title of presbyter. The title presbytera or presbytides can of course simply refer to an older woman, just as the masculine presbyter can refer to an older man (e.g., Acts 2:17; 1 Tim. 5:2; Titus 2:3; Heb. 11:2). There are, in fact, some other inscriptions in which one of these alternatives is a better translation. Context, therefore, is crucial for interpretation. That Flavia Vitalia is called “holy” indicates either an ascetic or ecclesial role, or both. The title perhaps reflects the ambiguity: is holiness ascribed to an ecclesial rank or to the reputation of the person? The fact that she seems to represent the local church in a business transaction suggests that she has an official role in the church community. Whether her position includes some kind of ritual or sacramental role similar to that of male presbyters or female deacons is not known.21 Flavia Vitalia is not a celibate: she is a matron and therefore respectably married. For possible further insight into the role of female presbyters, see Leta from Calabria. She, like Flavia Vitalia, did not live a fully ascetic lifestyle; she was married but did not survive her husband (figure 1.1).

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Leta presbitera. From Tropea, Calabria. A full-length funerary slab. B[onae] M[emoriae] S[acrum] LETA PRESBITERA QUI VIXIT ANN. XL M VIII D VIIII QVEI BENE FECIT MARITUS PRECESSIT IN PACE PRIDIE IDUS MAIAS (CIL 10.8079; ILCV 1.1192) Sacred to her good memory. Leta the presbyter lived forty years, eight months, and nine days. Her husband made [this tombstone]. She preceded him in peace on the day before the ides of May [May 14].

Both Flavia Vitalia and Leta are married women, as mentioned, who hold the title presbitera/presbytera apart from their husbands. In the case of Leta, if she bears the title only because her husband is a presbyter, his name would surely be prominently inscribed on the tombstone—he would be the significant figure, even though the monument was for his wife. In the case of Flavia Vitalia, she seems to be a sort of real-estate agent for the local church cemetery. Beyond this, what both women’s roles are as presbitera/presbytera is still unclear.22 As with the women commemorated in these inscriptions, so with women like Gorgoinia and Nonna, we are also missing much personal information. These two women appear in the sources because of their contact with a great male figure. Yet, we lack accounts of their complete lives. We do, however, have accounts of some elite ascetic women (though these accounts may be hagiographical), such as Macrina, Melanias, Marcella, Paula, and Olympias.

Figure 1.1  Tombstone of Leta Presbitera, Tropea, Calabria. Source: Photo credit: Giorgio Otranto, Italia meridionale e Puglia paleocristine. Saggi storici (Bari: Edipuglia, 1991), 110.

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More often, the idea of holiness by the time of these women will adhere to those consecrated by an ascetic lifestyle, including celibacy, fasting, and vigils. The probably ascetic Egeria, far-reaching pilgrim from the West who traveled all over biblical lands in the late fourth century, records that at the sanctuary of sancta Thecla at Seleucia in Isauria, she encountered again the sancta diakonissa Marthana, superior of a group of apoctactites, or virgins, whom she had previously met in Jerusalem (Egeria 9.3–5 [23.2–3]). THE CULT OF THECLA The popularity of devotion to Saint Thecla in the first Christian centuries is itself a phenomenon of belief in the power of holy persons and objects. The second-century Acts of Paul and Thecla, with its ideal female convert who turns not only to asceticism but to missionary activity, expands devotion to Saint Thecla to all the major centers of the Eastern Mediterranean, and even to Rome itself by the seventh century. In Acts of Paul and Thecla, Thecla, a disciple of Paul, is commissioned by him, though originally somewhat reluctantly on his part, to go and preach the word of God. In what is probably the original ending to the narrative, Thecla lives to an old age in Seleucia of Asia Minor and dies a natural death. Over time, however, expanded versions of the story—Life of Saint Thecla and The Miracles of Saint Thecla, an account of wonders performed after death—were developed to serve at the shrine locations. One version of the story ends with Thecla escaping from lecherous men into the rock at her shrine. A variant of this story also surfaced in Syria. By the seventh century, Thecla no longer ends her life with her leap into the rock, but somehow mysteriously travels to Rome, where she is commemorated two or three stadia from the tomb of her apostle, Paul (about 3 km south of today’s Porta San Paolo).23    Thecla’s cult was also immensely popular in Egypt from the time of Athanasius, and a number of attestations to the cult centers are found there, even the invention of a new Saint Thecla related to a local martyr.24 By the late fifth century, the major shrine to Thecla at Seleucia in Isauria (modern Silifke) included a church (at 80 m by 40 m, it was larger than the church of San Apollinare in Classe at Ravenna), with two other churches in the same precinct, all surrounded by monastic communities (figures 1.2 and 1.3). The shrine had to compete for pilgrims with the commemoration of Paul at nearby Tarsus, as witnessed by Egeria, who visited both in the later fourth century. As described by Kate Cooper, at the Seleucia sanctuary of Thecla, “[Thecla’s] ascetic followers served as living substitutes for her missing

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Figure 1.2  Remains of Apse of the Massive Church at the Sanctuary of Thecla at Seleucia (Silifke, Turkey). Source: Photo credit: Carolyn Osiek.

Figure 1.3  Underground Memoria, Sanctuary of Thecla, Silifke. Source: Photo credit: Carolyn Osiek.

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relics: in their imitation of the saint, they were embraced by her power and in turn carried that power out into the countryside around her shrine.”25 The power of the saint’s holiness was infectious. THE LURE OF HOLY GROUND AND THE PART PLAYED BY WOMEN The extended burial areas in central Italy that we now know as “catacombs” began as burials on private property, both above and below ground, but then extended far underground. By the late fourth century, most of the catacombs of Rome had at least one tomb of a martyr and a lively business in pilgrimage to the martyr’s tomb. What better place to be buried than as close as possible to the tomb of one who is revered as having carried in life the power of holiness that continues after death? What began as private burial plots intended for extended households of family, slaves, and freedmen and freedwomen grew into the vast systems we know today, with many miles of underground corridors and thousands of burials. It is striking that some of these burial areas retained the names of their original owners and patrons who were women: Priscilla, Domitilla, and Commodilla. Patronage of burial grounds may have been one of the principal ways that wealthy Christian women could exercise their social authority. This was an important aspect of women’s patronage that enabled the faithful to access the holy in their confrontation with death.26 The “business” of pilgrimage to holy sites and holy tombs in late antiquity produced multiple artifacts: ampullae, crosses, miniatures, and reliquaries by which to carry home physical remembrances of the holy places.27 The Roman catacombs have been extensively studied, but another burial complex around a holy woman is less known: Victoria sanctimonialis of Dougga, in Africa Proconsularis.28 The name sanctimonialis was, by the fourth century, a title sometimes given to a female ascetic.29 At Dougga, down a hill covered with gravestones, are the remains of a small funerary church, dating from probably the late fourth or early fifth century, though such a date is difficult to decipher because many pieces used in the church’s construction were stolen from elsewhere, especially from the theater and Temple of Saturn up the hill. Sarcophagi line both walls of the nave (figures 1.4 and 1.5).    On both sides of the presbyterium, steps lead down to an open space below and behind the altar. More burials are located below, but one is central, directly below the altar. The inscription reads (with misspelling): VICTORIAE SANTIMONIALE IN PACE (figure 1.6).  This otherwise unknown ascetic woman was so important to her community that being buried close to her meant being buried in especially holy

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Figure 1.4  Nave of Small Funerary Basilica, Dougga, Tunisia. Source: Photo credit: David Balch.

Figure 1.5  Presbyterium of Funerary Basilica, Dougga. Source: Photo credit: David Balch.

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Figure 1.6  Inscription on tomb of Victoria sanctimonialis, Dougga. Photo credit: David Balch.

ground. Again, perceptions of holiness, with new martyrs no longer possible, were concentrated in those who lived an ascetic life; but it was also believed that this holiness would extend to those who came into contact with the holy ones, not only spiritually but materially, not only in life but also in death.

A STEP BACK What did it mean to be holy? For Paul, it meant bearing a distinct call from God but not removing oneself from daily life. The expression of that identity required a consistency between belief and action that resulted in a life lived according to the demands of the gospel. Increasingly, however, it meant to be set apart into alternate patterns of ascetic life. By tracing some ways of thinking about women’s lives through the filter of perceptions of holiness, we can see some seemingly contradictory messages conveyed to women of the time. Some of those messages have come down to us: the invitation to women to full partnership and equal regard while pressuring them toward conformity to social expectations of traditional feminine behavior. Some previous paradigms have posited full gender equality (at least for the freeborn, if not for the enslaved) at the beginning of the Jesus movement, after which that initial insight was lost and equality degenerated. Still, this paradigm is not fully convincing. The work of scholars like Susan Hylen and

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Kate Wilkinson posits at least two different streams of tradition running consecutively yet in tension with each other: an expectation of modesty, silence, and submission and another of active engagement in daily life, political events, and worship. Some of these stories have shown how ideals existed alongside social realities. Women had to hold both of these pressures in tension and navigate their way through life, learning how to practice agency in effective ways.30 Though holiness at this time depended upon individuals’ perceptions, the examples of the holy ones who engaged in more radical ways of living caught historians’ attention. The lives of the majority of women who expressed their faith quietly have for the most part gone unrecorded. While some scholarship has focused on the extraordinary—the women who resisted, broke the mold, and dared to be different—this way of thinking has come under criticism from postcolonial scholars who view it as Western liberal ideology, in which “the final goal of human well-being is freedom in thought and action.”31 How are we to interpret both the cultural strictures on women as modest, silent, and domestic and the clear evidence that some women exhibited behavior contrary to those social expectations, behavior that by any criterion would be considered evidence of agency and leadership? One way has been to affirm the cultural expectations of quiet submission as the norm and consider those women whose behavior is outside those norms as exceptional. Another way has been to assume that the image of submissiveness was a literary commonplace that received little attention in the real world. Even another way has been to think of different expectations for different social groups: elite and nonelite; free and slave; Roman, Greek, and Jew, and so on. An additional way to interpret such behaviors, in the case of Christian women, has been to affirm a radical new liberation of women among the disciples of Jesus, following on the gospel record of his dealings with women; in this case, with a slippery transition from Jesus to church, the church liberated women. While this is doubtful anyway, it is also problematic for another reason: the liberation is usually from the supposed oppression of Judaism. Happily, that bias was discounted long ago.32 This liberation would then have lasted perhaps through the first generation (though this is difficult to reconcile with passages like 1 Cor. 11:2–16; 14:34–35) before patriarchy regained its control of women. Such hierarchy is then shown in the Pastoral Epistles and is represented by later figures like Tertullian. Yet another way in which recent scholarship has approached the anomaly of known social restrictions on women and the significant social prominence of some women in the early Christian era has been to posit celibacy as the means for women to escape the supposed strictures of subordination imposed on married women. It is certainly true that even in the early imperial period, wives were never seen as the social equals of their husbands. Moreover, in

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the ancient state of health services, childbearing was always a life-threatening activity. Yet as we have seen, there is sufficient evidence of married women of a certain social status exercising economic and social power within their own range of movement, and being appreciated and loved for it, while Christian celibate women surely fell under patriarchal power in their own way.33 Rather than one or the other, improvement or retrogression, perhaps the best way to see the seeming contradictions is as a continual tension in the culture, between the strong traditional ideal of the modest, silent, submissive woman and the complementary ideal of the strong woman who leads in appropriate ways. This was a tension already present in the ancient Mediterranean culture that continued in early Christianity. Any notion of development in either direction, be that toward the “liberation” of women—a Western liberal bias—or toward their containment and subordination—a traditional bias—cannot be substantiated. Rather, the dynamics of both “liberation” and “oppression” and everything in between are to be seen at every level and in every historical period. These very terms, however, are troublesome: living and acting within social expectations or resisting those expectations can be an exercise of agency. Therefore, we see that there are many different ways to empower and be empowered. Early Christian women found their own ways to holiness and wholeness.

NOTES 1. For more on this topic, see, for example, Beryl Rawson, ed., The Family in Ancient Rome: New Perspectives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Jane F. Gardner, Women in Roman Law and Society (London: Croom Helm, 1986); Karen K. Hersch, The Roman Wedding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 2. Joanna Kenty, “The Political Context of Cicero’s Oration De Domo Sua,” Ciceroniana Online II, no. 2 (2018): 245–64. http:​/​/www​​.ojs.​​unito​​.it​/i​​ndex.​​php​/C​​O​L​ /in​​dex. 3. (Cicero De domo sua 41.109) Translation by C. D. Yonge. London: George Bell & Sons, 1891. http:​/​/www​​.pers​​eus​.t​​ufts.​​edu​/h​​opper​​/text​​?doc=​​Perse​​us​%3A​​text%​​ 3A199​​9​.02.​​0020%​​3Atex​​t​%3DD​​​om.​%3​​Achap​​ter​%3​​D1. 4. See 1 Peter 2:5–12, where this theme is inspiration for living an honorable life. 5. Possibilities suggested by Margaret MacDonald. 6. See further Carolyn Osiek and David L. Balch, Families in the New Testament World: Households and House Churches (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1997); Carolyn Osiek and Margaret Y. MacDonald, with J. H. Tulloch, A Woman’s Place. House Churches in Earliest Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006). 7. The potential of Pompeii and Herculaneum for understanding social life in the early Roman period is exponential. See, for example, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Carolyn Osiek, “Growing Up Female in the Pauline Churches: What Did She

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Do All Day?” in Early Christianity in Pompeiian Light: People, Texts, Situations, ed. Bruce W. Longenecker, Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016. 3–22. 8. Didache 2.2; 5.2; Barnabas 19.5; 20:1–2; Justin Apology 1.27; Diognetus 5.6; Tertullian Apology 9.6–8; To the Nations 1.15; Minucius Felix Octavius 30.2; Philo Special Laws 3.108–15; Josephus Against Apion 2.202; Pseudo-Phocylides 184–85. 9. Recent scholarship on this literature has focused on the process of formation of the narratives as formation of community identity. See, for example, Candida Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Ideologies, and Traditions, Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (New York: Harper One, 2013). 10. Ute E. Eisen, Women Officeholders in Early Christianity: Epigraphical and Literary Studies, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), 63–65. 11. The revered Paula, for example, in Jerome’s letter 108 to Eustochium, is holy, venerable, and blessed (108.1, 3, 29, 35); Melania and Paula are “holy women” in Gerontius, The Life of Melania the Younger (116, 132, 148). Macrina in the Life by her brother Gregory is repeatedly referred to as “the holy one.” 12. Oration 8.8 (Sources Chrétiennes 405: 258–62). Translated by Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series [NPNF2], ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1894), 7:240, slightly altered. 13. Oration 18.7–12 (Patrologia Graeca 35:992–99). Translated by NPNF2 7:256–57. 14. Carolyn Osiek, “The Widow as Altar: The Rise and Fall of a Symbol,” Second Century 3, no. 3 (1983): 159–69. 15. This is the ancient Roman ideal of the univira, the widow who does not remarry out of fidelity to her deceased husband; cf. 1 Timothy 5:9, extended to the male episkopos in 1 Timothy 3:3. 16. Exodus 38:8; 1 Samuel 2:22. Two puzzling off-handed references that take their presence for granted. If there were separate entrances to the sanctuary for men and women, they perhaps supervised appropriate attire and decorum for the women, much like deaconesses in Apostolic Constitutions 8.28.6. 17. See other texts and discussion on the role of deaconesses in Kevin Madigan and Carolyn Osiek, eds., Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 106–16. 18. For example, Odes of Solomon 19, 24, 36. 19. Life of Pelagia the Harlot (PG 68.636–37); Peregrinatio Egeriae 23.3 (SC 296:226–28). 20. Christine Schenk, Crispina and Her Sisters: Women and Authority in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017). 21. For further discussion, see Madigan and Osiek, Ordained Women, 196, 202; Eisen, Women Officeholders, 131–32. 22. It has been suggested by Giorgio Otranto that these inscriptions should be put alongside the letter of Gelasius of Rome to the bishops of southern Italy in 494, decrying the custom of women serving at the altar: “Note sul sacerdozio femminile

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nell’antichità in margine a una testimonianza di Gelasio I,” Vetera Christianorum 19 (1982): 341–60; translated in Mary Ann Rossi, “Priesthood, Precedent, and Prejudice: On Recovering the Women Priests of Early Christianity,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 1 (1991): 73–94; see discussion in Madigan and Osiek, Ordained Women, 186–88, 194–95. 23. Various endings documented in manuscripts A, B, C, and G, of the tenth and eleventh centuries. See Jeremy W. Barrier, A Critical Introduction and Commentary to the Acts of Paul and Thecla, WUNT Series 2.270 (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 188–90. 24. Stephen J. Davis, The Cult of Thecla: A Tradition of Women’s Piety in late Antiquity, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 25. Kate Cooper, “A Saint in Exile”: The Early Medieval Thecla at Rome and Meriamlik,” Hagiographica II (1995): 11–14. See also Barrier, Critical Introduction; and Susan E. Hylen, “The ‘Domestication’ of Saint Thecla: Characterization of Thecla in the Life and Miracles of Saint Thecla,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30 (2014): 5–21. 26. Carolyn Osiek, “Roman and Christian Burial Practices and the Patronage of Women,” in Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Context, ed. Laurie Brink and Deborah Green (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 243–70; Carolyn Osiek, “The Patronage of Women in Early Christianity,” in A Feminist Companion to Patristic Literature, ed. Amy-Jill Levine (New York: T & T Clark, 2008), 173–92; Carolyn Osiek, “The Politics of Patronage and the Politics of Kinship: The Meeting of the Ways,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 39, no. 3 (2009): 43–52. 27. See Gary Vikan, Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art, Rev. ed. (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection Publications, 2011). 28. L. Poinssot and R. Lantier, “L’église de Thugga,” Revue Archéologique 5th series, vol. 22, fasc. 2 (July–September, 1925): 228, 247. 29. For example, Augustine Retract. 2.22.1; Justinian Institutes 4.18.8. 30. Susan E. Hylen, “Modest, Industrious, and Loyal: Reinterpreting Conflicting Evidence for Women’s Roles,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 44 (2014): 3–12; Kate Wilkinson, Women and Modesty in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2015). 31. Wilkinson, Women and Modesty, 22. 32. For example, Amy-Jill Levine, “Second Temple Judaism, Jesus, and Women: Yeast of Eden,” Biblical Interpretation 2, no. 1 (1994): 8–33. 33. Susan E. Hylen, A Modest Apostle: Thecla and the History of Women in the Early Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barrier, Jeremy W. A Critical Introduction and Commentary to the Acts of Paul and Thecla. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2.270. Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009. Cooper, Kate. “Insinuations of Womanly Influence: An Aspect of the Christianization of the Roman Aristocracy.” Journal of Roman Studies 82 (1992): 150–64.

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———. “A Saint in Exile: The Early Medieval Thecla at Rome and Meriamlik.” Hagiographica II (1995): 1–23. Davis, Stephen J. The Cult of Thecla: A Tradition of Women’s Piety in late Antiquity. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Eisen, Ute E. Women Officeholders in Early Christianity: Epigraphical and Literary Studies. Translated by Linda M. Maloney. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000. Gardner, Jane F. Women in Roman Law and Society. London: Croom Helm, 1986. Hersch, Karen K. The Roman Wedding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Hylen, Susan E. “The ‘Domestication’ of Saint Thecla: Characterization of Thecla in the Life and Miracles of Saint Thecla.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30 (2014): 5–21. ———. “Modest, Industrious, and Loyal: Reinterpreting Conflicting Evidence for Women’s Roles.” Biblical Theology Bulletin 44 (2014): 3–12. ———. A Modest Apostle: Thecla and the History of Women in the Early Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Kenty, Joanna. “The Political Context of Cicero’s Oration De domo sua.” Ciceroniana online II, no. 2 (2018): 245–64. . Levine, Amy-Jill. “Second Temple Judaism, Jesus, and Women: Yeast of Eden.” Biblical Interpretation 2, no. 1 (1994): 8–33. Madigan, Kevin, and Carolyn Osiek, eds. Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Moss, Candida. Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Ideologies, and Traditions. Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. ———. The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom. New York: Harper One, 2013. Osiek, Carolyn. “Growing Up Female in the Pauline Churches: What Did She Do All Day?” In Early Christianity in Pompeiian Light: People, Texts, Situations. Edited by Bruce W. Longenecker, 3–22. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016. ———. “The Patronage of Women in Early Christianity.” In A Feminist Companion to Patristic Literature. Edited by Amy-Jill Levine, 173–92. New York: T & T Clark, 2008. ———. “The Politics of Patronage and the Politics of Kinship: The Meeting of the Ways,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 39, no. 3 (2009): 143–52. ———. “Roman and Christian Burial Practices and the Patronage of Women.” In Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Context. Edited by Laurie Brink and Deborah Green, 243–70. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. ———. “The Widow as Altar: The Rise and Fall of a Symbol.” Second Century 3 no. 3 (1983): 159–69. ———, and David L. Balch. Families in the New Testament World: Households and House Churches. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1997.

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———, and Margaret Y. MacDonald, with J. H. Tulloch. A Woman’s Place. House Churches in Earliest Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006. Otranto, Giorgio. “Note sul sacerdozio femminile nell’antichità in margine a una testimonianza di Gelasio I,” Vetera Christianorum 19 (1982): 341–60. Translated by Mary Ann Rossi. “Priesthood, Precedent, and Prejudice: On Recovering the Women Priests of Early Christianity.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 1 (1991): 73–94. Poinssot, L. and R. Lantier. “L’église de Thugga.” Revue Archéologique series 5, vol. 22, no. 2 (July–September, 1925): 228, 247. Rawson, Beryl, ed. The Family in Ancient Rome: New Perspectives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Schenk, Christine, CSJ. Crispina and Her Sisters: Women and Authority in Early Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017. Vikan, Gary. Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art. Rev. ed. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection Publications, 2011. Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew. Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Wilkinson, Kate. Women and Modesty in Late Antiquity. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Chapter 2

Transferring and Transforming Religious Identity Abroad The Personal Adornment of an Egyptian Woman in Canaan Krystal V. L. Pierce

The ancient site of Deir el-Balah, which includes a settlement and associated cemetery, is located about 13 kilometers southwest of modern Gaza. The site was initially excavated jointly in 1972 by the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the direction of Trude Dothan and the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University under the direction of Itzhaq Beit-Arieh, and later, in the 1970s and 1980s, by the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the direction of Dothan.1 The necropolis has been dated to the Late Bronze Age IIB–Iron Age I (13th–12th centuries BCE) based on comparisons with the nearby settlement, pottery analyses, and geoarchaeological investigations.2 The cemetery at Deir el-Balah contained 85 pit graves with ceramic, metal, and stone vessels, coffins, jewelry, and other objects, many of which have been deemed to be “Egyptian” or “Egyptian-style.”3 Because of these designations, it has commonly been asserted that the individuals buried at Deir el-Balah were elite Egyptian male administrative and military personnel who played an authoritative role in the nearby settlement during the New Kingdom period of Egyptian hegemony in Canaan.4 However, female remains were also present in the graves, for example in Tomb 118, an undisturbed pit burial on the northern side of the cemetery. Tomb 118 contained the remains of two fully articulated individuals, a 35–40-year-old man and a 25–30-year-old woman, who had been contemporaneously interred in a clay coffin (figure 2.1).5 The man was in supine position on the southern side of the coffin and was the first to be placed in the sarcophagus, while the woman 25

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Figure 2.1  Interior of the Coffin. Source: Photograph © Zev Radovan. Drawing by George A. Pierce, after Trude Dothan, Deir el-Balah: Uncovering an Egyptian Outpost in Canaan from the Time of the Exodus (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 2008), 43.

was to the north on her right side slightly overlying the man so that the deceased were face-to-face with the heads touching. Only pottery had been placed outside of the sarcophagus, but stone, metal, and ceramic vessels, as well as jewelry, scarabs, and other items, were discovered inside of the coffin. Certain objects in the tomb, such as those placed outside the coffin, were clearly meant to be shared by the two occupants, while other items, like those related to personal adornment, were specific to each individual. The fact that these personal items were placed directly on

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the bodies of the deceased demonstrates the individualized nature of these ornamental objects. These items were intimately tied to the conscious presentation of an individual’s identity in death, an identity that would have also been transferred into the afterlife. Egyptians in the New Kingdom imbued material culture with philosophical, spiritual, and corporeal meanings and actively used material culture in death as a medium for emphasizing and maintaining cultural and social identities, especially regarding gender and religion. Aspects of personal adornment, including the combination of textiles and artifacts in dress, cosmetics, and jewelry, were notably related to the quotidian public and pervasive religious assertion of the female identity in Egypt.6 This study will examine aspects of personal adornment related to the female remains buried in Tomb 118 at Deir el-Balah in light of contemporary New Kingdom funerary and religious features associated with women in the Egyptian homeland in order to assess whether an Egyptian expatriate woman at Deir el-Balah was still able to transfer and transform her female Egyptian religious identity while abroad in Canaan. In New Kingdom Egypt, items of personal adornment were an essential aspect of an Egyptian woman’s burial and fulfilled two imperative functions in the funerary process related to the transference and transformation of identity. Jewelry, grooming, and dress were undoubtedly associated with the gendered identity and social position of the deceased among the living, both of which interacted with religion, status, age, kinship, and occupation.7 Most accoutrements that were placed in funerary monuments of the New Kingdom were almost certainly worn in daily life, as evidenced by signs of repeated wear and repair.8 The focal point of the mortuary process was the public funeral procession of the fully adorned body and mortuary offerings of the deceased, where the grave goods were on display for the community to behold and inspect. The funeral procession essentially defined, reinforced, and transferred social roles for the deceased and their living descendants.9 In the case of Egyptian burials abroad, the affluence embodied in funerary monuments and burial items did not merely reflect the social status of the deceased but also projected an image of Egyptian cultural identity and authority outside of the homeland.10 In the “Egyptian” cemetery at Deir el-Balah, the majority of the graves contained one or more Egyptian or Egyptianized objects, but there were also many burials with Canaanite items or a mix of Egyptian and Canaanite objects. Some inhabitants of the cemetery clearly chose to be buried in a way that displayed a purely Egyptian identity, while others desired a more multicultural appearance. The choice and display of personal jewelry, cosmetics, and garments on the deceased woman in Tomb 118 memorialized her living religious identity, which could then be transferred into her continued religious identity in death.

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The second imperative function for items of personal adornment in an Egyptian woman’s burial was related to the Egyptian concept of supernatural identities and the transformation of the physical and metaphysical aspects of the divisible self. These attributes—the body, ka (“spirit”), ba (“personality”), heart, name, and shadow—required adequate protection, preservation, sustenance, and deposition through the objects placed in the grave in order for the deceased to survive the liminal processes of death and the transition to the netherworld.11 The role of ornamentation was also related to the restoration of living connections that were broken at death and the integration of the deceased into the cosmos and physical transformation into a divinized being.12 JEWELRY The most ubiquitous and “mandatory” items of personal adornment used in female Egyptian burials were pieces of jewelry.13 In both life and death, jewelry was worn as a sign of rank or office, as a military honor or civil award from the king, to provide apotropaic and amuletic powers, as well as for aesthetic purposes.14 Some pieces of jewelry were placed on the deceased in a stipulated manner in order to provide guidance and protection throughout the liminal journey from life to the afterlife. The placement of specialized mortuary jewelry in the New Kingdom was prescribed according to instructions given in chapters from the Egyptian “Book of the Dead.” These instructions specified the type, color, material, and location of the amuletic item, as well as the associated spell to be recited as the object was placed on the body of the deceased.15 The amuletic power of jewelry could come from the shape of the piece, the inclusion of a figure or name of a king, deity, sacred animal, or hieroglyph, or merely from the material itself. The woman buried in Tomb 118 was buried wearing three pieces of jewelry, including an amuletic bracelet and two signet rings. A bracelet with two apotropaic amulets and one theophoric amulet was discovered near the right wrist of the woman. The two apotropaic amulets were carved in the shape of the deity Bes, who was depicted with the corporeal characteristics of achondroplastic dwarfism and the leonine features of a mane, ears, and tail (figure 2.2). Bes also exhibited a beard, protruding tongue, and distended abdomen. He was always nude, which, along with the leonine features, provided the god with a terrifying appearance that mirrored his ability to frighten off evil forces.16 Bes’s powerful apotropaic magic was associated with the protection of pregnant women. He was commonly shown in household paintings on the walls of rooms associated with childbirth, as well as in the form of “birth

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Figure 2.2  Carnelian Bes Amulet. Source: Photograph © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

amulets” purchased by pregnant women to aid in labor and delivery.17 The woman in Tomb 118 most likely wore these two Bes amulets during her lifetime in order to seek protection for herself during pregnancy and childbirth at a time when maternal and infant mortality were extraordinarily high.18 Due to the state of preservation of the remains, it was impossible to assess whether the woman in Tomb 118 was pregnant at the time of death. However, in

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wearing these amulets in death, she clearly sought continued protection from Bes for the afterlife. The remaining amulet on the bracelet of the woman buried in Tomb 118 at Deir el-Balah was in the form of the feline goddess Bastet (figure 2.3). This theophoric amulet would have imbued the wearer with the characteristics of the deity it embodied. In the New Kingdom, Bastet was represented by a female domestic cat, which was associated with motherhood and fertility. Women wore Bastet amulets not only to place themselves under the patronage of the goddess but also to endow themselves with her fecundity.19 These amulets were given out as popular gifts to commemorate the New Year, when parenthood and fertility were also celebrated.20 The woman in Tomb 118 wore the bracelet with Bes and Bastet amulets in death but also in life, demonstrating that she required the same female religious protection and benefaction in both Egyptian spheres of eternity. The apotropaic and theophoric forms of these amulets were not the sole purveyors of symbolism; the carnelian material of all three also held important symbolism. In Egypt, the choice of a material for an item of bodily ornamentation was based on several characteristics, including aesthetics, symbolism, availability, and expense. Carnelian was the most popular stone utilized for jewelry in New Kingdom Egypt.21 The orange and red hues of carnelian were associated with the sun god Ra, as well as with life-sustaining blood, both of which symbolized power and vitality.22 Wearing these orangered amulets in death would have facilitated the journey of the woman in Tomb 118 to the Egyptian underworld, a journey that mimicked the daily

Figure 2.3  Carnelian Bastet Amulet. Source: Photograph © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

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passage of the sun god across the sky, its subsequent death sinking into the western realm of the netherworld, and then rebirth and rise at the start of a new day. Her own rebirth in the afterlife was also tied to the reanimation and strength of her body, which would be expedited by the blood-red carnelian stones ornamenting her right wrist. While carnelian was actively mined in Egypt at the Stela Ridge near Gebel el-Asr, the stone is not found naturally in the Levant.23 These carnelian amulets, or their raw material, were most likely imported from Egypt to the Levant. This suggests that the Egyptian woman in Tomb 118 not only had the wealth required to acquire such items but also access to the merchants who brought or traded exotic Egyptian goods in Canaan. In Egypt, these amulets would be worth between 0.5 and 3 deben each, with all three amulets amounting to as much as one month’s wages for a state-employed workman in New Kingdom Egypt.24 In addition to the bracelet on the right wrist, the woman in Tomb 118 also wore two signet rings, which were discovered still intact on the finger bones of the left hand. In Egypt, signet rings produced from stone or metal were extremely popular during the New Kingdom. They were typically worn on the left hand, as opposed to both hands, which was a Canaanite practice.25 The woman in Tomb 118 desired to exhibit every small detail of her Egyptian cultural identity, even down to the correct position of her finger rings. The faces of Egyptian signet rings were inscribed with the names and figures of deities or kings, as well as amuletic figures, signs, or shapes that performed for the wearer the same associated apotropaic, theophoric, or dynatic functions (giving powers of qualities, conditions, or authority).26 One ring worn by the deceased woman in Tomb 118 was made of carnelian and incised with horizontal, vertical, and crisscrossed lines on the signet (figure 2.4). The design carved into the ring was an abstract version of the Egyptian hieroglyphic star, which, when encased in a circle or oval, designated the Egyptian word for the underworld, duat. There were two opposing stars engraved on the ring, one superimposed on top of the other so that one star was always visible from either side. A ring incised with this symbol for the netherworld would have been a specialty funerary item, explicitly manufactured for wear and use only after death. The sign for the duat would have helped guide the woman in Tomb 118 to the afterlife through the dynatic power of the engraved hieroglyph.27 The second ring worn by the woman in Tomb 118 was cast in gold alloy with a signet engraved with a cartouche enclosing a stylized figure of the god Bes (figure 2.5). The association of Bes with the protection of women during pregnancy and childbirth has already been discussed, and the fact that this woman wore three different representations of the god as part of her personal adornment demonstrates how significant this specific protection was for her

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Figure 2.4  Carnelian Ring with Engraved Stars. Source: Photograph © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

in life and in the afterlife. In Egypt, gold was always recorded first in lists of materials and was the most preferred substance for jewelry, as it was malleable, had a low melting point, did not tarnish or discolor, and was resistant to corrosion.28 Because gold was impervious to the effects of time and had a radiant sheen, it was associated with the flesh of the gods, immortality, and the brilliance of the sun.29 In New Kingdom Egypt, one imperative component of conquering death and reaching the afterlife included becoming a retainer of the ruler of the netherworld, the god Osiris. An individual’s goal was not only to eventually join Osiris but also to be transfigured into a version of Osiris, or for women, the goddess Hathor.30 This supermortal divinization occurred through mortuary rituals and sacerdotal recitations but was also intimately tied to the personified image of the living as a divine being in death.31 The adornment of a gold ring would have helped transfigure the deceased woman in Tomb 118 by reflecting the immortal flesh of Hathor. Since Bastet was also a form of the goddess Hathor, the amulet of this goddess on the woman’s bracelet also

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Figure 2.5  Gold Ring with Engraved Cartouche and Bes. Source: Photograph © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

connected and provided her with the divine form required to overcome death and become a Hathor. COSMETIC AND GROOMING ITEMS An important aspect of burial equipment in New Kingdom Egypt included objects related to the daily personal toilette. Cosmetics and grooming in Egypt went beyond mere adornment or embellishment and acted as devices of culturally charged personification in transforming the appearance of an

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individual into something uniform and “super-individual.”32 In death, the body became not only a corpse but also a permanent image of the deceased that required individualized adornment through jewelry, as well as the makeup, coiffure, wrapping, and clothing of the living.33 Mirrors, razors, cosmetics, and ointments for the eyes, cheeks, lips, and skin were located in various small containers in the tomb and were so personal that they were placed as close to the deceased as possible—for example, in their hands.34 Three objects related to bodily and facial grooming were discovered lying against the female body in Tomb 118. A calcite cosmetic container, commonly called a “spoon,” had been placed behind the right hand of the woman (figure 2.6). This small vessel was carved in the shape of a swimming woman with extended arms holding a bowl shaped like a pomegranate. In Egypt, these stone spoons were popular in the New Kingdom burials of sub-elite and elite women, who were sometimes gifted them during royal jubilees or other celebrations.35 The swimming female form was associated with beauty, youth, eroticism, and fertility. The youthful women shown on the spoons were referred to as neferut (“beautiful ones”) and were depicted wearing ornamental cosmetics, girdles, and elaborate wigs, just like the example from Tomb 118.36 Through the inclusion of a swimming girl spoon in a tomb, a deceased woman could portray the image of eternal youthful beauty, an image that would extend into the afterlife. Because the swimming female form is always shown nude, except for a painted waist or hip girdle, these spoons were also connected with eroticism and fertility. Similar girdles discovered in settlements and cemeteries were made of cowrie shells, mimicking female genitalia, or metal pellets that

Figure 2.6  Calcite Swimming Girl Spoon. Source: Photograph © Zev Radovan.

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rattled like the sistra used by the goddess Hathor.37 Women who used these spoons hoped not only for a blessing of fertility from the goddess but also to be imbued with some of Hathor’s own eroticism and fecundity. Studies of female remains from several sites in Egypt have shown that ancient Egyptian women suffered from a low fertility rate and sought many medical treatments and religious remedies in an attempt to overcome this issue.38 Women on amatory papyri from New Kingdom Egypt were shown wearing similar girdles while applying cosmetics from small containers like the spoons, demonstrating that the use of makeup was also closely tied to aspects of beauty, youth, eroticism, and fertility.39 Sub-elite and elite Egyptian women of the New Kingdom were always shown wearing black makeup on their eyes and lashes and red makeup on their lips, cheeks, and décolleté, especially at social gatherings, where the application of cosmetics was thought to add youthful beauty and aid in sexual attraction. The bowl of the spoon in Tomb 118 was shaped like a pomegranate, a fruit that is referenced in Egyptian love poetry in relation to the color and shape of female cheeks and breasts.40 It is possible that the spoon in Tomb 118 was created to hold a literal or symbolic rouge similar to the color of a pomegranate. Minerals used to create Egyptian cosmetics included galena, manganese, ocher, lead, iron, and copper.41 Makeup was also considered essential to ocular health, and many medical recipes called for the mixture and application of cosmetic materials and substances. Kohl (eye paint) was also considered a sign of divinity and was applied to the eyes of the statues of female deities in state and local temples during the daily offering ritual. By including this one small spoon in her burial, the woman in Tomb 118 had the ability to access eternal beauty, youth, eroticism, fertility, and medicine, all while transforming herself into a form of Hathor to join the underworld kingdom of the gods. Another toilette object often discovered in elite and sub-elite Egyptian burials of the New Kingdom were mirrors manufactured from costly metals like gold, silver, and bronze. Mirrors were considered such a significant grave good that those who could not afford one would include a painted image of a mirror on their coffin as a replacement.42 The handles of the mirrors were usually made of wood or ivory and do not usually survive. An elliptical bronze mirror was discovered in Tomb 118 at Deir el-Balah, lying against the body of the deceased woman and under the calcite cosmetic spoon (figure 2.7). Mirrors fulfilled several social, mortuary, and religious functions for Egyptian women in both life and death. In the New Kingdom, mirrors were placed only in the tombs of women and usually in association with other cosmetic implements, demonstrating their mutual usage. Mirrors were highly gendered objects at this time. Egyptian women are shown carrying mirrors to social gatherings with other women, using mirrors while other women dress their hair, and holding mirrors while

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Figure 2.7  Bronze Elliptical Mirror. Source: Photograph © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

applying cosmetics.43 These expensive objects were also viewed as a symbol of high social status and a sign of prosperity, or, as one scribe described, “she who had to view her face in the water is now the owner of a mirror.”44 Because of the connection between mirrors and cosmetics, these objects were also associated with beauty, youth, and fertility and appear in scenes on erotic papyri.45 Mirrors also played an important role in mortuary contexts, where these objects preserved the living image of a woman in a permanent state of continual existence. The common Egyptian word for a mirror, ankh, is analogous to the word meaning “life,” and these funerary items were commonly referred to in the fuller title, ankh-ma’a-her, meaning “the mirror that sees the face.”46 In a burial, a mirror had the capacity to observe the face of the deceased and maintain the living essence of the woman reflected. The creator god Ptah was

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credited with the fabrication of the first mirror, which was originally produced as a temporary depository for a women’s ka, or “spirit.”47 Mirrors were also important for women in the Egyptian religious sphere, where these objects were tied to the deities Ra and Hathor. The round polished yellow mirrors were symbols of the sun disk and the god Ra, who traveled across the sky during the daytime and entered the underworld at night, representing the eternal cycle of life and death.48 However, the shape of the handle and umbel, inscriptions, and cultic functions of mirrors were more closely tied to the goddess Hathor. Several examples of these objects are inscribed with a personal name and the title “Priestess of Hathor,” and in tomb scenes, mirrors were used with sistra in rituals and dances worshipping the goddess.49 Because of their close association with Hathor, these objects often became votive offerings for the deity at her temples.50 Other religious rituals employing mirrors included purification rites, especially for temple personnel, and divination practices, where the reflective surfaces were utilized by priestesses for scrying (predicting the future using a reflective surface).51 The handles and umbels of many mirrors in Egypt featured Hathoric imagery, including a cow’s head, face, ears, or horns, allowing the deceased to figuratively view themselves as having the features of the goddess, facilitating their proper divinization for the afterlife. For the woman in Tomb 118, the mirror had quotidian importance as well. She could use the mirror to apply makeup from the nearby cosmetic spoon, forever creating an eternal living image of youthful beauty for the afterlife. It is also possible that the woman in Tomb 188 was actually a priestess of Hathor. Texts about Egyptians in Canaan during the New Kingdom record priestesses as part of the expatriates traveling to and living in the area, as well as evidence for the worship of Hathor at several temples across the Levant.52 Another important aspect of personal grooming for New Kingdom Egyptian women was related to the adornment and maintenance of hair. Natural and artificial hairstyles transmitted information about gender, age, socioeconomic status, sensuality, roles, and professions in Egypt. Unkempt, unclean, and untrimmed hair was considered a sign of low status or mourning.53 Most body hairs were completely removed, and, for the wealthy elite of the New Kingdom, the most popular coiffure consisted of cutting the hair very short and covering it with a wig fashioned from human hair.54 In order to shave or trim their hair, Egyptian women employed various depilatory equipment, including metal tweezers, razors, and knives, as well as sticky poultices. Razors were manufactured from copper or bronze and were of two common types, one of which was a slender blade-like variety with a cutting edge that curved into the handle to form a hook.55 One of these razors was discovered in Tomb 118 at Deir el-Balah behind the knees of the female skeleton (figure 2.8).

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Figure 2.8  Bronze Hooked Razor. Source: Photograph © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

The woman’s remains had completely skeletonized, so it is now impossible to discern the condition of her hair at death, but the inclusion of a razor in the tomb demonstrates the desire to cut or remove her hair in the afterlife. Egyptian women trimmed or shaved their hair for several different reasons. Because of the predominantly high temperatures year-round in Egypt, having little or no hair helped with keeping the body cooler. Cleanliness was

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also associated with extremely short hair, as both head and body lice have been attested on several mummies and seemed to be a persistent problem in ancient Egypt.56 Hair was also kept short to facilitate the use of wigs woven from human hair, which were a sign of wealth and high social status.57 One of these wigs imitated the wig worn by the goddess Hathor in full-frontal view, helping the wearer to further transform into the deity. One exclusive group of Egyptians in the New Kingdom who consistently shaved their entire bodies were those who were attached to the temples or performed religious rituals. These women held titles such as “Priestess” or “Chantress” for a certain deity and were shown performing the divine cult and other sacred activities while completely bald.58 These temple personnel removed all hair from their bodies every other day as part of ritual purification before working in the temples or performing at festivals celebrating various gods and goddesses.59 Their razored-bald heads, cosmetically enhanced faces, and polished Hathoric mirrors, along with other implements, distinctly marked them as priestesses who served in the temples. The woman in Tomb 118 was buried with all of these objects, and even if she was not a professional Egyptian priestess during her lifetime, she desired to appear as one in death and the afterlife, which would further her association with goddesses and her transfiguration into one of them. TEXTILES AND ATTIRE A final category of personal adornment imperative to an Egyptian woman’s success in the afterlife was textiles and associated attire. Unlike in the Nile Valley and the arid deserts of Egypt, objects of perishable materials tend not to be equally preserved in the more temperate Levant, including all parts of the human anatomy, with the exception of bones and teeth. Unfortunately, this means that remains or evidence of cloth at Deir el-Balah are rare, as the area has a similar climate to the Egyptian Delta where the water table is high and perishable items, like human remains, are seldom discovered intact. However, some remains of clothing might exist in Tomb 118, where pieces of cloth were found adhered to the bronze mirror and on the base of a bronze platter lying against the woman in the burial (figure 2.9).60 In Egypt, textiles placed on and around the deceased were coded to show gender, age, and socioeconomic status. The representation of men, women, and children in the afterlife was strongly gender- and age-bound, with certain cultural conventions and decorum followed in order to differentiate between men and women, young and old.61 In the New Kingdom, men typically wore short pleated kilts, women wore longer wrap dresses, and children were consistently naked.62 Since the bronze platter with the cloth remains had

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Figure 2.9  Bronze Mirror with Detail of Linen Cloth Fragments. Source: Photograph © Zev Radovan. Drawing by George A. Pierce, after Trude Dothan, Excavations at the Cemetery of Deir el-Balah (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1979), Ill. 155.

originally been placed against the knees of the woman, she was wearing a longer garment, suitably demonstrating her gender and age. In Egyptian artistic representations, women were most commonly shown wearing skintight diaphanous dresses that exposed their body shape, breasts, and pubic triangle, demonstrating their fertility and eroticism.63 In some Egyptian amatory and adoratory poetry, women are described as using these lascivious dresses to seduce and lure men into adultery and other sexual crimes.64 However, all actual garments discovered on or with female remains in Egyptian cemeteries and settlements were actually quite voluminous and opaque, much like the cloth samples from Tomb 118 at Deir el-Balah, which were manufactured with single wefts over single warps, forming a tight tabby weave.65 This seeming discrepancy between artistic representations, textual evidence, and material culture demonstrates why it is so important to take an interdisciplinary and holistic approach when studying women in ancient Egypt. Clothing in New Kingdom Egypt was also used as a marker of socioeconomic status and profession. Expensive textiles were used as a medium of exchange and were worth more than most stone or metal items, sometimes costing up to two months of salary for an Egyptian state employee.66 The costliest fabric was a flax-based67 linen that was fine enough to be pleated,

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which became an essential characteristic of a “uniform” for high-status individuals.68 Elite individuals, such as royalty and officials, wore garments with certain folds and knots, while lower-status individuals, like laborers or farmers, wore thicker wool clothing, which could not be pleated.69 The cloth pieces discovered in Tomb 118 were manufactured from a flax ultimate fiber that shows distinct cross-markings and nodes from folding or other damage, perhaps related to bleaching. Priests and priestesses who worked in the temples were also required to wear clothing of fine linen, which had to be bleached white for purification purposes.70 During the daily offering ritual, temple personnel also dressed the statues of deities with similar fine linen, which was made into long white dresses for the goddesses.71 The long, white, fine linen garment worn by the woman in Tomb 118 would have properly designated her high status, adult, female, and possibly priestess identities, and helped her transform into a divinized being. In New Kingdom Egypt, clothing not only played an important role in designating gender, age, status, and profession but was also linked to an Egyptian cultural identity. In this cosmopolitan period, many foreigners from across the ancient Near East were visiting, residing, and trading in Egypt, especially since Egypt controlled much of the eastern Mediterranean.72 The largest group of foreigners in Egypt were Canaanites from the Levant, whom the Egyptians depicted with multicolored and vividly patterned clothing, in contrast to their own monochrome, undecorated garments.73 In the Levant, textiles were primarily manufactured from animal wool, which was dyed into several colors and patterns.74 For an Egyptian woman living in the southern Levant surrounded by Canaanites, being buried in a plain white linen garment would not only have identified her as female, adult, and high status for eternity but also would have underscored her distinct identity as an Egyptian. Even the manufacturing process of the cloth she wore conformed to Egyptian practices, with S-spun threads in a simple weave, while those in the Levant were typically Z-spun in a compound weave, demonstrating that even the tiniest thread can transmit detailed information about personal identity.75 CONCLUSIONS: TRANSFERRING AND TRANSFORMING IDENTITY For the woman buried in Tomb 118 at Deir el-Balah to have a proper existence in the Egyptian afterlife, she needed not only to transfer her living identity, including her gender, age, status, and profession, to the netherworld but also to transform her living identity into an immortal divinized being ready to reside among deities. These two processes were achieved through the personal adornment of her body in the burial, including jewelry, grooming,

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and clothing. Her identity as an adult woman was transferred to the next life via the long linen dress she wore, as well as the theophoric bracelet and apotropaic ring featuring images of the deities Bastet and Bes, who endowed the woman with fertility and then protected her during pregnancy and childbirth. The woman could use the bronze mirror to apply cosmetics from the swimming girl spoon, allowing her to transfer and maintain an eternal living image of fertile, youthful beauty in death and the afterlife. The expensive carnelian jewelry, gold ring, calcite spoon, bronze mirror and razor, and linen clothing adorning her body not only established her elite socioeconomic status for eternity but also hinted at her possible profession as a priestess for the goddess Hathor. Because she died and was buried in a foreign land, it was imperative for her to exhibit and transfer her Egyptian cultural identity. This was made possible through importing specific items for the tomb—items that were manufactured in Egypt, from Egyptian raw materials, and by Egyptian craftsmen—even down to the spin of the individual threads of her dress and the placement of her finger rings. All of these aspects of her living identity would have been properly transferred to the Egyptian underworld using the dynatic power of her carnelian duat ring, which, along with the mirror, reflected the powerful symbolism of the successful journey of the sun god to the underworld. While it was vital for the Egyptian woman buried in Tomb 118 at Deir el-Balah to transfer her living and mortal gender, age, status, and profession to the afterlife, it was equally as important for her to be transformed into an immortal divinized being, fit to live among gods and goddesses. Her physical mortal body was transformed through the carnelian and gold jewelry she wore, with the red stone reanimating her blood for eternity and the radiant metal altering her mortal flesh into the golden skin of a deity. Her transformation into a version of the goddess Hathor was facilitated by wearing a form of the goddess on her bracelet, shaving her hair with the razor, dressing in a long white linen garment, and using the cosmetic mirror and spoon to transmit a personified image of herself with features of the goddess. The personal adornment, jewelry, grooming, and attire of the Egyptian woman buried in Tomb 118 at Deir el-Balah would have allowed her to fully transfer and transform her living Egyptian religious identity, overcome the liminal processes of death and transfiguration, and successfully reach the afterlife as a divinized immortal being.

NOTES 1. For preliminary and final excavation reports on Deir el-Balah, see Itzhaq Beit-Arieh, “Further Burials from the Deir el-Balah Cemetery,” Tel Aviv 12 (1985):

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43–56; Trude Dothan, “Anthropoid Clay Coffins from a Late Bronze Age Cemetery near Deir el-Balah (Preliminary Report),” Israel Exploration Journal 22, no. 2/3 (1972): 65–72; Trude Dothan, “Anthropoid Clay Coffins from a Late Bronze Age Cemetery near Deir el-Balah (Preliminary Report II),” Israel Exploration Journal 23, no. 3 (1973): 129–46; Trude Dothan, Excavations at the Cemetery of Deir el-Balah (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1979); Trude Dothan, “Deir el Balah,” in The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, ed. Ephraim Stern (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 1:343–47; Trude Dothan, Deir el-Balah: Uncovering an Egyptian Outpost in Canaan from the Time of the Exodus (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 2008); Trude Dothan and Baruch Brandl, Deir el-Balah: Excavations in 1977–1982 in the Cemetery and Settlement I: Stratigraphy and Architecture (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 2010a); and Trude Dothan and Baruch Brandl, Deir el-Balah: Excavations in 1977–1982 in the Cemetery and Settlement II: The Finds (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 2010b). 2. For the initial and final dating of the cemetery by the excavators, see Dothan, Excavations, 3; and Dothan, “Deir el Balah,” 347. For dating based on geoarchaeology and pottery, see Ann E. Killebrew, Paul Goldberg, and Arlene M. Rosen, “Deir el-Balah: A Geological, Archaeological, and Historical Reassessment of an Egyptianizing 13th and 12th Century B.C.E. Center,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 343 (2006): 97–119; and Mario Martin, Egyptian-Type Pottery in the Late Bronze Age Southern Levant (Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2011), 214–15. 3. In this study, the term “Egyptian” refers to an object manufactured in Egypt, and “Egyptian-style” or “Egyptianized” are used interchangeably to designate items manufactured in the Levant but demonstrating certain characteristics that have an Egyptian cultural affinity. 4. For examples of an Egyptian designation given to some or all of the occupants of the cemetery at Deir el-Balah, see B. Arensburg and Patricia Smith, “The Human Remains,” in Excavations at the Cemetery of Deir el-Balah, by Trude Dothan (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1979), 96; Dothan, Excavations, 102–04; Rivka Gonen, Burial Patterns and Cultural Diversity in Late Bronze Age Canaan (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1992), 29; Gary Lipton, “The Excavation of the Cemetery,” in Deir el-Balah: Excavations in 1977–1982 in the Cemetery and Settlement I: Stratigraphy and Architecture, ed. Trude Dothan and Baruch Brandl (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 2010), 45; Martin, Egyptian-Type Pottery, 214; and Ellen F. Morris, The Architecture of Imperialism: Military Bases and the Evolution of Foreign Policy in Egypt’s New Kingdom (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 520–24. 5. The excavation report on Tomb 118 can be found in Dothan, Excavations, 46–91, ills. 113–221, and information on the deceased from the burial in Arensburg and Smith, “Human Remains,” 94. For an updated description and discussion of Tomb 118 and its contents, see Krystal V. L. Pierce, “Living and Dying Abroad: Aspects of Egyptian Cultural Identity in Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Canaan” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2013), 136–40. 6. Yvonne J. Markowitz, “Jewelry,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, ed. Donald B. Redford (Oxford: Oxford University, 2001), 2:201.

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7. John Baines and Peter Lacovara, “Burial and the Dead in Ancient Egyptian Society: Respect, Formalism, Neglect,” Journal of Social Archaeology 2, no. 1 (2002): 11, 15. 8. Stuart Tyson Smith, “Intact Tombs of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Dynasties from Thebes and the New Kingdom Burial System,” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts Abteilung Kairo 48 (1992): 203. 9. Kathryn A. Bard, From Farmers to Pharaohs: Mortuary Evidence for the Rise of Social Complexity in Egypt (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 112–13. 10. This has been demonstrated by Egyptian burials in Nubia; see Stuart Tyson Smith, Wretched Kush: Ethnic Identities and Boundaries in Egypt’s Nubian Empire (London: Routledge, 2003), 197. 11. Aidan Dodson and Salima Ikram, “Egyptian Mortuary Beliefs,” in Writing Egypt: History, Literature, and Culture, ed. Aleya Serour (Cairo: American University in Cairo, 2012), 22, 24–25. 12. Jan Assmann, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt (New York: Cornell University, 2005), 237–406. 13. Smith, “Intact Tombs,” 202; John H. Taylor, Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001), 109. 14. Carol Andrews, Ancient Egyptian Jewelry (New York: Abrams, 1990), 7. 15. Carol Andrews, Amulets of Ancient Egypt (London: British Museum, 1994), 6. 16. Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 48. 17. Carolyn Graves-Brown, Dancing for Hathor: Women in Ancient Egypt (London: Continuum, 2010), 74, 113; Jaana Toivari-Viitala, Women at Deir elMedina. A Study of the Status and Roles of the Female Inhabitants in the Workmen’s Community During the Ramesside Period (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut Voor Het Nabije Oosten, 2001), 175. 18. Elise V. MacArthur, “Fertility and Birth Rituals,” in The Life of Meresamun, ed. Emily Teeter and Janet H. Johnson (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2009), 76. 19. Andrews, Amulets, 33. 20. Wilkinson, Complete Gods and Goddesses, 178. 21. Markowitz, “Jewelry,” 2:201–02. 22. Andrews, Amulets, 102–04. 23. James A. Harrell, “Gemstones,” in UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, ed. Willeke Wendrich (Los Angeles: University of California, 2012), 5. 24. Jac J. Janssen, Commodity Prices from the Ramesside Period (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 308–11. 25. James F. Romano, “Jewelry and Personal Arts in Ancient Egypt,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, ed. Jack M. Sasson (New York: Scribner, 1995), 3:1612; Smith, “Intact Tombs,” 204. 26. Cyril Aldred, Jewels of the Pharaohs: Egyptian Jewelry of the Dynastic Period (New York: Ballantine, 1971), 161; Markowitz, “Jewelry,” 2:205. 27. Andrews, Amulets, 74. 28. Romano, “Jewelry and Personal Arts,” 1605.

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29. Yvonne J. Markowitz and Peter Lacovara, “Gold,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, edited by Donald B. Redford, 2:34–38. Oxford: Oxford University, 2001, 34. 30. Assmann, Death and Salvation, 74. 31. Harold Hays, “Funerary Rituals (Pharaonic Period),” in UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, ed. Jacco Dieleman and Willeke Wendrich (Los Angeles: University of California, 2010), 1, 4. 32. Jan Assmann, “Preservation and Presentation of Self in Ancient Egyptian Portraiture,” in Studies in Honor of William Kelly Simpson, ed. Peter Der Manuelian (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1996), 70–71. 33. Assmann, Death and Salvation, 105. 34. For examples, see Elizabeth Riefstahl, Toilet Articles from Ancient Egypt (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 1943). 35. Biri Fay, “Egyptian Duck Flasks of Blue Anhydrite,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 33 (1998): 23. 36. Graves-Brown, Dancing, 53. 37. Aldred, Jewels, figs. 33, 35, 48. 38. Toivari-Viitala, Women, 171. 39. Graves-Brown, Dancing, 119; Lyn Green, “Toiletries and Cosmetics,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, ed. Donald B. Redford (Oxford: Oxford University, 2001), 3:415. 40. Lise Manniche, Sexual Life in Ancient Egypt (New York: Routledge, 1987), 83. 41. Green, “Toiletries,” 414. 42. Claire Derriks, “Mirrors,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, ed. Donald B. Redford (Oxford: Oxford University, 2001), 2:421. 43. Graves-Brown, Dancing, 63–64. 44. Admonitions of Ipuwer 8, 5. Author’s translation. 45. Lynn Meskell, Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 161. 46. Emily Teeter, “Meresamun’s Life Outside the Temple,” in The Life of Meresamun, ed. Emily Teeter and Janet H. Johnson (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2009), 63. 47. Derriks, “Mirrors,” 422; Graves-Brown, Dancing, 167–68. 48. Derriks, “Mirrors,” 421–22. 49. Lesley Kinney, Dance, Dancers and the Performance Cohort in the Old Kingdom (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2008), 164–67; Christine Lilyquist, Ancient Egyptian Mirrors from Earliest Times Through the Middle Kingdom (Berlin: Münchner Ägyptologische Studien, 1979), 97–99. 50. Caroline Ellis, “A Bronze Mirror with the Titles rht-nsw hmt-ntr Hwt-hr,” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 70 (1984): 139. 51. Graves-Brown, Dancing, 64, 167. 52. Katia Charbit Nataf, “An Egyptian Mortuary Cult in Late Bronze II Canaan,” Tel Aviv 38 (2011): 52–66. 53. Meskell, Private Life, 158. 54. Graves-Brown, Dancing, 111.

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55. Green, “Toiletries,” 73. 56. Dorothea Arnold, The Royal Women of Amarna: Images of Beauty from Ancient Egypt (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996), 55. 57. Gay Robins, “Hair and the Construction of Identity in Ancient Egypt c. 1480– 1350 B.C.,” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 36 (1999): 56, 59. 58. Suzanne Lynn Onstine, The Role of the Chantress (smayt) in Ancient Egypt (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005), 76. For scenes featuring bald temple personnel, see Norman de Garis Davies and Alan H. Gardiner, Seven Private Tombs at Kurnah (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1948), 15, pl. 12. 59. Arnold, Royal Women, 55. 60. The description and analysis of these cloth remains can be found in Dothan, Excavations, 68, ills. 151, 154–56. 61. Deborah Sweeney, “Sex and Gender,” in UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, ed. Elizabeth Frood and Willeke Wendrich (Los Angeles: University of California, 2011), 1. 62. Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood, Pharaonic Egyptian Clothing (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 97–98, 114. 63. Gay Robins, “Male Bodies and the Construction of Masculinity in New Kingdom Egyptian Art,” in Servant of Mut: Studies in Honor of Richard A. Fazzini, ed. Sue H. D’Auria (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 212. 64. Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature (Berkley: University of California Press, 1980), 3:127–38. 65. Graves-Brown, Dancing, 36; Vogelsang-Eastwood, Pharaonic Egyptian Clothing, 97–98. 66. Christopher Eyre, “The Market Women of Pharaonic Egypt,” in Le Commerce en Égypte Ancienne, ed. Nicolas Grimal and Bernadette Menu (Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1998), 182–83; Janssen, Commodity Prices, 526, 534. 67. Although all authentic linen is flax-based, tabby weave cloth manufactured from other materials, such as hemp or cotton, is sometimes also referred to as linen. 68. Green, “Toiletries,” 278; Deborah Sweeney, “Women Growing Older in Deir el-Medina,” in Living and Writing in Deir el-Medine. Socio-historical Embodiment of Deir el-Medine Texts, ed. Andreas Dorn and Tobias Hofmann (Basel: Schwabe, 2006), 143. 69. Kelly William Simpson, “A Protocol of Dress: The Royal and Private Fold of the Kilt,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 74 (1988): 203–04. 70. Robins, “Hair,” 67–68. 71. Magaera Lorenz, “Women and Their Employment,” in The Life of Meresamun, ed. Emily Teeter and Janet H. Johnson (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2009), 104–05. 72. Rachel T. Sparks, “Canaan in Egypt: Archaeological Evidence for a Social Phenomenon,” in Invention and Innovation: The Social Climate of Technological Change II: Egypt, The Aegean and the Near East 1650–1150 BC, ed. Janine Bourriau and Jacke Phillips (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2004). For examples of Canaanite burials in Egypt during the New Kingdom, see Christine Lilyquist, The Tomb of Three Foreign Wives of Tuthmosis III (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003).

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73. Thomas Schneider, “Foreigners in Egypt: Archaeological Evidence and Cultural Context,” in Egyptian Archaeology, ed. Willeke Wendrich (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 154–55. Examples of these contrasted depictions can be found in Edward Brovarski, S. K. Doll, and Rita E. Freed, Egypt’s Golden Age: The Art of Living in the New Kingdom 1558–1085 BC (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 180; Ora Negbi, Canaanite Gods in Metal: An Archaeological Study of Ancient Syro-Palestinian Figures (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1976), fig. 103; and P. H. Newby, Warrior Pharaohs: The Rise and Fall of the Egyptian Empire (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), 38. 74. For overviews on cloth and textiles in Egypt, see Zipora Cochavi-Rainey, Royal Gifts in the Late Bronze Age: Fourteenth to Thirteenth Centuries B.C.E. BeerSheva Vol. 13 (Beersheba: Ben-Guryon University of the Negev, 1999), 181–83; and Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood, “Textiles,” in Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, ed. Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2000), 286–90. 75. For the manufacturing processes of Egyptian and Levantine cloth, see Rosalind Hall, Egyptian Textiles, Shire Egyptology 4 (Aylesbury: Shire, 1986), 45–46; Barry J. Kemp and Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood, The Ancient Textile Industry at Amarna (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 2001), 59, 436; Avigail Sheffer and Amalia Tidhar, “Textiles and Textile Impressions on Pottery,” in The Egyptian Mining Temple at Timna, ed. Beno Rothenberg (London: University College London, 1988), 230; and Vogelsang-Eastwood, “Textiles,” 275.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aldred, Cyril. Jewels of the Pharaohs: Egyptian Jewelry of the Dynastic Period. New York: Ballantine, 1971. Andrews, Carol. Amulets of Ancient Egypt. London: British Museum, 1994. Andrews, Carol. Ancient Egyptian Jewelry. New York: Abrams, 1990. Arensburg, B., and Patricia Smith. “The Human Remains.” In Excavations at the Cemetery of Deir el-Balah, edited by Trude Dothan, 92–97. Qedem 10. Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1979. Arnold, Dorothea. The Royal Women of Amarna: Images of Beauty from Ancient Egypt. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996. Assmann, Jan. Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt. New York: Cornell University, 2005. Assmann, Jan. “Preservation and Presentation of Self in Ancient Egyptian Portraiture.” In Studies in Honor of William Kelly Simpson, edited by Peter Der Manuelian, 55–81. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1996. Baines, John, and Peter Lacovara. “Burial and the Dead in Ancient Egyptian Society: Respect, Formalism, Neglect.” Journal of Social Archaeology 2, no. 1 (2002): 5–36. Bard, Kathryn A. From Farmers to Pharaohs: Mortuary Evidence for the Rise of Social Complexity in Egypt. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994.

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Beit-Arieh, Itzhaq. “Further Burials from the Deir el-Balah Cemetery.” Tel Aviv 12 (1985): 43–56. Brovarski, Edward, S. K. Doll, and Rita E. Freed. Egypt’s Golden Age: The Art of Living in the New Kingdom 1558–1085 BC. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982. Charbit Nataf, Katia. “An Egyptian Mortuary Cult in Late Bronze II Canaan.” Tel Aviv 38 (2011): 52–66. Cochavi-Rainey, Zipora. Royal Gifts in the Late Bronze Age: Fourteenth to Thirteenth Centuries B.C.E. Beer-Sheva Vol. 13. Beersheba: Ben-Guryon University of the Negev, 1999. Davies, Norman de Garis, and Alan H. Gardiner. Seven Private Tombs at Kurnah. London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1948. Derriks, Claire. “Mirrors.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Vol. II, edited by Donald B. Redford, 419–22. Oxford: Oxford University, 2001. Dodson, Aidan, and Salima Ikram. “Egyptian Mortuary Beliefs.” In Writing Egypt: History, Literature, and Culture, edited by Aleya Serour, 22–29. Cairo: American University in Cairo, 2012. Dothan, Trude. “Anthropoid Clay Coffins from a Late Bronze Age Cemetery near Deir el-Balah (Preliminary Report).” Israel Exploration Journal 22, no. 2/3 (1972): 65–72. Dothan, Trude. “Anthropoid Clay Coffins from a Late Bronze Age Cemetery near Deir el-Balah (Preliminary Report II).” Israel Exploration Journal 23, no. 3 (1973): 129–46. Dothan, Trude. “Deir el Balah.” In The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, Vol. 1, edited by Ephraim Stern, 343–47. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. Dothan, Trude. Deir el-Balah: Uncovering an Egyptian Outpost in Canaan from the Time of the Exodus. Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 2008. Dothan, Trude. Excavations at the Cemetery of Deir el-Balah. Qedem 10. Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1979. Dothan, Trude, and Baruch Brandl. Deir el-Balah: Excavations in 1977–1982 in the Cemetery and Settlement I: Stratigraphy and Architecture. Qedem 49. Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 2010a. Dothan, Trude, and Baruch Brandl. Deir el-Balah: Excavations in 1977–1982 in the Cemetery and Settlement II: The Finds. Qedem 50. Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 2010b. Ellis, Caroline. “A Bronze Mirror with the Titles rht-nsw hmt-ntr Hwt-hr.” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 70 (1984): 139–40. Eyre, Christopher. “The Market Women of Pharaonic Egypt.” In Le Commerce en Égypte Ancienne, edited by Nicolas Grimal and Bernadette Menu, 173–92. Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1998. Fay, Biri. “Egyptian Duck Flasks of Blue Anhydrite.” Metropolitan Museum Journal 33 (1998): 23–48. Gonen, Rivka. Burial Patterns and Cultural Diversity in Late Bronze Age Canaan. American Schools of Oriental Research Dissertation Series 7. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1992.

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Graves-Brown, Carolyn. Dancing for Hathor: Women in Ancient Egypt. London: Continuum, 2010. Green, Lyn. “Toiletries and Cosmetics.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Vol. III, edited by Donald B. Redford, 412–17. Oxford: Oxford University, 2001. Hall, Rosalind. Egyptian Textiles. Shire Egyptology 4. Aylesbury: Shire, 1986. Harrell, James A. “Gemstones.” In UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, edited by Willeke Wendrich, 1–23. Los Angeles: University of California, 2012. Hays, Harold. “Funerary Rituals (Pharaonic Period).” In UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, edited by Jacco Dieleman and Willeke Wendrich, 1–14. Los Angeles: University of California, 2010. Janssen, Jac J. Commodity Prices from the Ramesside Period. Leiden: Brill, 1975. Kemp, Barry J., and Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood. The Ancient Textile Industry at Amarna. London: Egypt Exploration Society, 2001. Killebrew, Ann E., Paul Goldberg, and Arlene M. Rosen. “Deir el-Balah: A Geological, Archaeological, and Historical Reassessment of an Egyptianizing 13th and 12th Century B.C.E. Center.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 343 (2006): 97–119. Kinney, Lesley. Dance, Dancers and the Performance Cohort in the Old Kingdom. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2008. Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian Literature. Vol. III. Berkley: University of California Press, 1980. Lilyquist, Christine. Ancient Egyptian Mirrors from Earliest Times Through the Middle Kingdom. Berlin: Münchner Ägyptologische Studien, 1979. Lilyquist, Christine. The Tomb of Three Foreign Wives of Tuthmosis III. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003. Lipton, Gary. “The Excavation of the Cemetery.” In Deir el-Balah: Excavations in 1977–1982 in the Cemetery and Settlement I: Stratigraphy and Architecture, edited by Trude Dothan and Baruch Brandl, 3–46. Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 2010. Lorenz, Magaera. “Women and Their Employment.” In The Life of Meresamun, edited by Emily Teeter and Janet H. Johnson, 98–110. Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2009. MacArthur, Elise V. “Fertility and Birth Rituals.” In The Life of Meresamun, edited by Emily Teeter and Janet H. Johnson, 76–81. Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2009. Manniche, Lise. Sexual Life in Ancient Egypt. New York: Routledge, 1987. Markowitz, Yvonne J. “Jewelry.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Vol. II, edited by Donald B. Redford, 201–07. Oxford: Oxford University, 2001. Markowitz, Yvonne J., and Peter Lacovara. “Gold.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Vol. II, edited by Donald B. Redford, 34–38. Oxford: Oxford University, 2001. Martin, Mario. Egyptian-Type Pottery in the Late Bronze Age Southern Levant. Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2011. Meskell, Lynn. Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

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Morris, Ellen F. The Architecture of Imperialism: Military Bases and the Evolution of Foreign Policy in Egypt’s New Kingdom. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Negbi, Ora. Canaanite Gods in Metal: An Archaeological Study of Ancient SyroPalestinian Figures. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1976. Newby, P. H. Warrior Pharaohs: The Rise and Fall of the Egyptian Empire. London: Faber and Faber, 1980. Onstine, Suzanne Lynn. The Role of the Chantress (smayt) in Ancient Egypt. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005. Pierce, Krystal V. L. “Living and Dying Abroad: Aspects of Egyptian Cultural Identity in Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Canaan.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2013. Riefstahl, Elizabeth. Toilet Articles from Ancient Egypt. Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 1943. Robins, Gay. “Hair and the Construction of Identity in Ancient Egypt c. 1480–1350 B.C.” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 36 (1999): 55–69. Robins, Gay. “Male Bodies and the Construction of Masculinity in New Kingdom Egyptian Art.” In Servant of Mut: Studies in Honor of Richard A. Fazzini, edited by Sue H. D’Auria, 208–15. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Romano, James F. “Jewelry and Personal Arts in Ancient Egypt.” In Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, Vol. III, edited by Jack M. Sasson, 1605–21. New York: Scribner, 1995. Schneider, Thomas. “Foreigners in Egypt: Archaeological Evidence and Cultural Context.” In Egyptian Archaeology, edited by Willeke Wendrich, 143–63. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Sheffer, Avigail, and Amalia Tidhar. “Textiles and Textile Impressions on Pottery.” In The Egyptian Mining Temple at Timna, edited by Beno Rothenberg, 224–31. London: University College London, 1988. Simpson, Kelly William. “A Protocol of Dress: The Royal and Private Fold of the Kilt.” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 74 (1988): 203–04. Smith, Stuart Tyson. “Intact Tombs of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Dynasties from Thebes and the New Kingdom Burial System.” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts Abteilung Kairo 48 (1992): 193–231. Smith, Stuart Tyson. Wretched Kush: Ethnic Identities and Boundaries in Egypt’s Nubian Empire. London: Routledge, 2003. Sparks, Rachel T. “Canaan in Egypt: Archaeological Evidence for a Social Phenomenon.” In Invention and Innovation: The Social Climate of Technological Change II: Egypt, The Aegean and the Near East 1650–1150 BC, edited by Janine Bourriau and Jacke Phillips, 25–54. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2004. Sweeney, Deborah. “Sex and Gender.” In UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, edited by Elizabeth Frood and Willeke Wendrich, 1–14. Los Angeles: University of California, 2011. Sweeney, Deborah. “Women Growing Older in Deir el-Medina.” In Living and Writing in Deir el-Medine. Socio-historical Embodiment of Deir el-Medine Texts, edited by Andreas Dorn and Tobias Hofmann, 135–53. Basel: Schwabe, 2006.

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Taylor, John H. Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001. Teeter, Emily. “Meresamun’s Life Outside the Temple.” In The Life of Meresamun, edited by Emily Teeter and Janet H. Johnson, 60–70. Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2009. Toivari-Viitala, Jaana. Women at Deir el-Medina. A Study of the Status and Roles of the Female Inhabitants in the Workmen’s Community During the Ramesside Period. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut Voor Het Nabije Oosten, 2001. Vogelsang-Eastwood, Gillian. Pharaonic Egyptian Clothing. Leiden: Brill, 1993. Vogelsang-Eastwood, Gillian. “Textiles.” In Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, edited by Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw, 268–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2000. Wilkinson, Richard H. The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003.

Chapter 3

Besieged Maternity Reading Textual Cannibalism in the Hebrew Bible through Material Culture Susannah M. Larry

Examining visual representations of siege warfare casts new light on Hebrew Bible texts, enabling a more sympathetic view of the plight of women in these writings. Many passages of the Hebrew Bible dealing with siege warfare employ the disturbing motif of cannibalism and evince a strong cultural disapprobation of cannibalism in general, with consumption of one’s children viewed as the worst of the worst offenses. The focus of these texts narrows from men and women as engaging in anthropophagy (the eating of humans) to women in particular as perpetrators.1 Deuteronomy 28:53 and Leviticus 26:29 threaten cannibalism of children as the consequence of the disobedience of YHWH’s people. The ‫פְ ִ ֽרי־בִ ְטנְ ָ֗ך‬ ‫( בְּ ַ ֤שׂר בָּ ֶ֙ניָך֙ וּבְ נֹ ֔ ֶתיָך‬fruit of your [masc. sing.] womb, the flesh of your [masc. sing.] sons and daughters) are on the menu in Deuteronomy 28:53, and the passage continues to explain how the women, who are actually compassionate, will refuse to share even this abhorrent food with their other offspring. In Leviticus 26:29, cannibalism is alluded to more tersely: ‫ַו ֲאכַלְ ֶ ֖תּם בְּ ַ ֣שׂר בְּ נֵיכֶ ֑ם‬ ‫ֹאכלוּ‬ ֽ ֵ ‫( ּובְ ַ ֥שׂר בְּ נֹ תֵ יכֶ ֖ם תּ‬And you [masc. pl.] will eat the flesh of your sons, and you [masc. pl.] will eat the flesh of your daughters.) In Jeremiah 19:9, children are cannibalized, as are the children’s neighbors, their fellow Judeans. The hiphil form of ‫ אכל‬identifies God as the agent responsible for the cannibalism, taking place during the context of warfare: ‫ר־רעֵ ֖הוּ י ֹאכֵ ֑לוּ‬ ֵ ַ‫יהם וְ ִ ֥אישׁ בְּ שׂ‬ ֶ ֔ ֵ‫ֵיהם וְ אֵ ת֙ בְּ ַ ֣שׂר בְּ נֹ ת‬ ֶ ֗ ‫( וְ ַ ֽה ֲאכַלְ ֞ ִתּים אֶ ת־בְּ ַ ֣שׂר בְּ נ‬And I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and each will eat the flesh of his neighbor). Ezekiel 5:10 makes the anthropophagy go both ways between parents and children: ‫ֲבֹותם‬ ֑ ָ ‫אָבֹות י ֹאכְ ל֤ וּ בָ נִ ים֙ בְּ תֹו ֵ֔כְך וּבָ ִנ֖ים י ֹאכְ ל֣ וּ א‬ ֞ ‫ָל ֵ֗כן‬ (Surely parents will eat children in your midst and children will eat parents) 53

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In 2 Kings 6:24–33, while Samaria is under siege from Ben-Hadad of Aram, famine leads two women to make an agreement about eating their own sons, which is ultimately not upheld by one of the parties. In Lamentations 2:20, and even more graphically in 4:10, mothers cook and eat their children under the exigency of starvation. Text Lev. 26:29 Deut. 28:53 2 Kings 6:24–33 Jer. 19:9 Lam. 2:20 Lam. 4:10 Ezekiel

Setting Unspecific Siege Siege Siege Siege Siege Siege

Who eats? You (masc. plural) You (masc. sing.) Two women Them Women Women Parents and children

Who is eaten? Sons and daughters Sons and daughters One son Sons, daughters, friend Children Children Children and parents

Thus, across the Law, Prophets, and writings of the Hebrew Bible, eating children signals the ultimate divine punishment of the inhabitants of Israel and Judah. Why is this horrifying motif such a salient one in biblical writings? Furthermore, what does this imagery reveal about the role of mothers within the biblical world? Previously, biblical scholars have done important work to explore the literary origins and ramifications of the cannibalistic motif, upon which I will build. They have also explored how the alleged eating of children in the ancient Near-Eastern world inspired a polemic against such practices in the Hebrew Bible. However, a dimension of this phenomenon that has not yet been fully investigated is the material evidence related to these literary portrayals. What holds these instances of maternal cannibalism together is, in most cases, the context of siege warfare that creates famine conditions. Therefore, I will explore how archaeological remains from the ninth to sixth centuries BCE and visual art from contemporary sieges in Assyria and Babylon point to mothers’ extreme precarity during siege warfare. Mothers’ particularly vulnerable position within ancient Israelite society, brought about by the imperative to care for both themselves and their children, was heightened through the context of warfare. The archaeological and artistic evidence does not suggest a widespread practice of child consumption during siege to confirm the literary portrayals of anthropophagy in warfare. However, the texts’ portrayals of sharp hunger during siege, borne out by famine, invites a curiosity about the material world in which the women of these texts lived. A turn toward material culture can better flesh out the precarity of women, suggested through their consumption of children in biblical texts. I will discuss a theoretical framework of “reading” material culture and literary texts side by side, then review earlier scholarship on passages in the

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55

Hebrew Bible concerning maternal cannibalism in warfare, offering my own remarks on the literary trope. Next, I will consider the excavation of Iron Age sites in the Levant that experienced siege warfare, the human remains of which gesture toward the dietary restrictions under siege warfare, and I will examine visual art portraying women under siege, noting how having children adds to the exigency the women faced. Finally, I will show how my interpretation of this material evidence acts in concert with biblical texts to shape a fuller idea of maternal precarity. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK My approach to material culture, like other interdisciplinary post-processual approaches, seeks to read literature and artifacts in dialogue with one other. The materiality of the texts I reference invites such an approach; they speak of conditions of starvation under siege that should leave markers in the material world. They also gender the experience of food and eating, which connects with the contemporary interest in constructions of gender manifested in objects and space. As Linda M. Hurcombe writes, “Material culture is a key means of signaling gender and age categories within a society alongside, and sometimes in contradiction to, sexual bodily characteristics.” Among the methods of “signaling gender with goods” are “food collection and processing,” as well as the “places in which these acts are performed” and “skeletal evidence [that] can show gendered task-related differences.”2 Yet the disentanglement of gender from other factors (e.g., socioeconomic status, occupation, etc.) suggested through objects is no simple matter. Often, a single household might contain evidence of objects pointing to involvement in multiple spheres of society. Hurcombe writes, “If we seek gender in the past then it is indeed likely to be expressed through differences in material culture, but these may be difficult to unravel. It is going to be difficult to disentangle maker, owner, and user and to see cases with both cultural ‘norms’ and social blurring of the generalized pattern.”3 Therefore, though material culture can suggest gendered realities, these phenomena are not self-evident and emerge within a matrix of other factors. Furthermore, Hurcombe makes the point that as material cultural studies have developed, objects are not viewed merely as passive but instead have a type of “animacy” that enables them to form and transform the human relationships of which they are part; “it is not a simple dichotomy between person and thing but rather an interplay between them. Objects become part of thought systems and, in turn, colour and channel those thought systems, possibly in particular routes or in new directions where there is a breakthrough.”4 Material culture should not merely be instrumentalized to verify biblical

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accounts, as this fails to take seriously the literary nature of the texts as well as the stand-alone significance of artifacts. Physical artifacts are themselves a dynamic category to be investigated and “read” just as, and sometimes counter to, the narratives of texts. CHILD CONSUMPTION DURING FAMINE IN THE BIBLE AND THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST When literary works depict famine, whether from natural causes or warfare, references to anthropophagy are common, both within biblical literature and within the larger ancient Near-Eastern context. These references occur both in strictly mythological works and in those purporting to be historical accounts. The Epic of Atrahasis, an Akkadian text whose earlier fragments originated in the seventeenth century BCE, contains such imagery of parents consuming children, as a drought and subsequent famine reduces them to desperation: “When the sixth year arrived, / They prepared [the daughter] for a meal / The child they prepared for food” (Tablet III, lines 36–37).5 Assurbanipal’s records of military campaigns display cannibalism from a triumphalist perspective, as a demonstration of his ability to break down a people completely: “Famine broke out among them, and they ate the flesh of their children to satisfy their hunger.”6 The Egyptian Heqanakht Papyri include anthropophagy as well: “Why, they have begun to eat men and women here!”7 A curse within the vassal-treaties of Esarhaddon reads, “Mother shall [bar the door to] her daughter, may you eat in your hunger the flesh of your children.”8 Josephus’s The Jewish War extends the occurrence of maternal cannibalism to the 70 CE siege of Jerusalem as well.9 Thus, a well-established pattern exists of textual depictions of anthropophagy under exigent conditions of siege. A siege sets the stage for anthropophagy in several passages of the Hebrew Bible. In three of the previously named instances (Deut. 28, Jer. 19, and 2 Kings 6), the context is of ‫( מָ צוֺ ר‬siege), while in Lamentations, the purported setting of the book depicts the effects of Babylon’s siege of Jerusalem. When the prophetic and legal warnings concerning anthropophagy play out in scenarios of actual siege, an interesting transformation occurs: while the prophetic and legal references to anthropophagy are gender-inclusive (both men and women engage in anthropophagy), the texts of “historical” sieges focus on women specifically as those who are committing the cannibalism. This narrowing of focus from both the men and women of Israel as a whole to the mothers specifically constitutes an unexplored issue. I posit that it is the mothers’ more direct obligations toward child-rearing within the cultural contexts of the text, exposing them to greater danger, that effect the singular focus on women’s anthropophagy in the literary portrayals of specific

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historical sieges in 2 Kings and Lamentations. Since women’s lives were more imperiled than men’s by their nurturing role during wartime, it is they who consume the children to reverse the drain of life they experience through caretaking. The real precarity of mothers, singled out by gender in 2 Kings and Lamentations, challenges the interpretation of anthropophagic mothers along the lines of the female-as-monster stereotype preferred in mainstream (or better, “malestream”) biblical interpretation.10 2 KINGS 6:24–31 In 2 Kings 6:24–31, two women bring a horrific dispute to Jehoram, king of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, who is ruling during the siege of Ben-Hadad of Aram. The women had agreed to eat their sons (of indeterminate age), but after they have consumed the first woman’s son, the second woman refuses to relinquish her own for a meal. While in the history of interpretation, these women have been the targets of critical rhetoric, recent interpretation has sought to recover both the mothers and their children as figures whom biblical scholarship should remember and regard sympathetically. The cannibalistic mothers in 2 Kings receive mixed reviews from commentators, often (though not always) veering into a realm of blame. Robert L. Cohn’s analysis reflects a shock in the speaking woman’s “utter lack of self consciousness about the crime she has committed” in eating a child.11 Similarly, T. R. Hobbs condemns a “lack of feeling” demonstrated in the mother’s request to the king.12 Richard D. Nelson stigmatizes the entire situation, calling it a “horrible parody” of typical neighborly dispute.13 However, other commentators attempt to explain the mothers’ behavior and mitigate the blame they receive through pointing to the practical exigency of the situation. Marvin A. Sweeney argues that the mothers’ choices show nothing short of “sheer desperation.”14 Stephen L. McKenzie takes care to show that the mothers are not guilty of filicide as well as cannibalism; he points out that, especially if the children were infants, particularly vulnerable to starvation conditions, there is a good chance they died of hunger rather than murder at the hands of their mothers.15 Walter Brueggemann goes so far as to compare the starvation conditions in Samaria to death camps under the Nazi regime, which for him provides a context for the mothers’ desperate actions.16 Other contemporary scholars mitigate the mothers’ blame through a more theological explanation of the situation. Stuart Lasine reads the “grotesque humor” of the chapters as an indictment of divine injustice; readers are led to question the “topsy-turvy” world in which divine punishment has been enacted.17 As Kristine Garroway points out, the first child’s death functions

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as an “expiatory sacrifice” for the people as a whole. While the death causes Elisha to end the famine, a positive result, the “insertion of the unit functions as a polemic against the northern kingdom concerning the north’s place in the covenant and the place of child sacrifice in the cult of YHWH.”18 Also at issue are the power dynamics between ordinary (female!) people and political powers. Gina Hens-Piazza’s Nameless, Blameless, and Without Shame: Two Cannibal Mothers Before a King involves a postcolonial reading of the “othering” of these women, which enables Hens-Piazza to resist the tradition of shaming the mothers. The mothers’ consumption of their children results from the oppressive power structures that are already destroying them: “The hunger for food that would motivate citizens to engage in anthropophagy coincides with sovereigns’ voracious appetites for power and domination. The insatiable craving on the part of the powerful reigns over the hunger of the powerless, who eventually resort to cannibalizing in the face of threat.”19 Though each of these analyses raises valuable observations about the historical setting, theological significance, or power dynamics within the texts, motherhood is not a category that receives much attention. Why are mothers, specifically, the ones who are eating their children? Continuing the discussion into the book of Lamentations, the question concerning mothers’ position as the child-eaters in biblical texts becomes even more pronounced. LAMENTATIONS 2:20, 4:9–10 In Lamentations 2:20, the telling of anthropophagy, though still within the context of siege, is unique because it emerges from the mouth of a woman, the personified figure of the city of Jerusalem, Daughter Zion. The cannibalism of mothers is expressed not so much as a condemnation of the women themselves but as an indictment of God: See, YHWH, and observe: whom have you abused?20 Should women eat their fruit, the children they produced? Should priests and prophets be killed in the temple of the Lord?

In her speech, Zion ironically plays on the root ‫עלל‬. In the first line of the stanza, the verbal form refers to what YHWH has done, behaving abusively to children. In the second line, the substantivized form of ‫עלל‬ refers to the children being eaten by their mothers. The poet suggests that the children’s consumption is a direct consequence of YHWH’s abusive behavior. Lamentations 4:10 reprises the maternal cannibalism of 2:20, but in contrast to Lamentations 2:10, in which a woman’s voice uses the consumption of children to accuse God, it is part of a documentary-style description of the

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carnage of all the people. Hunger once again clearly sets the scene for the cannibalistic activity. Lamentations 4:9 reads ‫ֵי־ח ֶרב‬ ֶ ֔ ‫טֹובים הָ יוּ֙ חַ לְ ל‬ ִ֤ ‫ֵ ֽמחַ לְ לֵ ֖י ָרעָ ֑ב‬ ֙‫ֶ ֣שׁ ֵה֤ם יָז֙ וּבוּ‬ ‫ְמדֻקָּ ִ ֔רים ִמ ְתּנוּבֹ֖ ת שָׂ ָ ֽדי׃‬ Happier are those pierced by the sword Than those pierced by hunger Whose life drains away, Deprived of the produce of the field.

Starvation is a more prolonged death than that by weapons, and certainly one that would affect all inhabitants of the besieged city, beyond those participating in combat. However, though all are hungry, once again it is the mothers whose desperation segues into cannibalism in 4:10: ‫יְ ֗ ֵדי נ ִָשׁים֙ ַרח ָ ֲ֣מנִ יּ֔ ֹות‬ ‫יה֑ן‬ ֶ ֵ‫בִּ ְשּׁל֖ וּ יַלְ ד‬ ‫הָ י֤ וּ לְ בָ רֹות֙ ָ֔למֹו‬ ‫בְּ ֶ ֖שׁבֶ ר בַּ ת־ע ִ ַֽמּי׃‬ The hands of compassionate women Have boiled their children, They became food for them In the destruction of Daughter of My People.

Curiously, there is a mismatch between the gender of the mothers (fem. pl.) and the object pronoun (masc. pl.). Through this mismatch—regardless of its origin—there is a disconnect between the mothers’ horrific action and its ultimate result. The mothers do not appear to be the only beneficiaries of the sinister meal; the identity of the “them” remains unresolved in the final form of the Hebrew text. The eaters of human flesh may be other children whom the mothers are struggling to keep alive, or fathers as well as mothers. In any case, the masculine gender reveals that, counter to the commentary tradition of focusing on maternal “selfishness” when child anthropophagy is involved, the mothers are not turning their children into food for themselves alone. Furthermore, they may not be guilty of both killing and eating the children; Lamentations tells that children collapse from hunger “at the head of every street” (2:19). The mothers may simply use the corpses of children who have already died in order to save others.

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Regardless, in all of these instances, mothers specifically are highlighted (or accused, less charitably) in the siege account that plays out legal and prophetic warnings about anthropophagy in an actual siege. While the Deuteronomistic warnings about anthropophagy were directed to men and women alike, these siege-specific accounts seize on just the maternal figures as the ones to carry out the consumption. This phenomenon has not been sufficiently considered in Lamentations and 2 Kings scholarship. The shock value of eating children may be higher when the eaters are mothers, due to the assumption that mothers are especially predisposed to protect their offspring. However, while the “shock value” explanation of the maternal anthropophagy has grounds, a deeper cultural phenomenon is at play as well regarding the precarity of the mothers under siege. Recalling her reading of 2 Kings 6:24–31, Hens-Piazza’s analysis of Lamentations 2:20 and 4:10 resists reading the Jerusalemite mothers who cannibalize their children as wholly responsible for their actions, caught as they are within a larger web of power structures.21 While incisive, HensPiazza’s study does not extensively consider why mothers receive attention as the potential eaters of children or why they in particular are caught within the power structures she outlines. Hens-Piazza does note that maternal identity plays a role in the telling of these stories: “However, in the case of the cannibal mothers, the horror of consuming their children competes with the horror of all that is lost in such an act. Eating their own children estranges them from their posture as mothers. Hence they are robbed of identity.”22 Yet more questions go unanswered, including the issue of how the material conditions of environments in which Israelites found themselves, including in warfare, resulted in the expression and display of this identity.23 MATERIAL CULTURE AND MATERNAL PRECARITY IN THE ANCIENT NEAR-EASTERN WORLD Archaeological evidence confirms the impact of siege warfare on the vulnerable populations of cities in the ninth-to-sixth-century Levant. Mass graves excavated within Ashdod and Lachish held the remains of many victims, especially women and children, who had suffered no obvious physical injuries, strongly suggesting death by starvation, dehydration, or related illnesses. The excavated latrines and cesspools from the era of the 586 siege of Jerusalem show evidence of a restricted diet in which household garden plants like mustard greens, lettuce, and artichokes replaced crop staples like wheat, barley, lentils, and peas. Meanwhile, the exigent use of human excrement for fertilizer and other unsanitary conditions led to the development of internal parasites that exacerbated the ill health of poor diet.24

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These archaeological remains suggest a heightened vulnerability for people in besieged cities of the ancient Near East, particularly for those parents who needed to provide food not only for themselves but for their dependents as well. As the prominence of female victims of the siege period shows, this reality could have been especially harsh for mothers. Assyrian reliefs and paintings from the ninth to seventh century BCE can help to cast light on the particularity of women’s (especially mothers’) situations during warfare. In a ninth-century Assyrian relief (figure 3.1), a charioteer approaches the besieged city walls. Above him, the figures of three women watch, two of them turned toward one other, with the hand of one gesturing toward the approaching rider, indicating conversation. The women are observers, not combatants, and yet they are clearly intimately involved in the situation. They could be discussing strategies for survival once the approaching charioteer makes his way into the city or wondering whether they will fare relatively well or badly once they fall into his possession. The absence of men except for the charioteer here is striking. In the imagined world of the artist, the defending men may all be dead, and the charioteer’s access to the women is relatively open. An Assyrian seventh-century BCE wall painting (figure 3.2) displays women’s situations under siege warfare in a shockingly vivid depiction of the

Figure 3.1  Siege of a City, Detail: A Charioteer Advancing beneath the Walls of the City. Relief, Palace of Ashurnasirpal II. British Museum. Source: Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 3.2  Wall Painting. Source: Copy made by Lucien Cavro. Late Assyrian Period. Til Barsip: Palace. From Boeotia. artstor​.or​g.

aftermath of conflict. In the painting, two Assyrian warriors stand between captives. One of the Assyrian soldiers grasps a kneeling male captive by his hair, sword raised; the descending blow will decapitate the male prisoner. The male prisoner plaintively touches the soldier on the arm, as if to plead with him to suspend the assault. The other male prisoner, seemingly in line for execution, stands behind the more immediate victim, his hands outstretched in supplication. Another Assyrian soldier holds a female prisoner by the arm. Her head draped with a shawl, she too holds up her hands in supplication. Behind her, another female prisoner waits. This one, though her face is worn away, is looking behind her to a small child whom she holds by the hand. They are awaiting their fate at the hands of the soldiers. Unlike with the male prisoner, it does not seem that death is imminent for them, but, given the soldier’s proprietorial grasp of the first woman’s hand, slavery seems likely. The enslavement of women and captured children appears in a late Assyrian relief (figure 3.3) in which the Assyrian victors parade their spoils. In this relief, a small group of women walks in front of a cart, pulled by oxen. A soldier drives the oxen, and on top of material spoils laid in the cart, two small children ride. The fate of children and mothers is intertwined as they face together the next destination their captors have set for them. In figure 3.4, a conquering army’s manipulation of the resources needed to survive in besieged cities comes into play in a ninth-century relief. With a large walled city as a backdrop, an Assyrian soldier uses a knife to cut the rope holding a pail used to draw water from a well. As the biblical narratives recall, lack of access to water could often be the most critical problem in a besieged city (see the reference to the Siloam Tunnel in 2 Kings 20:20; 2

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Figure 3.3  Relief, Late Assyrian Period. Source: British Museum. London: Mus., British. artstor​.or​g.

Chron. 32). Here, the soldier’s clandestine cutting of the rope represents a warfare carried out through the attrition of resources, the results of which would be particularly devastating for mothers caring for children. For some inhabitants of besieged cities, escape was an option, albeit a perilous one. Within the seventh-century relief in figure 3.5, Elamite fugitives swim from siege in dangerous conditions, archers overhead, using inflated animal skins as flotation devices. Notably, women are absent from these depictions; all those who escape are men. As discussed earlier, men are more likely to be killed by the invading army, while women escape with their lives as slaves. Given the dangers of attempts at escape, encompassing the dangers posed by the natural world such as drowning, exposure to the elements, and animal attack, as well as the threat of human enemies, staying in place might represent the best chance for women to survive.25 The chance for mothers to escape would have been even slimmer, with children slowing down the escape process and mothers bearing the added responsibility of providing food for their children’s hungry bellies. Mothers’ roles as caretakers for children continued in siege warfare, even into captivity, as the Assyrian seventh-century relief in figure 3.6 demonstrates; a captive woman gives her child a drink from a large pitcher of water. These everyday scenes of mothers providing care to children, even during wartime, points to the salience and significance of these aspects of motherhood for besieged peoples.

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Figure 3.4  Siege of a City, Detail: An Assyrian Soldier Cuts the Rope to a Pail for a Well in the Besieged City. Relief, Palace of Ashurnasirpal II. British Museum. Source: Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

READING 2 KINGS 6 AND LAMENTATIONS 2, 4 WITH MATERIAL CULTURE The presence of cannibalism in extra-biblical written materials, while not targeting women specifically in their descriptions, confirms that cannibalism could occur in cities under siege but does not explain why, in the Bible, mothers are particularly prominent in this motif. On the other hand, while anthropophagy is absent from the material evidence I have discussed, the artistic record does point more broadly to the situation of women in wartime,

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Figure 3.5  Siege of a City, Detail: Fugitives under Fire Swimming across a Moat, Two with Inflated Animal Skins. Relief, Palace of Ashurnasirpal II. British Museum. Source: Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

in which women were exposed to heightened dangers because of their caretaking role. If they were unwilling to abandon their children by escaping, obliged to provide food for their dependents, and liable to become the enslaved property of enemy masters, mothers could experience tremendous pressure as a result of siege warfare. Children made life more dangerous and precarious for mothers, whose own well-being was compromised through protecting their children. This intensified stress feeds the imagery of child consumption repeated in biblical literature. The mothers now (figuratively) consume their children, who (literally) are the ones eating the mothers through the caretaking stress of the siege. The women’s survival and the children’s are now at odds, a situation that seemingly goes against the created order of mother-and-child relationships. This disturbance in “the way things should be” prompts Daughter Zion’s censure of God in Lamentations 2:10, as well as the king’s gestures of lament (tearing his clothes and wearing sackcloth) in 2 Kings 6:30. Materially informed readings of the motif of child consumption in 2 Kings 6:24–31 and Lamentations 2 and 4 extend the previous feminist scholarship on these passages. The emphasis of interpretation can shift from morally evaluating the women (either positively or negatively) to exploring a deeper understanding of the conditions surrounding their literary portrayals. The mothers are not necessarily “selfish” or “monstrous,” nor are these qualities

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Figure 3.6  Relief, Captive Babylonian Women, 705–681 BCE, Nineveh, South-West Palace. Source: Room XIX. Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts.

the point of the texts that the cannibalistic mothers inhabit. Rather, the consumption of the children indicates the intimate and troubling relationship between mothers and children who, in the context of siege, have conflicting needs for safety and resources. The mothers’ consumption of the children in literary sieges ironically reverses the consequences of the mothers’ caretaking roles in historical sieges. The mothers, who have given life to the children at the expense of their own, are shown as now taking back life from the children by eating them. Caring for their children in the context of siege was self-sacrificial for mothers, to the point of their own physical harm. The death of their children would have, tragically, made survival a less tenuous outcome for the mothers. Reduced to such circumstances, maternal precarity becomes an opportunity for literary outcry to more powerful constituencies for help: the king (in 2 Kings) and God (in Lamentations). In the literary imagining of siege, eating the children became a primary way to express the impossible choices that mothers faced. The women portrayed in the biblical texts and artistic record experienced siege as a situation in which death might be preferable to life for both themselves and their children. The agony of their decisions prompts outcry to God in both 2 Kings 6 and Lamentations 2 and 4.

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NOTES 1. I use the term cannibalism with reservation, given its storied origins as a mechanism for othering groups of indigenous peoples whom European sea travelers encountered. Therefore, I tend to use anthropophagy as an alternative. For anthropological consideration of these terms, see Peggy Reeves Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Gananath Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Bill Schutt, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2017); Catalin Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, trans. Alistair Ian Blyth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 2. Linda M. Hurcombe, Archaeological Artefacts as Material Culture (New York: Routledge, 2007), 101. 3. Hurcombe, Archaeological Artefacts, 102. 4. Hurcombe, Archaeological Artefacts, 103. 5. “The Epic of Atrahasis,” in James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Related to the Old Testament (ANET), (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 105. 6. Maximilian Streck, Assurbanipal und die letzten assyrischen Könige bis zum Untergange Niniveh’s, II. Teil: Texte: die Inschriften Assurbanipals und der letzten assyrischen Könige (Liepzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1916), 76. 7. Henakhte Papyri, qtd. in H. E. Winlock, Excavations at Deir El Bahri (1911– 1931) (New York: MacMillan Company, 1942), 62. 8. “The Vassal-Treaties of Esarhaddon,” in Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 534–41. 9. Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, 6.3.4. 10. See the examples in the discussion to follow. 11. Robert L. Cohn, Berit Olam: 2 Kings (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), 50. 12. T. R. Hobbs, 2 Kings (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1995), 80. 13. Richard D. Nelson, First and Second Kings, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012, 189. 14. Marvin A. Sweeney, I & II Kings: A Commentary, 1st ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 311. 15. Stephen L. McKenzie, 1 Kings 16–2 Kings 16, International Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2019), 341. 16. Walter Brueggemann, 1 & 2 Kings, Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2000), 354. 17. Stuart Lasine, “Jehoram and the Cannibal Mothers (2 Kings 6:24–33): Solomon’s Judgment in an Inverted World,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 50 (1991), 29. 18. Kristine Garroway, “2 Kings 6:24–30: A Case of Unintentional Elimination Killing, Journal of Biblical Literature 137, no. 1 (2018): 53–70.

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19. Gina Hens-Piazza, Nameless, Blameless, and Without Shame: Two Cannibal Mothers Before a King (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003), 86. 20. I draw the translation of ָ‫ עֹולַ ֣לְ תּ‬as “abused” from Tod Linafelt, Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 57. He points out that the same verb is used in Judges 19:25 in the story of the Levite’s concubine. 21. Hens-Piazza, Lamentations, Wisdom Commentary, vol. 30, ed. Barbara E. Reid (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2017), 60. 22. Hens-Piazza, Nameless, Blameless, 110. 23. While I have restricted my discussion here to two biblical texts, the portrayal of mothers as cannibalistic during siege warfare continued after the biblical period as well. In book VI, chapter 3 of The Jewish War, Josephus illustrates how the cannibalism of a woman, Mary of Jerusalem, serves to demonstrate the sinfulness of Jewish men in persisting to rebel against Rome. His portrayal here builds upon the biblical narratives of siege discussed here. For a more detailed discussion of this intertextual linkage, see Caryn A. Reeder, “Pity the Women and Children: Punishment by Siege in Josephus’ The Jewish War,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 44 (2013): 174–94. 24. Lachish Tombs 107, 108, 116, and 120 (Olga Tufnell, The Iron Age, vol. 3 of Lachish [Tell ed-Duweir] [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953], 1:187–96); N. Haas, “Anthropological Observations on the Skeletal Remains Found in Area D (1962–3),” in Ashdod II–III: The Second and Third Seasons of Excavations, 1963, 1965, Soundings in 1967, 2 vols., ed. Walter E. Rast and M. Dothon, Atiqot English Series 9–10 (Jerusalem: Department of Antiquities and Museums in the Ministry of Education and Culture, 1971), 1:212–14; Israel Eph’al, The City Besieged: Siege and Its Manifestations in the Ancient Near East, Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 36 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 31–34. 25. This is not at all to romanticize the treatment of women in warfare. Then, as it is now, rape was rampant during warfare, carried out as a form of cultural genocide. This too is an issue that affects maternity, as these wartime rapes could result in pregnancy. These pregnancies then tied women to their captors on an entirely new level. F. Rachel Magdalene, “Ancient Near Eastern Treaty-Curses,” in A Feminist Companion to the Latter Prophets, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield University Press, 1995).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Avramescu, Catalin. An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, trans. Alistair Ian Blyth. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Brueggemann, Walter. 1 & 2 Kings. Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary. Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2000. Cohn, Robert L. Berit Olam: 2 Kings. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000. Eph’al, Israel. The City Besieged: Siege and Its Manifestations in the Ancient Near East. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 36. Leiden: Brill, 2009.

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Garroway, Kristine. “2 Kings 6:24–30: A Case of Unintentional Elimination Killing. Journal of Biblical Literature 137, no. 1 (2018): 53–70. Haas, Nigel. “Anthropological Observations on the Skeletal Remains Found in Area D (1962–3).” In Ashdod II–III: The Second and Third Seasons of Excavations, 1963, 1965, Soundings in 1967, edited by Walter E. Rast and M. Dothan, 212–14. Atiqot English Series 9–10. Jerusalem: Department of Antiquities and Museums in the Ministry of Education and Culture, 1971. Hens-Piazza, Gina. Lamentations. Wisdom Commentary, vol. 30, edited by Barbara E. Reid. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2017. Hens-Piazza, Gina. Nameless, Blameless, and Without Shame: Two Cannibal Mothers Before a King. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003. Hobbs, T. R. 2 Kings. Word Bible Commentary, vol. 13. Waco, TX: Word Books, 1995. Hurcombe, Linda M. Archaeological Artefacts as Material Culture. New York: Routledge, 2007. Lasine, Stuart. “Jehoram and the Cannibal Mothers (2 Kings 6:24–33): Solomon’s Judgment in an Inverted World.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 50 (1991): 27–53. Linafelt, Tod. Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Magdalene, F. Rachel. “Ancient Near Eastern Treaty-Curses.” In A Feminist Companion to the Latter Prophets, edited by Athalya Brenner. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield University Press, 1995, 326–52. McKenzie, Stephen L. 1 Kings 16–2 Kings 16. International Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2019. Nelson, Richard D. First and Second Kings. Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012. Obeyesekere, Gananath. Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Pritchard, James B., editor. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Related to the Old Testament (ANET). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950. Reeder, Caryn A. “Pity the Women and Children: Punishment by Siege in Josephus’ The Jewish War.” Journal for the Study of Judaism 44 (2013): 174–94. Sanday, Peggy Reeves. Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Schutt, Bill. Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2017. Streck, Maximilian. Assurbanipal und die letzten assyrischen Könige bis zum Untergange Niniveh’s, II. Teil: Texte: die Inschriften Assurbanipals und der letzten assyrischen Könige. Liepzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1916. Sweeney, Marvin A. I & II Kings: A Commentary. 1st ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007. Tufnell, Olga. The Iron Age. Vol. 3 of Lachish [Tell ed-Duweir]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953. Winlock, H. E. Excavations at Deir El Bahri (1911–1931). New York: MacMillan Company, 1942.

Chapter 4

Material Expression and Mantic Performance An Examination of Women’s Religious Experience at the Time of Josiah Amanda Colleen Brown

In antiquity, the practice of weaving was synonymous with womanhood. As an industry exceeded in importance only by agriculture, weaving represented women’s chief economic contribution to society.1 Naturally, such a universally requisite skill also manifested within the realm of religion, where it enabled and fostered belief through material expression.2 While weavers in the ancient Near East most commonly wove everyday wares, some weavers could assert skills originally attained for their household and commercial livelihood and repurpose them toward ritual use. In ancient Israel, national religious expression underwent significant structural upheaval and minimization through Josiah’s aniconic cult reformation, which favored those who created and curated texts.3 This reformation included new prohibitions against rituals that required fabric production: “He [Josiah] broke down the houses of the consecrated men that were in the house of YHWH where the women wove linen garments for Asherah” (2 Kings 23:7). Women who had previously woven for Asherah, an authorized cult activity, were now prohibited from their former pursuit. This abrupt cessation is particularly poignant when contrasted with the immaterial expression of Huldah’s prophetic pronouncement that validated the reform (2 Kings 22:15–20).4 As the prophetess who authenticates the sêp̄er hatōrāh (Book of the Law), Huldah represents the new orthodox religion, and as a woman, she functions as the ambassador for women’s religion. When read with these considerations, the women weavers’ sudden stance outside of their religion’s new orthodoxy is apparent and highlights the unease between material and metaphysical religious expression in Israelite religion at this time. 71

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I will first discuss the archaeological record’s attestations for cult weavers and their handiwork, then comment upon both weaving and the relationship between the asherah cult object and YHWH at the time of Josiah’s reign (640–609 BCE), and finally remark on the text’s perspective regarding material and scribal approaches to worship. Skilled women within the cult could worship through both material expression and their own accomplished dexterity in weaving for the asherah cult object. Examining their contributions to the cult, the subsequent restrictions on their activity, and how women’s religious weaving compares to more metaphysical forms of worship yields a deeper understanding of the religious expression once experienced by women in antiquity and the losses it sustained from an iconoclastic reformation. FROM FIBER TO ARTICLE The complexities of textile production attest to the advanced skills of antiquity’s weavers. The basic steps of fiber preparation were stretching, spinning, twisting, making the yarn, entwining, weaving, and folding.5 Loose fibers first underwent various straightening or stretching processes in preparation for spinning.6 Women used spindles of varying shapes and materials7 to spin fibers together into one continuous skein of thread, an endeavor that ranged in difficulty according to the fiber.8 The number and pattern of the weft and warp threads determined the intricacy and design of the cloth. The final product was then set against a pattern, cut out, sewn, and tailored to the intended person or object. Since weaving was women’s chief economic endeavor, all social classes would have known the fundamentals of spinning and weaving and would at times participate in an item’s production together.9 Cloth produced on looms in private households usually covered the unit’s basic needs, whereas production efforts for the larger demands of the community would have been sourced to local textile workshops or, for the elite, to urban complexes of professional weavers that specialized in rare fabrics and dyes.10 SANCTUARY WEAVERS The identity of the ancient Near Eastern weavers who applied their craft to the manufacturing of sacred paraphernalia is broadly unknown. According to Mesopotamian palace and temple records, both men and women worked in textile production capacities, the gender ratio substantially depending on the empire and period.11 At smaller cult sites in the Southern Levant, women pilgrims may have offered obeisance through leaving a piece of fabric on a cult

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object while visiting a sanctuary.12 The best example of a woman weaving for a sanctuary in the Hebrew Bible is Hannah’s sewing of a coat for her son, Samuel, and delivering it to him at Shiloh during her family’s annual pilgrimage (1 Sam. 2:18–20). Ackerman posits that the coat was one of Samuel’s priestly vestments.13 Exodus outlines the desired characteristics of weavers responsible for creating priestly vestments, describing them as they “who are wise of heart, whom I endowed with the spirit of wisdom” (Exod. 28:3). This phrasing highlights the place for talented individuals who wove as part of their religious expression at the divine figure’s dwelling place. Remnants of the work, and the workshops that produced it, flesh out details that formal records do not. Textual and archaeological evidence attests that workshops within religious compounds “prepared their own textiles for autonomous consumption.”14 The natural demand for sacred accouterments would have required a level of moderate production connected to each cult site. Documents throughout the ancient Near East suggest that some temples supported relatively large textile operations to generate money for the precinct, thus contributing to the larger cult economy.15 The preparation of items required for sanctuary operations involved immense knowledge of fabric properties, skill at dyeing, and expertise concerning a variety of fibers of the highest quality.16 Sanctuary weavers also would have been required to demonstrate proficiency with specialty fabrics forbidden to the general population (Lev. 19:19; Deut. 22:2–11). Wool, flax, and, less commonly, goat’s hair were naturally occurring substances in Israel and played a role in community and sanctuary operations. The elite wore linen, and commoners wore wool; tents and similar industrial items were fashioned from coarse fabric produced from goat’s wool.17 In Israel, the priests wore linen and girdles of sha’atnez (a wool-and-linen blend), and the high priest’s attire contained three additional garments from the fabric.18 The sanctuary would have required, produced, and prepared fabric “as offerings, as attire for the deities, as furniture or decoration in the sanctuaries, and as priestly vestments.”19 Regulations prohibited service by improperly attired priests, as without the correct garments, they approached the deity as “strangers” and thereby desecrated the rituals and space (cf. Exod. 28:43).20 Moreover, the proper garments would have guarded against the life-threatening gaze of the deity to whom the priests had pledged service, additionally protecting those involved in administering the cult, and the people who worshipped there, from divine wrath.21 The high priest’s ensemble consisted of a tunic, pants, turban, belt, breastplate, ephod, robe, and crown (Exod. 28:4). Details of these prescribed items included semiprecious stones and materials of gold, blue, purple, crimson, and white. Pomegranates made of crimson yarn were spaced between golden

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bells along the hem of the high priest’s robe, indicating the need for skilled needleworkers in the production process. Visually recognizable authority during ritual performance also affected the construction of priestly clothing, necessitating that each piece undergo tailoring.22 Specifications in clothing of the priestly class are not a unique feature of Israelite religion. Priestly vestments in Egypt also required specialty fabrics,23 and while wool was a more durable fiber accessible in Mesopotamia, linen garments likewise distinguished the region’s priests.24 These details of priestly dress, painstakingly created and curated by the weavers and cult officials, served as a “hallmark of holiness” for those officiating in the temple precincts.25 In addition to liturgical clothing, ancient Near Eastern texts document that the rituals and gods themselves could require cloth items during a ceremony’s execution.26 For example, the Babylonian Mis Pî (mouth-washing) ritual specified the color and type of cloth for use before the cult image at different stages of the ritual that prepared the newly fashioned image for divine habitation.27 This process ritually enlivened the image after its creation. Without the specified style and color of fabric, the ritual could not transform the physical cult image into a host for the divine essence, demonstrating how color and type of fabric could legitimize ritual action. WEAVING’S CONNECTION TO A FEMALE DEITY Given women’s strong ties to familial textile production, an association between a female deity and weaving in several ancient Near Eastern cultures should not be a surprise. Egypt’s goddess Tait curated the linens used for the embalming, mummification, and afterlife processes, as well as the clothing of dead kings and idols.28 More famously, Athena cursed Arachne for boasting that her weaving was superior to that of the goddess, and both the name of the Sumerian patron Goddess Uttu and the word for spider used the goddess’s logogram, conjuring the shared image of spinning.29 In a passage in which ʾAṯiratu (Asherah) undertakes common domestic tasks, the Baal epic portrays her holding a spindle and distaff, a unique scene within the collection.30 The passage reads “She has taken her spindle [in hand] / a spindle befitting her high station in her right hand.”31 Additionally, in some translations of the Hittite Elkunirsa Myth, Asherah tries to stab Baal with her spindle after he refuses to sleep with her.32 While these depictions connect Asherah to weaving, Israelite literature and archaeological sites do not definitively substantiate a similar connection.33 This is not to say that lack of archaeological or textual evidence totally precludes a connection between Asherah and weavers, but merely that these fragmentary records do not preserve a connection between the two.

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SITES Several cult sites in the Levant illuminate the production and scope of weaving. While these sites span several centuries and none is in Jerusalem itself, significant finds at each site establish a cohesive and continuous portrait of the work produced by sanctuary weavers in the region. Since the climate is unsuitable for textile preservation, archaeologists must rely on other, more durable findings to inform their understanding of the ancient textile process.34 Loom weights, a substantial feature of the standard loom in the Levant, are common at sites dating from the Iron Age to the Roman era35 and are reliable archaeological indicators of localized general textile production activity.36 Most often made of clay in varying styles, shapes, and weight,37 loom weights were attached to warp (vertical) threads to stretch them taut, then the weft (horizontal) threads were threaded through the warp threads (figures 4.1 and 4.2).38 This practice created a tightly woven product on the warp-weighted loom.39 When discovered in close proximity to loci of a sanctuary, loom weights can provide data concerning the textile production scale at a specific complex. These, in addition to surviving fiber fragments, provide a glimpse into a material element of religious activity in weaving for the cult.

Figure 4.1  Loom Weight, Ca. 1295–1070 BCE, Egypt. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Figure 4.2  Loom Weight and String, Ca. 1295–1070 BCE, Egypt. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Kuntillet ‘Ajrud Kuntillet ‘Ajrud was an active outpost in Northeastern Sinai under the protection of the Kingdom of Israel.40 Situated near the Darb el-Ghazza, and at a junction connecting Philistia to the Gulf of Eilat, Jeroboam II of Israel (787–748 BCE) may have built the state-run caravanserai and attached sanctuary complex.41 The site is best known for two pithoi (storage jars) that bear what were probably practice sketches intended for a larger mural. Some of the sketches are political, while others bear protective religious motifs.42 Amid the several figures intended to evoke divine protection,43 two inscriptions (ca. 800 BCE) invoke the divine blessing of lYHWH šmru wl’šrth, (YHWH of Samaria and his/its Asherah).44 More relevant to the subject of weaving in religious contexts is the evidence found in Kuntillet ‘Ajrud’s main religious feature, the small Benchroom that consisted of plastered benches for offerings and “special dedicatory objects.”45 The Bench-room excavation produced about twenty fragile, donutshaped loom weights, and scholars assume a larger number once existed. The precinct’s western storeroom held eleven loom weights and what is possibly a wooden beam from a loom, and the southern storeroom held five more loom weights, wood fragments, and individual threads. These discoveries attest to textile production within the sanctuary’s precinct.46 Archaeologists also found 120 textile fragments measuring between 5 and 50 centimeters.47 Of these fragments, 106 were linen that was probably imported, given the inhospitable flax-culturation environment;48 11 were

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wool; and 3 consisted of a linen-and-wool blend. While linen was not forbidden to Israel’s upper echelons of society, only priests wore garments of a wool-and-linen blend, called sha’atnez (Exod. 28:6, 8, 15 and 39:29).49 Of the three sha’atnez fragments, one contained red wool and blue linen threads, possibly relating to the high priest’s vestments (Exod. 28:2–43).50 In an effort to link this site with the activity described in 2 Kings 23:7b, a scholar has speculated that these sha’atnez fragments were once offerings, produced by worshippers to adorn a sacred tree or wooden icon representative of Asherah.51 The architectural space, the sha’atnez fragments, and the inscribed folk blessings all denote a sanctuary and a small-scale weaving production adjoined to it that would have employed expert workmen and women.52 Kadesh Barnea Related to Kuntillet ‘Ajrud’s sanctuary is the Iron Age II Kadesh Barnea and its fifty-one linen textile fragments, the largest measuring 8 × 10 centimeters. Z. Meshel underscores that this strategically valuable fortress in the Southern Levant would almost certainly have supported a small contingent of priests, who needed vestments to run the site’s shrine properly. Therefore, the imported linen fragments found at the site should be connected to the cult activity that most likely occurred there.53 Tel eṣ-Ṣafî/Gath Archaeologists unearthed three extremely fragile loom weights in a small storage room north of the temple that dates from the eleventh to end of the tenth century BCE at this Philistine city in the Shephelah (figure 4.3). The activity amount evinces a small-scale textile operation, supplying sanctuary demands.54 Additionally, the ninth-century stratum shows growth in this locus’s textile production. The 110 spherical loom weights discovered five meters from the room that housed the two-horned altar (figure 4.4) are all uniform in shape and size, suggesting that they were a set, created to produce the same type and quality of fabric. Such a set points to an expanded workshop equipped to produce specific items on an industrial scale for cult or community.55 Other Significant Discoveries In addition to the previously mentioned sites, other discoveries in the Levant fill in the picture of the region’s cult weaving. The Philistine Tel MiqneEkron shrine held twenty-seven loom weights dating to the eleventh century BCE. Tel Qasile’s eleventh-century stratum rendered similar findings.56

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Figure 4.3  Loom Weights Found In Situ in 2012, Five Meters from the Two-Horned Alter in Area D, Tel eṣ-Ṣafî/Gath. Source: Jeffrey R. Chadwick, used with permission of the Tel eṣ-Ṣafî/Gath Archaeological Project in Israel.

Looking to Jordan, Moab’s Khirbet al-Mudayna,57 Deir El ‘Alla, and Tel Abu Sarbut boast similar finds.58 Tel Ta’anach’s main religious precinct (dating to the tenth century) bears evidence of several ritual activities, including matzebot (standing stones), low benches for votive offerings, and the bones of animals most likely used in extispicy rites (a divinatory practice wherein the priest divined the will of the gods from anomalies in animal entrails). The site’s cult structure also contained between fifty-eight and sixty-two loom weights and several spindle whorls, demonstrating that cult textile production was active at this site.59 Finally, a Megiddo cult room revealed loom weights among other religious paraphernalia, such as sheep and goat astragali (ankle bones), strongly pointing to the existence of a textile workshop that supplied the sanctuary.60 These discoveries and those at Tel Ta’anach are contemporaries. From the site data, apparent, if fragmented, evidence for cult weavers throughout the Levant survives. While none of the sites previously mentioned is specifically Judahite, the surrounding archaeological evidence for weaving in connection to places of worship is compelling. Variances in production level from site to site and limited remains can provide only a general view into this aspect of material religion. However, the quality of work and scale

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Figure 4.4  Two-Horned Altar Found In Situ in 2011 in the Lower North City Area of Tel eṣ-Ṣafî/Gath. Source: Jeffrey R. Chadwick, used with permission of the Tel eṣ-Ṣafî/Gath Archaeological Project in Israel.

of the different operations can provide data as a whole and can critique the Hebrew Bible texts mentioning the practice. WOMEN WEAVERS, ASHERAH, AND THE JERUSALEM TEMPLE Whereas archaeological sites throughout the region attest to weaving in cult spaces, 2 Kings 23:7b records the only extant documentation regarding the Jerusalem temple’s workshop at the time of Josiah. The verse reads: “He [Josiah] broke down the houses of the consecrated men that were in the house of YHWH where the women wove linen garments for Asherah.”61 While the activity’s censorship is the primary focus of the scripture, at the passage’s core the reader encounters women engaging in weaving for the asherah cult object in the Jerusalem temple. The ritual object’s inceptive position and inclusion at the Jerusalem temple requires an analysis of its integral effect upon women’s worship. Identifying the goddess Asherah’s position within Israelite popular religion and within the Jerusalem cult proves tricky, as popular religious practices (i.e., libation offerings to ancestors, domestic rituals utilizing pillar figurines, etc.) most likely did not intersect with state cult

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rites (figure 4.5).62 The goddess’s development and ultimate sublimation also factor into constructing an accurate picture of her role and prominence in Jerusalem during the Divided Monarchic period. The Hebrew Bible alludes to and polemicizes Asherah, asherim, and the asherah cult object in forty passages. Asherah refers to the goddess, the wife of YHWH; asherim functioned in a capacity underneath trees at high places; and the asherah cult object was a wooden representation of a tree situated next to a sanctuary altar. These objects’ appearance, specific placement, representation, and function are not specified by the Hebrew Bible.63

Figure 4.5  Pillar Figurine Ca. 8th–7th Century BCE, Lachish. One manifestation of women’s popular religion, aspects of this nude female figurine’s form and function may have derived characteristics from Asherah worship before the Divided Monarchy. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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However, popular textual and iconographic evidence leads to the conclusion that Asherah was once an accepted figure within all strata of Israelite religion and that the passages polemicizing the goddess and these related objects were glosses or retrojections on the original historical reality.64 While many of these objects’ specifics are hypotheses awaiting conclusive data, a basic understanding of their place and function before Josiah’s reformation is tenable. While Asherah once was the consort of YHWH, the goddess, as an anthropomorphic image, would have begun to cede autonomy from the tenth to the eighth centuries BCE. As the state cult’s theology shifted to monolatry (worship of one God) and further developed into monotheism (the claim that only one God exists),65 the goddess Asherah would have lost all independent blessing and revelatory powers, her symbols instead representing YHWH’s powers of blessing until they were prohibited altogether.66 By Josiah’s reign, a theological development spearheaded by the Deuteronomists reached its apex, permanently altering the state cult’s approach to popular, syncretized religious symbols (figure 4.6). At the time, these popular symbols stood as recast images for YHWH. Regarding the asherah cult symbol, the goddess it once represented would have virtually disappeared as an individual entity before Josiah’s reform.67 It is also important to remember that the disappearance of the goddess’s individuality from her cult representation should not be unilaterally viewed as a disguise crafted by those who still secretly worshipped her. Instead, such activity marks the development of Yahwistic religion and highlights God’s ability to absorb characteristics of separate deities into his own cult.68 While there is little evidence for a patron bond between the weavers and Asherah, the text of 2 Kings 23:7 specifies that the asherah cult object utilized women weavers. Even if cult practice had moved from worship of a full goddess to worship of a symbol of YHWH, women remained integral members of this rite’s operation.69 Josiah’s reform therefore directly affected women’s religious practice in this case. The reform turned what had once been an accepted women’s practice into an idolatrous act. This change was based on historical memory of the practice, not its development into the contemporary practice.70 HULDAH The prophetess Huldah, as the key figure in Josiah’s reformation and subsequently the entire Deuteronomistic movement,71 dominates the prophetic authentication of the book that incites and substantiates the reform theology detailed in 2 Kings 22 and 23. As a woman, as a prophet, and as the herald

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Figure 4.6  This Enthroned Canaanite Deity (Ca. 14th–13th BCE) Represents an Important Aspect of the Broader Culture from Which Israelite Aniconic Monotheism Developed. While small idols were routine aspects of religious expression in the pantheons of the ancient Near East, the Israelite iconoclastic reform and its reflected texts show the notable shift away from such expression under Josiah. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

of the new text and resultant reforms,72 Huldah stands in stark contrast to the women weavers’ connection to a cult relic. Huldah was the wife of Shallum, the “keeper of the garments,” or the curator of the temple vestments.73 Their son may have been Maaseiah, a keeper of the temple threshold (Jer. 35:4)—one who oversaw monetary contributions to the temple and later removed the idolatrous objects from the temple in the reform.74 The scriptures mentioning Huldah and Maaseiah locate their residences in the mišněh (addition, or second quarter of the city), an Israelite refugee camp turned upscale neighborhood. Pinpointing Huldah in the mišněh

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indicates that she was probably descended from Northern Israel Levites who fled Assyrian deportation, eventually attaining influence at temple and court in Judah.75 Apart from her family connections,76 Huldah herself occupied a unique place within these institutions. Women in the temple generally assumed roles of cooking cultic meals and weaving vestments. These positions were essential for the maintenance of the cult but were not specifically associated with its Levitical administrative responsibilities.77 Huldah’s position as prophetess crossed that boundary as she became what one scholar has termed “the most powerful Deuteronomic prophet of her day,”78 authorized to speak for the national deity, a right traditionally associated with, though not always exclusive to, men.79 Adding to Huldah’s uniqueness, her contribution to the Jerusalem temple was selectively endowed by deity rather than crafted through aptitude for a task.80 As a neḇî’āh (prophetess), Huldah could access divine knowledge, an ability that is always bestowed and controlled by the deity.81 There is some discussion over which deity Huldah spoke on behalf of—YHWH or Asherah. Although Huldah’s gender identifies her as an anomaly in the male-dominated world of Hebrew Bible prophets,82 her placement in 2 Kings 22 and 23 serves a specific function,83 and her familial connections to those who carried out the reforms evidence a strong connection to YHWH, not Asherah.84 At a time of impending radical social and political upheaval, where many personnel within the cult would lose status during the widespread restrictions, Huldah is the impetus for the reform’s propaganda and represents Yahwistic religion.85 Central to Huldah’s position, and Josiah’s reforms, is the discovery of the sêp̄er hatōrāh (Book of the Law).86 At the behest of King Josiah, Hilkiah, the high priest, brings the book to Huldah in a private meeting at her dwelling in the mišněh, a woman’s space, for prophetic authentication.87 She prophesies two distinct messages: the first warns of impending destruction upon Jerusalem because of the people’s idolatry; the second proclaims salvation for Josiah. Because of his penitence upon hearing the words of the sêp̄er hatōrāh, Josiah would avoid the destruction and be “gathered to [his] fathers in peace.”88 Peculiarly, the authority to authenticate the sêp̄er hatōrāh falls to a woman despite the activity of Jeremiah and Zephaniah, her male contemporaries.89 Huldah’s involvement in the public relations campaign at this critical juncture in the Deuteronomistic account is essential; therefore, explanations for it are legion. As a woman, she represented an element of society that traditionally loses authority under urban construction.90 The exploitation of her gender gave “voice to a theological template that justifies the silencing of the feminine aspect of deity.”91 Political positioning of the cult reforms under the guise of a woman’s voice also provided a dynamic of support to Josiah’s

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ensuing reformation.92 It is tempting to view Huldah as a woman compelled to align with and justify a patriarchal orthodoxy that silences the overtly feminine aspect of deity,93 but to do so denies her right to individual motivation and dismisses her status as oracle to the people.94 These proposals rely upon the premise that an interested group chose Huldah because of her sex95; however, I suggest a different reading. A critical reading of the text centers on Huldah’s gender, and she almost assuredly felt pressure from the parameters of a patriarchal culture. However, she also possessed an intrinsic connection to temple officials, the court, and the Deuteronomists, thereby making her suitable for the role of liaison among God, temple, court, and people in ushering in a reformation campaign. Her husband’s position as keeper of the wardrobe and curator of the textiles fashioned in the Jerusalem cult workshop engendered an inseparable connection with the cult weavers. Counterbalancing this, her status as prophetess set her apart from the weavers’ material religious expression. Instead of reading Huldah as the female alter ego of Jeremiah,96 who heralds the reform that drastically alters women’s worship, reading her as a woman tied to a group of women whose religious efforts are about to be dramatically altered provides nuance. This interpretation finds support in Judith McKinlay’s observation “faithful adherence to the written word of YHWH . . . demands . . . the rejection of certain cult economic structures and the socio-economic disempowering, marginalization, or expulsion of their practitioners from society.”97 If we interpret Huldah’s religious duties and expression as connected to, but the antithesis of, the women weavers’ adherence to the preservation and maintenance of cult objects, we can recognize a new level of disparity in the reforms Huldah promoted and their effect on many of the temple practitioners’ lives and stations. Huldah’s prophetic authority stands in tension with the status and activity of the women weavers and many others whose work fell to the reformation. Connected to material religious practices through her husband’s position, and yet herself devoted to a nonmaterial form of expression, Huldah’s position lends legitimacy and sanctity to a newly discovered text and the cult’s consequent iconoclastic reforms. Accordingly, the tension between a material religion and its move to textual veneration as a heightened form of religious expression requires a figure who links both realms to champion a religious restructuring. Huldah, in backing these reforms, also champions her own form of worship. In the aftermath, she presumably continues to prophesy within the cult, her husband still curating the temple vestments, while there are fewer positions for both women and men who wish to participate within the cult without divinatory or scribal authority.98 This is centrally indicative of the

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Deuteronomic reform, as shutting down the bāmôt (high places) across Judah reduced the number of Levites needed to staff sanctuaries. CONCLUSION Weaving requires immense skill and provided women in Jerusalem a way to contribute to male-dominated religious traditions. Evidence in the form of loom weights and textile fragments spanning several centuries of the region’s history, along with connections from surrounding cultures, creates a general picture of the cloth-production capacity and structure at certain cult sites, as well as the grade of materials used in said production. The fine quality of the fragments and the quantity and location of loom weights provide insight into the religious enterprise of these individuals as they worked in dedication to the running and beautification of the site to which they were connected. At the time of Josiah’s reformation, the women weavers for the asherah cult object, a main feature of the Jerusalem temple at the time, lost an integral aspect of their artistry and worship. As the cult transitioned from its earlier focus on material worship to forms that placed greater emphasis on mantic and scribal pursuits, regulations and limitations for artisans in Judah made their activities synonymous with idolatry. In contrast, Huldah, endowed with mantic abilities, heralded the reforms, seemingly providing women a greater voice within a traditionally maledominant domain. Yet Huldah’s connection to women weavers highlights the disparity the reforms enacted between women involved in material practices and those few who could contribute through divination. While the theology of the reform accepted one, it regulated the other to discontinue what was now defined as an idolatrous practice, even though asherah-clothing had hitherto held authorization and status. While the weavers’ looms were by no means empty, as the remaining, male-dominated practices and cult renovation still needed cloth, the reforms did silence women’s religious devotion to an object that evoked the female aspects of deity and dismantled the physical spaces where women had previously performed their weaving service. Speaking broadly, the Deuteronomic shift from material religious practices to scribalism, prophecy, and veneration of the sêp̄er hatōrāh largely limited opportunities for those women and men who possessed skills to worship and gain status within the cult community. By imposing strict regulations and emphasizing scribal writings over icons and their symbols, Josiah’s reform suppressed an integral part of women’s material religious expression in ancient Israelite religion.

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NOTES 1. Romina Laurito, Cristina Lemorini, and Assunta Perilli, “Making Textiles at Arslantepe, Turkey, in the 4th and 3rd Millennia BC: Archaeological Data and Experimental Archaeology,” in Wool Economy in the Ancient Near East and Aegean: From the Beginnings of Sheep Husbandry to Institutional Textile Industry, ed. Catherine Breniquet and Cécile Michel (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014), 153; Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager, Life in Biblical Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 146. 2. Francesca Stavrakopoulou, “Materialist Reading: Materialism, Materiality, and Biblical Cults of Writing,” in Biblical Interpretation and Method: Essays in Honor of John Barton, ed. Katharine J. Dell and Paul M. Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 227. 3. Stavrakopoulou correctly emphasizes the materiality of the Book of the Law, arguing that Josiah’s aniconic reformation did not abandon religious materiality for scribalism but transferred the Divine Power from one material object to another. This decision’s ramifications deeply affected the creators and curators of religious objects in the cult. Whereas weavers and craftsmen had once substantially contributed, now scribes, priests, kings, and, in my estimation, prophets gained power and control in matters of sanctuary operations. Stavrakopoulou, “Materialist Reading,” 233. 4. 2 Chronicles 34 records Huldah’s prophecy and Josiah’s reformation as well; however, I am exclusively referring to the 2 Kings account as it is the older of the two and reflects Deuteronomistic theology. 5. Valérie Matoïan et al., “Wool Production and Economy at Ugarit,” in Wool Economy in the Ancient Near East, 316. 6. Catherine Breniquet, “The Archaeology of Wool in Early Mesopotamia, Sources, Methods, Perspectives,” in Wool Economy in the Ancient Near East, 52–78. 7. Common spindle whorl materials included clay, stone, and bone. See Matoïan et al., “Wool Production,” 160. 8. Breniquet, “Archaeology of Wool,” 67. 9. Patricia Wattenmaker, “Craft Production and Social Identity in Northwest Mesopotamia,” Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 8, no. 1 (1998): 47–55; Louise Quillien, “Invisible Workers: The Role of Women in Textile Production during the 1st Millennium BC,” ed. Cécile Michel and Brigitte Lion (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 320. 10. A. Leo Oppenheim, The Golden Garments of the Gods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 54. 11. For a thorough examination of Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian palace and temple weaving records, see Quillien, “Invisible Workers,” 313–24. 12. Nadav Na’aman and Nurit Lissovsky, “Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, Sacred Trees and the Asherah,” Tel Aviv 35, no. 2 (2008): 186–208. 13. Susan Ackerman, “Household Religion, Family Religion, and Women’s Religion in Ancient Israel,” Household and Family Religion in Antiquity, ed. John Bodel and Saul M. Olyan (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 147–48.

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14. Deborah Cassuto, “Modes of Textile Production in Cultic Contexts in the Iron Age Southern Levant: The Finds from Tell Eṣ-Ṣafî/Gath,” in Textiles and Cult in the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. Cecilie Brøns and Marie-Louise Nosch (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017), 325. 15. Cassuto, “Modes of Textile Production,” 325; Orit Shamir, “Textiles, Loom Weights and Spindle Whorls,” in Excavations at Kadesh Barnea (Tell El-Qudeirat) 1976–1982, ed. Rudolph Cohen and Hannah Bernick-Greenberg, Part 1 of Israel Antiquities Authority Reports 34 (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2007), 343; Quillien, “Invisible Workers,” vol. 13, 313–24. 16. King and Stager, Life in Biblical Israel, 150. 17. King and Stager, Life in Biblical Israel, 147, 150–51. 18. Orit Shamir, “The High Priest’s Garments of Mixed Wool and Linen (Sha’atnez) Compared to Textiles Found in the Land of Israel,” in Textiles and Cult in the Ancient Mediterranean, 345. 19. Cassuto, “Modes of Textile Production,” 316. 20. Susan Ackerman, “Asherah, the West Semitic Goddess of Spinning and Weaving?,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 67, no. 1 (2008): 1–30; Shamir, “High Priest’s Garments,” 345. 21. Francesca Stavrakopoulou, “The Prophet Huldah and the Stuff of State,” in Enemies and Friends of the State: Ancient Prophecy in Context, ed. Chris A. Rollston (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2018), 289–90. 22. Shamir, “High Priest’s Garments,” 345. 23. Shamir, “High Priest’s Garments,” 343. 24. Shamir, “High Priest’s Garments,” 345; Breniquet, “Archaeology of Wool,” 55. 25. King and Stager, Life in Biblical Israel, 150. 26. Ackerman, “Asherah,” 18; Quillien, “Invisible Workers,” 317. 27. ETANA, “Mouth-Washing Ritual for a Cult Statue” n.d., http://etana​.org​/node​ /580; Michael B. Dick and Christopher Walker, “The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian Mīs Pî Ritual,” in Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 1999), 70. 28. Ackerman, “Asherah,” 3, 4. 29. Ackerman, “Asherah,” 3. 30. Ackerman, “Asherah,” 9, 10; Tilde Binger, Asherah: Goddesses in Ugarit, Israel and the Old Testament (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 68–72. 31. William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger, Jr. The Context of Scripture, Volume 1, Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 257. 32. Ackerman, “Asherah,” 8. 33. Ackerman, “Asherah,” 19. 34. Jeannette H. Boertien, “Weaving at Tell Mazar; The Loomweights,” in Tell El-Mazar II. Excavations on the Mound 1977–1981, Field I, ed. K. Yassine and E. Van der Steen, (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2012), 63–78; King and Stager, Life in Biblical Israel, 316.

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35. Jeannette H. Boertien, “Asherah and Textiles,” Biblische Notizen 134 (2007): 134; Cassuto, “Modes of Textile Production,” 316. 36. Avigail Sheffer and Amalia Tidhar, “‫ טקסטילים ומוצרי קליעה מכונתילת עג’רוד‬/ Textiles and Basketry at Kuntillat ‘Ajrud,” Atiqot 20 )1991(: 20 ‫ ;עתיקות‬Cassuto, “Modes of Textile Production,” 315–16. 37. While unfired clay loom weights are most common, they could also be made from gypsum, alabaster, and limestone. Loom weights appear in a variety of styles, sizes, and shapes. These include conical, pyramidal (round base and square base), anchor, square, doughnut, wheel, spherical, and cylindrical. See Boertien, “Weaving at Tell Mazar,” 60–64. 38. Boertien, “Weaving at Tell Mazar,” 54. 39. Jeannette H. Boertien, “Unravelling the Fabric: Textile Production in Iron Age Transjordan” (Groningen, NL: Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 2013), 69, 70. 40. Tallay Ornan, “Sketches and Final Works of Art: The Drawings and Wall Paintings of Kuntillet ‘Ajrud Revisited,” Tel Aviv 43, no. 1 (2016): 22. 41. Shamir, “High Priest’s Garments,” 339; Na’aman and Lissovsky, “Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, Sacred Trees and the Asherah,” 187–89. 42. Ornan, “Sketches and Final Works of Art,” 6. 43. Oppenheim, Golden Garments, 178. 44. Graham I. Davies et al., Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions: Corpus and Concordance (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 80. Whether Asherah in this instance is a proper noun referring to a goddess or a cult object associated with YHWH is debatable and largely depends on reading the final heh as a proper ending or as a pronominal suffix. If taken as an indication of the already occurring sublimation of the goddess’s characteristics into the Yahwistic cult, corroboration for the goddess’s presence, embodied in the asherah cult object in the Jerusalem temple, can be taken from this site. For our purposes, an acknowledged evolution regarding Asherah worship early in the development of Israelite theology suffices. For this proposal’s argument and counterargument, see Brian Arthur Mastin, “Yahweh’s Asherah, Inclusive Monotheism and the Question of Dating,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series (2004): 328; Judith M. Hadley, The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah: Evidence for a Hebrew Goddess, vol. 57 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 104. 45. Shamir, “High Priest’s Garments,” 339. 46. Sheffer and Tidhar, “Textiles and Basketry,” 3, 14; Shamir, “High Priest’s,” 343; Cassuto, “Modes of Textile Production,” 317. 47. Sheffer and Tidhar, “Textiles and Basketry,” 1. 48. Shamir, “High Priest’s Garments,” 341. 49. Shamir, “High Priest’s Garments,” 343, 45. 50. Shamir, “High Priest’s Garments,” 343; King and Stager, Life in Biblical Israel, 151. 51. Na’aman and Lissovsky, “Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, Sacred Trees and the Asherah,” 200. 52. Shamir, “High Priest’s Garments,” 340. 53. Shamir, “High Priest’s Garments,” 343, 44. 54. Cassuto, “Modes of Textile Production,” 315, 16.

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55. Cassuto, “Modes of Textile Production,” 321, 325. 56. Cassuto, “Modes of Textile Production,” 319. 57. Cassuto, “Modes of Textile Production,” 317. 58. Shamir, “High Priest’s Garments,” 341. 59. Ackerman, “Asherah,” 20, 21; Lawrence E. Stager and Samuel R. Wolff, “Production and Commerce in Temple Courtyards: An Olive Press in the Sacred Precinct at Tel Dan,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 243, no. 1 (1981): 95–102. 60. King, Life in Biblical Israel, 157. 61. Akkadian cognates to haqědēšīm (commonly translated as “male cult prostitutes”) reflect that the word should be rendered as “persons set apart for specific ritual activity.” Additionally, while bāttîm (houses) technically appears in the verse twice, Oppenheim proposd that the second bāttîm is really baddîm (linen garments); Stager and Wolff, “Production and Commerce,” 95–102, note 5. Joan Goodnick Westenholz, “Tamar, Qĕdēšā, Qadištu, and Sacred Prostitution in Mesopotamia,” Harvard Theological Review 82, no. 3 (1989): 245–66; William G. Dever, “The Silence of the Text: An Archaeological Commentary on 2 Kings 23,” in Scripture and Other Artifacts: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Honor of Philip J. King, ed. Michael D. Coogan, J. Cheryl Exum, and Lawrence Stager (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 143–68. 62. See Smith’s succinct discussion on Asherah’s connection to YHWH and popular religion in Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 108–11. 63. For a discussion on the iconographic and textual limitations a reconstruction of Asherah and the asherah cult object pose, see Steve A. Wiggins, “The Myth of Asherah: Lion Lady and Serpent Goddess,” Ugaritforschungen 23 (1991): 383–94, and Steve Wiggins, “Of Asherahs and Trees: Some Methodological Questions,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religion 1, no. 1 (2001): 158–87. 64. Smith, Early History of God, 109, 110, 127. 65. Maura Sala, “Beyond Dagon: Resilience and Entanglement of Canaanite Backgrounds in Sacred Buildings and Cult Practices of Iron Age Philistia,” in Tell It in Gath: Studies in the History and Archaeology of Israel: Essays in Honor of Aren M. Maeir on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Louise Hitchcock, Amit Dagan, and Chris McKinny, Ägypten Und Altes Testament 90 (Münster: Zaphon, 2018), 352–74; Mark S. Smith, “The Blessing God and Goddess: A Longitudinal View from Ugarit to ‘Yahweh and . . . His Asherah’ at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud,” in Enigmas and Images: Studies in Honor of Tryggve ND Mettinger, ed. Eidevall Göran and Blaženka Scheuer (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 213–26. 66. Othmar Keel and Christoph Uehlinger, eds., Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Bloomsbury, 1998), 149; Ross Shepherd Kraemer, “Gender,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Mediterranean Religions, ed. Barbette Stanley Spaeth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 296. For an evaluation of the merits of the asherah cult object’s connection to divination and blessing, see Smith, Early History of God, 115–18. 67. Smith, “Blessing God and Goddess,” 217.

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68. Joan E. Taylor, “The Asherah, the Menorah and the Sacred Tree,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 20, no. 66 (1995): 51. 69. Quillien details the lack of women’s recorded roles in Neo-Babylonian idol vestment production, which contextualizes the significance of women weavers for the asherah cult object in the Jerusalem Temple. See Quillien, “Invisible Workers,” vol. 13, 317–19. 70. Diana Vikander Edelman, “Huldah the Prophet—of Yahweh or Asherah?,” in A Feminist Companion to Samuel and Kings, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 245; Kraemer, “Gender,” 296. Josiah’s reforms shifted many formerly accepted cult practices into idolatry, dramatically altering women’s religious expression. For a detailed analysis, see Ackerman, “Household Religion,” 127–58. 71. Tal Ilan, “Huldah, the Deuteronomic Prophetess of the Book of Kings,” Lectio Difficilior 1, no. 2010 (2010): 208. Edelman argues that Huldah’s prophetic phrasing closely echoes the phrasing and ideas of Jeremiah. While her argument is compelling, the integral nature of Huldah’s prophecy to the Deuteronomistic narrative in 2 Kings negates much of this proposal’s value in my mind. See Edelman, “Huldah the Prophet,” 235. For a thorough examination of the relationship between the Deuteronomists and Jeremiah, see Carolyn Sharp, Prophecy and Ideology in Jeremiah: Struggles for Authority in the Deutero-Jeremianic Prose (Devon, UK: A&C Black, 2003). 72. Sheffer and Tidhar, “‫ טקסטילים ומוצרי קליעה מכונתילת עג’רוד‬/ Textiles and Basketry,” 1. Some scholars have seen the sêp̄er hatōrāh as a divine oracle for the king’s ensuing actions, and ancient Near-Eastern tradition corroborates this viewpoint. However, Josiah’s immediate consultation of the prophetess indicates that she is the reformation flashpoint. See Jonathan Ben-Dov, “Writing as Oracle and as Law: New Contexts for the Book-Find of King Josiah,” Journal of Biblical Literature 127, no. 2 (2008): 223–39. 73. Providing more detail on this position, 2 Kings 10:22 references a keeper of the wardrobe at the Samarian temple of Baal, who oversaw and supplied the priestly vestments. Stavrakopoulou, “Prophet Huldah,” 289. 74. Susan Ackerman, “Why Is Miriam Also among the Prophets? (And Is Zipporah among the Priests?),” Journal of Biblical Literature 121, no. 1 (2002): 58n31; Ilan, “Huldah,” 7. The keeper of the threshold oversaw the collection of money from worshippers. Shaphan instructed Hilkiah to count the collected money and use the collection for repairs, inadvertently bringing about the discovery of the sêp̄er hatōrāh. Later, the task of removing the idolatrous items associated with Baal and Asherah falls to the Keeper of the Threshold. See, James K Aitken and Hilary Marlow, The City in the Hebrew Bible: Critical, Literary and Exegetical Approaches, 2020, 43–45. 75. Nahman Avigad, Discovering Jerusalem (Nashville: T. Nelson, 1983), 54. 76. Gerda De Villiers, “Where Did She Come From, and Where Did She Go To? (The Queen of Heaven in Jeremiah 7 and 44),” Old Testament Essays 15, no. 3 (2002): 620–27. 77. Phyllis A. Bird, “Images of Women in the Old Testament,” in The Bible and Liberation: Political and Social Hermeneutics, ed. Norman K. Gottwald (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983): 252–88.

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78. Ilan, “Huldah, the Deuteronomic Prophetess,” 207. 79. Despite the predilection for male-deity alignment in Israelite and wider ancient Near-Eastern prophecy, Mesopotamian records show that male gods could use female oracles. Thus, there may have been more prophetesses in ancient Israel than the Hebrew Bible records. See Jonathan Stökl, “Ištar’s Women, YHWH’s Men? A Curious Gender-Bias in Neo-Assyrian and Biblical Prophecy,” Z. Für Alttestamentliche Wiss. 121, no. 1 (2009): 87–100; Blaženka Scheuer, “Huldah: A Cunning Career Woman?” in Prophecy and Prophets in Stories, ed. Bob Becking and Hans Barstad (Leiden: Brill, 2015): 104–23. 80. Ilan, “Huldah, the Deuteronomic Prophetess,” 210. 81. Martti Nissinen, “Gender and Prophetic Agency in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean and in Greece,” in Prophets Male and Female: Gender and Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Ancient Near East, vol. 15, ed. Jonathan Stökl and Corrine L. Carvalho, (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2013), 44. 82. Ackerman, “Why Is Miriam?” 50, 51. 83. Esther J. Hamori, “The Prophet and the Necromancer: Women’s Divination for Kings,” Journal of Biblical Literature (2013): 827–43. 84. The argument in favor of Asherah as Huldah’s divine patroness reads Huldah’s prophecy in 2 Kings 22:15–20 as a thorough reworking of the original prophecy by a post-exilic Deuteronomistic historian. While multiple redaction levels certainly exist in the Huldah story, her prophecy is too central to the pre-exilic, reformed Israel, triumphant theology of Kings to be a post-exilic restructuring of a prophecy once provided by Asherah. Edelman, “Huldah the Prophet,” 231–50. 85. Arlene Swindler, “In Search of Huldah,” Bible Today 989 (1978): 1780–85. 86. There are two basic viewpoints on this discovery that I will mention here. The first holds that the discovery of the sêp̄er hatōrāh heralded the restoration of a long-lost oracle. The other views the sêp̄er hatōrāh as a literary method to legitimate changes instigated by Josiah. For our purposes, both are acceptable. See Nadav Na’aman, “The ‘Discovered Book’ and the Legitimation of Josiah’s Reform,” Journal of Biblical Literature 130, no. 1 (2011): 47–62; Thomas Römer, The So-Called Deuteronomistic History: A Sociological, Historical and Literary Introduction (New York: T & T Clark International, 2005); Stavrakopoulou, “Materialist Reading,” 223–42. 87. Antti Marjanen, “Female Prophets among Montanists,” in Prophets Male and Female: Gender and Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Eastern Near East, vol. 15, ed. Jonathan Stökl and Corrine L. Carvalho (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2013), 143. 88. Scheuer, “Huldah,” 105. 89. Stavrakopoulou, “Prophet Huldah,” 285no31, 288. 90. For further reading on women’s shifting roles in urbanized communities, see Carol L. Meyers, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 91. Judith E McKinlay, “Gazing at Huldah,” The Bible and Critical Theory 1, no. 3 (2005): 1–15.

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92. Renita J. Weems, “Huldah, the Prophet: Reading a (Deuteronomistic) Woman’s Identity,” in A God So Near: Essays on Old Testament Theology in Honor of Patrick D. Miller, ed. Brent A. Strawn and Nancy R. Bowen (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 321–39. 93. McKinlay, “Gazing at Huldah,” 4. 94. Nissinen, “Gender and Prophetic,” 44–46. 95. Edinburgh Prophecy Network et al., eds., Prophecy and Prophets in Stories: Papers Read at the Fifth Meeting of the Edinburgh Prophecy Network, Utrecht, October 2013, 107. 96. McKinlay, “Gazing at Huldah,” 243–50. 97. Stavrakopoulou makes this observation regarding the Golden Calf narrative in Exodus 32, but the same logic applies in the case of Huldah and the women weavers. Stavrakopoulou, “Materialist Reading,” 224. 98. Ackerman, “Why Is Miriam ?,” 59. Elsewhere, Ackerman has argued that the stability and centralization brought about by Josiah’s reform would have silenced Huldah’s prophetic authority. Considering Huldah’s connectivity to the reform’s institution and adjoined elite social class, I disagree. Instead, I argue that her role in the book’s authentication would have elevated her status as a mantic authority to a level wherein she could be viewed as a beloved, if outdated, figure. Regarding women’s diminished opportunities for religious connection, Ackerman has detailed the different ways in which the Hebrew Bible exhibits women in cult spaces and how many of these practices would have shifted or utterly ceased at the time of Josiah’s reforms. See Ackerman, “Household Religion.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ackerman, Susan. “Asherah, the West Semitic Goddess of Spinning and Weaving?” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 67, no. 1 (2008): 1–30. ———. “Household Religion, Family Religion, and Women’s Religion in Ancient Israel.” In Household and Family Religion in Antiquity, edited by John Bodel and Saul M. Olyan, 127–58. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. ———. “Why Is Miriam Also among the Prophets? (And Is Zipporah among the Priests?).” Journal of Biblical Literature 121, no. 1 (2002): 47–80. Aitken, James K., and Hilary Marlow. The City in the Hebrew Bible: Critical, Literary and Exegetical Approaches. New York: T&T Clark, 2018. Avigad, Nahman. Discovering Jerusalem. Nashville: T. Nelson, 1983. Becking, Bob, and Hans M. Barstad, eds. Prophecy and Prophets in Stories: Papers Read at the Fifth Meeting of the Edinburgh Prophecy Network, Utrecht, October 2013. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Ben-Dov, Jonathan. “Writing as Oracle and as Law: New Contexts for the Book-Find of King Josiah.” Journal of Biblical Literature 127, no. 2 (2008): 223–39. Binger, Tilde. Asherah: Goddesses in Ugarit, Israel and the Old Testament. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997.

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Bird, Phyllis A. Bird. “Images of Women in the Old Testament.” In The Bible and Liberation: Political and Social Hermeneutics, edited by Norman K. Gottwald, 252–88. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983. Boertien, Jeannette H. “Asherah and Textiles.” Biblische Notizen 134 (2007): 63–78. Boertien, Jeannette H. Unravelling the Fabric: Textile Production in Iron Age Transjordan. Groningen, NL: Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 2013. Boertien, Jeannette H. “Weaving at Tell Mazar: The Loomweights.” Tell El-Mazar II. Excavations on the Mound 1977–1981, Field I, edited by K. Yassine and E. Van der Steen, 59–72. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2012. Breniquet, Catherine. “The Archaeology of Wool in Early Mesopotamia: Sources, Methods, Perspectives.” In Wool Economy in the Ancient Near East and the Aegean, edited by Catherine Breniquet and Cecilie Michel, 52–78. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014. Cassuto, Deborah. “Modes of Textile Production in Cultic Contexts in the Iron Age Southern Levant: The Finds from Tell Eṣ-Ṣafî/Gath.” In Textiles and Cult in the Ancient Mediterranean, edited by Cecilie Brøns and Marie-Louise Nosch, 316–32. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017. Davies, Graham I., Markus N. A. Bockmuehl, Douglas R. De Lacey, and Andrew J. Poulter. Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions: Corpus and Concordance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. De Villiers, Gerda. “Where Did She Come From, and Where Did She Go To? (The Queen of Heaven in Jeremiah 7 and 44).” Old Testament Essays 15, no. 3 (2002): 620–27. Dever, William G. “The Silence of the Text: An Archaeological Commentary on 2 Kings 23.” In Scripture and Other Artifacts: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Honor of Philip J. King, edited by Michael D. Coogan, J. Cheryl Exum, and Lawrence Stager, 143–68. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994. Dick, Michael B., and Christopher Walker. “The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian Mīs Pî Ritual.” In Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East, edited by Michael B. Dick, 55–122. University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 1999. Edelman, Diana Vikander. “Huldah the Prophet—of Yahweh or Asherah?” In A Feminist Companion to Samuel and Kings, edited by Athalya Brenner, 231–50. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994. ETANA, “Mouth-Washing Ritual for a Cult Statue.” n.d. http://etana​.org​/node​/580. Hadley, Judith M. The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah: Evidence for a Hebrew Goddess. Vol. 57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hallo, William W., and K. Lawson Younger, Jr. The Context of Scripture, Volume 1, Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World. Leiden: Brill, 2002. https://brill​ .com​/view​/title​/856. Hamori, Esther J. “The Prophet and the Necromancer: Women’s Divination for Kings.” Journal of Biblical Literature 132, no. 4 (2013): 827–43. Ilan, Tal. “Huldah, the Deuteronomic Prophetess of the Book of Kings.” Lectio Difficilior 1, no. 2010 (2010): 205–11.

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Keel, Othmar, and Christoph Uehlinger, eds. Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God in Ancient Israel. Minneapolis: Bloomsbury, 1998. King, Philip J., and Lawrence E. Stager. Life in Biblical Israel. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Kraemer, Ross Shepherd. “Gender.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Mediterranean Religions, edited by Barbette Stanley Spaeth, 281–308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Laurito, Romina, Cristina Lemorini, and Assunta Perilli. “Making Textiles at Arslantepe, Turkey, in the 4th and 3rd Millennia BC: Archaeological Data and Experimental Archaeology.” In Wool Economy in the Ancient Near East, vol. 17 edited by Catherine Breniquet and Cecilie Michel, 151–68. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014. Marjanen, Antti. “Female Prophets among Montanists.” In Prophets Male and Female: Gender and Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Eastern Near East, vol. 15, edited by Jonathan Stökl and Corrine L. Carvalho, 127–46. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2013. Mastin, Brian A. “Yahweh’s Asherah, Inclusive Monotheism and the Question of Dating.” In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel, edited by J. Day, 326–51. London: T & T Clark, 2004. Matoïan, Valérie, Juan-Pablo Vita, Catherine Breniquet, and Cecile Michel. “Wool Production and Economy at Ugarit.” In Wool Economy in the Ancient Near East, vol. 17, edited by Catherine Breniquet and Cecilie Michel. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014. McKinlay, Judith E. “Gazing at Huldah.” The Bible and Critical Theory 1, no. 3 (2005): 1–15. Meyers, Carol L. Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Na’aman, Nadav. “The ‘Discovered Book’ and the Legitimation of Josiah’s Reform.” Journal of Biblical Literature 130, no. 1 (2011): 47–62. Na’aman, Nadav, and Nurit Lissovsky. “Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, Sacred Trees and the Asherah.” Tel Aviv 35, no. 2 (2008): 186–208. Nissinen, Martti. “Gender and Prophetic Agency in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean and in Greece.” In Prophets Male and Female: Gender and Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Ancient Near East, vol. 15, edited by Jonathan Stökl and Corrine L. Carvalho, 27–58. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2013. Oppenheim, A. Leo. The Golden Garments of the Gods. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949. Ornan, Tallay. “Sketches and Final Works of Art: The Drawings and Wall Paintings of Kuntillet ‘Ajrud Revisited.” Tel Aviv 43, no. 1 (2016): 3–26. Quillien, Louise. “Invisible Workers: The Role of Women in Textile Production during the 1st Millennium BC.” In The Role of Women in Work and Society in the Ancient Near East, edited by Brigitte Lion and Cécile Michel, 312–24. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. Römer, Thomas. The So-Called Deuteronomistic History: A Sociological, Historical and Literary Introduction. New York: T & T Clark International, 2005.

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Sala, Maura. “Beyond Dagon: Resilience and Entanglement of Canaanite Backgrounds in Sacred Buildings and Cult Practices of Iron Age Philistia.” In Tell It in Gath: Studies in the History and Archaeology of Israel: Essays in Honor of Aren M. Maeir on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, edited by Louise Hitchcock, Amit Dagan, and Chris McKinny, 352–74. Ägypten Und Altes Testament 90. Münster: Zaphon, 2018. Scheuer, Blaženka. “Huldah: A Cunning Career Woman?” In Prophecy and Prophets in Stories, edited by Bob Brecking and Hans M. Barstad, 104–23. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Shamir, Orit. “Textiles, Loom Weights and Spindle Whorls.” In Excavations at Kadesh Barnea (Tell El-Qudeirat) 1976–1982, edited by Rudolph Cohen and Hannah Bernick-Greenberg. Part 1 of Israel Antiquities Authority Reports 34, 255–67. Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2007. ———. “The High Priest’s Garments of Mixed Wool and Linen (Sha’atnez) Compared to Textiles Found in the Land of Israel.” In Textiles and Cult in the Ancient Mediterranean, edited by Cecilie Brøns and Marie-Louise Nosch, 333–52. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017. Sharp, Carolyn. Prophecy and Ideology in Jeremiah: Struggles for Authority in the Deutero-Jeremianic Prose. New York: T&T Clark, 2003. Sheffer, Avigail, and Amalia Tidhar. ‫אביגיל שפר‬, and ‫ “טקסטילים ומוצרי‬.‫עמליה תדהר‬ ‫ קליעה מכונתילת עג’רוד‬/ Textiles and Basketry at Kuntillat ‘Ajrud.” Atiqot 20 ‫עתיקות‬ 26–1)1991(:. Smith, Mark S. “The Blessing God and Goddess: A Longitudinal View from Ugarit to ‘Yahweh and . . . His Asherah’ at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud.” In Enigmas and Images: Studies in Honor of Tryggve ND Mettinger, edited by Eidevall Göran and Blaženka Scheuer, 213–26. University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2011. ———. The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002. Stager, Lawrence E., and Samuel R. Wolff. “Production and Commerce in Temple Courtyards: An Olive Press in the Sacred Precinct at Tel Dan.” Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research 243, no. 1 (1981): 95–102. Stavrakopoulou, Francesca. “Materialist Reading: Materialism, Materiality, and Biblical Cults of Writing.” In Biblical Interpretation and Method: Essays in Honor of John Barton, edited by Katharine J. Dell and Paul M. Joyce, 223–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ———. “The Prophet Huldah and the Stuff of State.” In Enemies and Friends of the State: Ancient Prophecy in Context, edited by Chris A. Rollston, 277–96. University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2018. Stökl, Jonathan. “Ištar’s Women, YHWH’s Men? A Curious Gender-Bias in NeoAssyrian and Biblical Prophecy.” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 121, no. 1 (2009): 87–100. Swindler, Arlene. “In Search of Huldah.” Bible Today 989 (1978): 1780–85. Taylor, Joan E. “The Asherah, the Menorah and the Sacred Tree.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 20, no. 66 (1995): 29–54.

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Wattenmaker, Patricia. “Craft Production and Social Identity in Northwest Mesopotamia.” Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 8, no. 1 (1998): 47–55. Weems, Renita J. “Huldah, the Prophet: Reading a (Deuteronomistic) Woman’s Identity.” In A God So Near: Essays on Old Testament Theology in Honor of Patrick D. Miller, edited by Brent A. Strawn and Nancy R. Bowen, 321–39. University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2003. Westenholz, Joan Goodnick. “Tamar, Qĕdēšā, Qadištu, and Sacred Prostitution in Mesopotamia.” Harvard Theological Review 82, no. 3 (1989): 245–66. Wiggins, Steve A. “Of Asherahs and Trees: Some Methodological Questions.” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 1, no. 1 (2001): 158–87. Wiggins, Steve A. “The Myth of Asherah: Lion Lady and Serpent Goddess.” Ugaritforschungen 23 (1991): 383–94.

Chapter 5

“Part of the Same Miracle” Women and Visual Art in the Dura Europos Synagogue Sarah E. G. Fein

In 1932, an archaeological expedition from Yale University made an astonishing discovery: amid the ruins of the so-called “Roman frontier town” of Dura Europos was a third-century synagogue whose walls preserved a remarkable narrative cycle of wall paintings depicting biblical scenes.1 This discovery was remarkable for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it upended the conventional wisdom that Judaism was an aniconic, nonfigural religion and provided evidence for a unique Jewish artistic tradition.2 Additionally striking is that a number of these paintings feature biblical women characters. These paintings, such as the “Purim Panel,” the “Infancy of Moses,” and “Elijah Restores the Widow’s Son,” all found on the west wall of the synagogue, are more than mere illustrations of biblical narratives (figure 5.1).3 Indeed, they appear to offer interpretations of the biblical narratives, much like contemporaneous written interpretations of those narratives, such as the targumim (Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible) and rabbinic midrash.4 Many scholars have noted the interplay between these written texts and the visual “text” of the Dura Europos synagogue wall paintings, most notably Annabel Jane Wharton. Wharton argues that the pastiche of these interpretive voices produced a “narrative bricolage,” in which disorder itself is an “organizing principle” of the paintings.5 In this bricolage, a story emerges about women as protectors of Jewish children, and, by extension, of the Jewish people. In this chapter, I ask how those who worshipped in the synagogue, particularly women members of the congregation, might have interacted with these images and the narratives they represented. I use Jonathan Z. Smith’s theory of emplacement, in which an action or object becomes sacred by having 97

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Figure 5.1  Dura Synagogue West Wall. Source: Yale University Art Gallery, DuraEuropos Collection.

attention focused upon it in a “highly marked” way, to consider how worshippers made meaning in this sacred space. This view of meaning-making challenges “classic” ideas of what made space sacred, popularized by scholars such as Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane and Peter Brown in The Cult of the Saints. This view argues that some spaces are inherently different from others, and thus sacred, and people are prompted to respond to this sacredness through ritual actions. Recently, some scholars such as AnneMarie Yasin have argued that within early Christianity, sources expressed an alternative sense of the sacred, in which “sacred space is constructed through ritual and social convention.”6 As Yasin’s approach builds upon Smith’s understanding of sacred space and applies it to early Christian saints’ tombs, I will apply this understanding of sacred space as actively constructed through human participation to my analysis of the Dura Europos synagogue. Ultimately, I argue that the written and visual narratives of biblical women, who each in their own way challenged authority to protect the vulnerable, would have resonated deeply with the Jewish women who were living as a minority population under Roman imperial rule. Indeed, perhaps these women would have been inspired to resist Roman domination in small, subversive ways, as their biblical foremothers resisted authority, for the sake of the preservation of the Jewish people.7 Considered in this way, the paintings shed new light on the important, but oft-overlooked, experiences of Jewish women in the ancient synagogue. These experiences of Jewish women in the ancient synagogue arguably included personal identification with the women depicted in the wall paintings at Dura Europos. The paintings that featured women invited the women congregants of the synagogue to view themselves as those biblical women and emulate their behaviors in their own social context, in order to ensure

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the survival of their people. In this way they truly embodied the teaching of Joshua b. Levi, who in BT Megillah 4a stated: ‫נשים חייבות במקרא מגילה שאף‬ ‫( הן היו באותו הנס‬Women are obligated to read the Megillah, since they were also part of the same miracle). Women of the Dura synagogue could consider themselves coagents with the divine in effecting the miracle of Jewish survival and continuance, like the bold, assertive biblical women before them— they were part of, and indeed, crucial to, the same miracle. SPATIALITY IN THE ANCIENT SYNAGOGUE What would it have been like to be a Jewish woman in the ancient synagogue? The evidence suggests that women did indeed attend synagogue in antiquity. Textual sources from the first through seventh centuries CE affirm the presence of women in synagogues.8 That they mention such pres��ence without comment attests to the widespread acceptance of this practice. Women participated, to varying degrees, in the ritual life of the congregation. According to Mishnah Berakot 3:3, they were “obligated in prayer [of the Amidah]” (‫)חינין בתפילה‬. Furthermore, Megillah 23a says that the “rabbis” teach, in regards to the seven persons called to read the Torah on Shabbat:9 ‫הכל עולין למנין שבעה ואפילו קטן ואפילו אשה‬ “All [people] are qualified for a minyan of seven, even a minor, even a woman.”

The logical space for these activities to have taken place was the synagogue. Archaeological evidence makes an even stronger case for women’s participation in synagogue life. Inscriptions from a wide variety of geographical and temporal locations bestow upon women (female personal names) such titles as ἀρχισυνάγωγος (head of the synagogue) and πρεσβυτέρα (elder).10 A dedicatory inscription on a tomb in Smyrna from no earlier than the third century CE names a Jewish woman “Rufina” as an ἀρχισυνάγωγος (head of the synagogue).11 Finally, epigraphical evidence shows that women were synagogue benefactors, donating money for the upkeep, beautification, and running of the synagogue.12 An inscription from Aphrodisias (late fourth to early sixth century CE) names Jael as a προστάτης, a title that “could denote a high-level administrator, a patron, a presiding officer, or, more generally a leader.”13 While evidence from Smyrna and Aphrodisias suggest women were leaders and donors in the ancient synagogue, women’s participation in synagogue life was likely to vary widely by region.14 At Dura, the ceiling tiles can shed some light on women’s involvement in that particular Jewish community.

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Analysis of these tiles reveals their uniqueness, for while other buildings at the site feature both male and female faces on ceiling tiles, and both male and female figures appear in the synagogue wall paintings, only women’s faces appear in the synagogue ceiling tiles.15 In contrast, no women’s names appear as donors in the Aramaic dipinti in the synagogue ceiling tiles, save for one (Tile A, lines 12 and 14) that names “wives and children”—only men are named as donors.16 Karen B. Stern hypothesizes that the lack of men’s faces on the ceiling tiles represents a hesitance to depict portraits of male donors, who would be real members of the community. Therefore, the women featured would not be donors but rather stylized representations of female faces, which would have been more acceptable to the community.17 This lack of representation in the ceiling tiles does not necessarily mean that women did not donate to the Dura synagogue or hold leadership roles, however; it merely indicates that there was some hesitance about publicly celebrating their contributions. Another controversial matter regarding women’s participation in the ancient synagogue is the matter of separate seating. Many scholars have assumed that women were seated separately from men in antiquity, but the archaeological and epigraphical evidence does not support this claim.18 Such assumptions are more likely reflective of scholars’ preconceived biases than historical realities. In the particular case of the Dura synagogue, there is a small room off of the side of the main assembly hall that some have posited served as the women’s gallery in the first iteration of the building (figure 5.2). In his official report of the Dura Europos archaeological expedition, Carl H. Kraeling identified this “room 7” as a women’s gallery.19 In the later stage of the synagogue (figure 5.3), Kraeling suggests that the women might have sat on benches on the south side of the main assembly hall. He argues this on the basis of what we know about the nature of the wall decorations of this area [which is to say, “the prominent position on the west wall, immediately vis-à-vis the women’s entrance, the scene of the reviving of the widow’s child”] and what we can infer from the existence of the smaller door, makes it clear that the benches in question were those used by the women and that here the raised footrests were omitted lest modesty and propriety be offended.20

However, no confirming evidence for this theory has been found, and several scholars have refuted Kraeling’s claim: Erwin Goodenough, for example, suggests that room 7 could have been a storage room for sacred objects, and Bernadette Brooten concedes that if there was separate seating for men and women, it was more likely to have been an “informal” arrangement such as

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Figure 5.2  Plan of the First Stage of the Synagogue. Source: Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europos Collection.

separate benches rather than a separate room for women.21 Theories of separate seating for women in the ancient synagogue thus remain, at best, only conjecture. It is therefore not unreasonable to assume that at Dura, women sat in the main assembly hall, together with the men on the benches on each of the four walls. They therefore would have been able to clearly view the wall paintings, to which we now turn.22

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Figure 5.3  Plan of the Later Stage of the Synagogue. Source: Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europos Collection.

IMAGES OF WOMEN IN THE SYNAGOGUE In this section, I discuss three images that function as visual retellings of biblical narratives in which women resist authority in order to protect the lives of a vulnerable party. Each of these paintings can be read in conversation with other visual and written interpretations and tells a new version of the story. The resulting narrative in this program of images expresses the idea that women were uniquely capable of resisting authority in order to protect the vulnerable. The first panel I will consider is designated the “Purim Panel,” so named for the holiday established by the book of Esther (figure 5.4).

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Figure 5.4  Purim Panel, West Wall, Dura-Europos Synagogue. Source: Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

Briefly, this book tells a lively tale of a beautiful Jewish woman who a Persian king chooses to be his bride. She foils a plot by his wicked courtier Haman and prevents the annihilation of all the Jews in the Persian empire. The Dura panel telling this story can be divided into two scenes. The first scene, on the viewer’s left, depicts the wicked Haman leading Mordecai on horseback in a triumphal procession. He is acclaimed by four figures. To the right is a separate court scene in which a message is exchanged between a messenger and the enthroned Persian king Ahasuerus and Queen Esther. Scholars have long puzzled over the identification of this scene, but it does not seem to explicitly correspond to any biblical verse. Wharton notes that “there is no scholarly consensus concerning a proof-text for the right hand side of the panel. . . . It remains open to multiple interpretations.”23 The scene both reflects and contributes to the multiplicity of interpretive voices in this biblical narrative. This enigmatic visual interpretation interacted with contemporaneous visual art of surrounding cultures and other retellings of Esther’s story, such as those in targumim (Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible) and rabbinic midrash. The book of Esther establishes Esther as a heroine who manages to save the Jewish people despite being a queen in the non-Jewish court of King Ahasuerus. Rabbinic midrash and targumim take up this theme and develop Esther’s character as a pious Jewish woman. They emphasize that despite Esther’s living in a Gentile palace as the wife of a Gentile king, she faithfully maintained Jewish practices. Targum Rishon and Sheni, Aramaic translations of the book of Esther, explain that she maintained kosher dietary laws with the help of her handmaids and observed menstrual purity laws, or niddah.24 In addition, the texts expand upon Esther’s piety, which is suggested by her fast in the biblical book, by placing in her mouth prayers for divine assistance.25

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Targum Sheni especially solidifies Esther’s Jewish identity, having her call upon ‫( אלהיה דאברהם יצחק ויעקב‬God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) and drawing parallels between her situation and the akedah of Isaac and the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai. These interpretations of Esther elevate her to the level of a Jewish role model of sorts that other Jewish women living in the diaspora should emulate. Like the written interpreters of the book of Esther, the Dura Europos artist distinguished the figure of Esther from the other figures in her narrative.26 The Hellenistic style in which Esther is shown in the painting (i.e., chiton and himation, beaded necklace and bracelet, and her gestures) stands in stark contrast to the Parthian features (i.e., belted tunic, wide trousers, and long-sleeved coat) of Mordecai and Ahasuerus. Such juxtaposition is common in Parthian art, which, especially in Palmyrene funerary representations of male-female couples, usually depicts the woman in Hellenistic prototype.27 In my view, this distinction further designates Esther as “other.” In contrast to the king, Esther is a Jew; in contrast to Mordecai, she is a woman. Furthermore, her costume reflects a hybridity of features. While her dress is Hellenistic, her crown, on which I will speak more below, is distinctly “oriental.”28 Esther’s costume, like her identity, is hybrid, neither fully one culture nor the other. Perhaps Jewish woman viewers would have noted, and identified with, these “marked” features that indicated Esther’s in-betweenness. Like Esther, they too lived at the intersection of of multiple cultures in the multi-ethnic, multi-religious city of Dura Europos. Esther’s actions could have thus served as a model for the real women of Dura. Esther’s leadership in the book of Esther cannot be denied. While she does not outright challenge the king or the authority he represents, she uses subversion to undermine Haman’s plot and achieve her goals.29 Rabbinic midrash and the targumim recognize this and emphasize, in particular, Esther’s beauty, humility, and righteousness.30 The rabbinic authors of Esther Rabbah neatly sum up Esther’s efficacious use of her charms. In explaining Esther’s Hebrew name, Hadassah (“myrtle”), they say: ‫ כך‬,‫מה הדסה ריחה מתוק וטעמה מר‬ ‫( הייתה אסתר מתוקה למרדכי ומרה להמן‬Just as the myrtle has a sweet fragrance but a bitter taste, so Esther was sweet for Mordecai [and, I would add, Ahasuerus] and bitter for Haman) (6.5). This quote reveals how the rabbis recognized how Esther’s (distinctly gendered) attributes, such as “sweetness,” enabled her to challenge those in power better than anyone else could. The Dura artist drew upon the visual vocabulary of surrounding cultures in order to express Esther’s leadership. One particularly striking way in which he did this was to model her after depictions of the goddess Tyche. As the personification of luck, Tyche was fused at Dura with other deities and took on attributes such as good fortune and fertility.31 In fact, “the Tyche of a city could be conflated with the divinity traditionally believed to protect it.”32 Both Esther’s clothing and her posture are reminiscent of Tyche, as is evident in the sketch of a tessera (figure 5.5) found in nearby Palmyra.

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Figure 5.5  Drawing of Tessera, Atargatis Tyche, by Ryann Bailey Wawro, after Robert Du Mesnil du Buisson, Les tessères et les monnaies de Palmyre. Source: (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1962), 371, fig. 204.

Dalia Levit-Tawil points out that on this tessera, the lower half of the goddess’s body, like Esther’s, is turned toward the left, while the top half faces the viewer. Both women wear “a sleeveless v-shaped chiton and himation” and rest their feet on a footstool. Additionally, in the Purim panel, Esther wears a type of crenelated crown that is an “outstanding attribution” of the goddess Tyche.33 An example of this attribute can be seen not far from the Dura synagogue, at the city’s Temple of Adonis (figure 5.6).34 Modeling Esther after the goddess Tyche would have signified to her viewers that she was a powerful force in her own right, one fully capable of protecting the Jewish community, as Tyche protected the city.

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Figure 5.6  Head of Atargatis or Tyche with Doves, the Temple of Adonis, Dura-Europos. Source: Public domain, Yale University Art Gallery.

Two additional panels preserve scenes of women acting in salvific roles to protect the lives of a vulnerable party (in their specific cases, male children), and interact with the Esther panel to produce a new story for the synagogue community. First, the “Infancy of Moses” panel portrays Exodus 1:8–2:15, in which two Hebrew midwives disobey the order of Pharaoh to kill every baby boy they deliver, and Moses’s mother and sister and Pharaoh’s daughter (unknowingly) work together to save the infant Moses’s life (figure 5.7). Of note in “The Infancy of Moses” panel is the choice of the Dura artist to depict Pharaoh’s daughter fetching Moses from the river herself. The MT says that she sent her ‫אֲמָ תָ הּ‬, from ‫( אָמָ ה‬handmaid), into the water, but Targum Onkelos, the Aramaic translation of the Torah, has ‫אַמתַ ה‬, ְ from ‫( אַמָּ ה‬hand) (both nouns have a third feminine singular possessive suffix).35 Whether as a result of the influence of the targum or another interpretive tradition, or representing an independent interpretation, the Dura artist similarly chose to show Pharaoh’s daughter taking an active role in the saving of the vulnerable infant Moses. Regardless of the cause, the effect in the painting is a Pharaoh’s daughter with significantly more agency than in the MT. The significance of Pharaoh’s daughter in the Dura scene is further indicated by two visual cues. First, she is completely nude; she rises from the river in full frontality, visible from her knees upward.36 This nudity emphasizes Pharaoh’s daughter’s non-Jewish identity; it is especially stark in contrast to

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Figure 5.7  The Infancy of Moses Panel, West Wall, Dura-Europos Synagogue. Source: Scanned image, Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europos Collection.

the veiled, fully clothed women who surround her.37 It is also reminiscent of Aphrodite, goddess of sexuality, who is elsewhere found at Dura (figure 5.8); the pendant between Pharaoh’s daughter’s breasts is a further reference to that worn by fertility goddesses.38 This invocation of non-Jewish fertility goddesses serves to connect the “Infancy of Moses” panel with the Purim panel, where Esther is modeled after Tyche, and specifically, it connects the figures of Esther and Pharaoh’s daughter. Both are marked by their costume (or lack thereof) as distinct from the other figures in their respective scenes, and both invoke ideas of fertility, maternal care, and protection. Next, the panel “Elijah Restores the Widow’s Son” depicts the story found in 1 Kings 17:17–24, in which a widow prompts the prophet Elijah to restore her young son to life after he has died (figure 5.9).39 The widow’s appearance in this panel bears little immediate resemblance to either the figure of Esther or Pharaoh’s daughter. This is understandable, as she is a poor peasant woman (1 Kings 17:8–16) and thus would be shown differently than a queen or a princess. Yet there is more binding them together than meets the eye. Like Esther, a Jew in Shushan, and Pharaoh’s daughter, an Egyptian among Hebrews, the widow in this scene is also a foreigner— a Sidonian encountering an Israelite prophet.40 Perhaps the Jewish women in Dura would have noted that these brave women, like themselves, were

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Figure 5.8  Relief of Aphrodite in a Niche, Dura-Europos. Source: Public domain, Yale University Art Gallery.

strangers in a strange land and would have connected more deeply with their stories. The widow’s gestures in the painting make it clear that she, like these other “foreign” women, takes an active role in protecting the life of a child. While she is not ultimately responsible for bringing her son back to life, she plays a critical role in compelling the prophet to do so. On the left side of the painting, the widow gives her dead child to the prophet; he does not ‫( והחקיו‬take him) from her, as specified in 1 Kings 17:19. This active physicality echoes her outcry in 1 Kings 17:18 (“What have I to do with you, Man of God? You came to me to remind me of my sin, and to kill my son!”), which inspires Elijah to act. The widow’s language, represented by her assertive gesture in this painting, is reminiscent of the power of Esther’s words when she compels Ahasuerus to protect the Jewish population of Shushan. Both women function

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Figure 5.9  Elijah Restores the Widow’s Son. Dura-Europos synagogue. Source: Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

in protective capacities on behalf of a vulnerable party, whether it be an ill child or a community under threat. Finally, the painting affirms the widow’s central role in the narrative through her physicality in the final “scene” of the painting. On the couch on Elijah’s lap, the restored child holds out his arms, “as in invitation.”41 His outstretched left hand echoes the two other hands that appear on his right: the hand of the widow, his mother, below, and the Hand of God above. In the synagogue paintings, the Hand of God can be a “convention indicating a miracle.”42 Yet there is precedent within the synagogue’s artistic program to suggest that the placement of human hands can indicate that human participation is an important component in the occurrence of these “miracles.” The scene “Ezekiel in the Valley of the Dry Bones,” on the north wall of the synagogue, depicts Ezekiel 37:1–10, in which Ezekiel is commanded by God to prophesy (figure 5.10). When he does, the dry bones by which Ezekiel had been surrounded are gathered together and come to life again. The painting shows three separate Hands of God, which reach from above toward the three separate figures of Ezekiel. Carl H. Kraeling suggests that showing a close relationship between the Hand of God and the hand of Ezekiel corresponds to Ezekiel 37:9–10, which describes how Ezekiel acts as the recipient and transmitter of the divine message. According to this reading, “Where the appearance of the Hand is combined with gestures on the part of the person concerned, we must conclude from the fact that the emphasis is . . . upon some divine act requiring human participation.”43

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Figure 5.10  Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones. Dura-Europos synagogue. Source: Scanned image, Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europos Collection.

This conclusion can justifiably be applied to our analysis of the placement of the hands in the scene of Elijah restoring the widow’s son. In this image, the hands of Elijah are occupied holding the widow’s child. They have no relationship to the Hand of God, even though it is supposedly the prophet through whom God is working to restore the child to life. Instead, it is the widow’s right hand that mimics the Hand of God extended on the right side of the scene, and the child’s left hand that reaches toward them from the center. Thus, I argue that because of the similarity of the widow’s and God’s gestures, the painting is suggesting that they share responsibility for the miracle that has just occurred—in other words, the divine act requires the human participation of the mother. The widow’s words to Elijah, represented by her active posture in the painting, are a necessary element that activates God’s intervention. The three paintings “The Purim Panel,” “The Infancy of Moses,” and “Elijah Restores the Widow’s Child” do more than simply illustrate biblical scenes. They draw on other written and visual interpretations to tell a particular story: women in Israel’s history have been uniquely capable of standing up to authority in order to protect the vulnerable. What was the significance of this story for the Jewish congregation that worshipped in the Dura Europos synagogue, and particularly for the women in that congregation?

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SACRED SPACE AND IMAGES OF WOMEN To answer this question, I turn to Jonathan Z. Smith’s theory of “emplacement.” In To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual, Smith says that when one enters a sacred space, such as a temple, one enters a marked-off space . . . in which, at least in principle, nothing is accidental; everything, at least potentially, demands attention. . . . Within the temple, the ordinary . . . becomes significant, becomes sacred, simply by being there. A ritual object or action becomes sacred by having attention focused on it in a highly marked way. From such a point of view, there is nothing that is inherently sacred or profane. . . . Sacrality is, above all, a category of emplacement.44

This model, in which things are neither inherently sacred nor profane, but made sacred through “ritual and political power,” has been applied productively to a late antique context by Anne-Marie Yasin.45 In her work Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community, Yasin analyzes the “social functions” of church spaces, in which some early Christian thinkers defined sacred space through “Christian community, ritual, and commemoration.”46 The Dura Europos synagogue community seems to have demonstrated a similar understanding of sacred space by the intentionality through which they decorated the synagogue space. The three images featuring women in salvific roles that I have discussed are intentionally “emplaced” in a very significant location: first, in a synagogue, the locus of the Jewish community’s ideals and identity in late antiquity, and second, and more specifically, to the viewer’s immediate left and right of the Torah niche, on the western (Jerusalem-oriented) wall of the synagogue (figure 5.11).47 (The “Infancy of Moses” is removed in proximity only by the small panel “The Anointing of David,” the significance of which falls outside the scope of this chapter.) The Torah niche would have held the scrolls of the Pentateuch (i.e., the Torah), which would have been removed and a portion read for the congregation every week.48 Eric Meyers notes that “the clear placement of the niche in the center dramatically underscores the role of Torah in the worship of the synagogue.”49 Archaeological and art historical evidence reflects the importance of the Torah shrine in the synagogue space for the congregation. Synagogue mosaics, for example, depict furnishings that beautify the Torah shrine under the principle of hiddur mitzvah (beautification of the mitzvah), such as menorahs that flanked the shrine or fine cloths that likely hung before it.50 The presence of a Torah scroll conferred sanctity upon a space. In a fourth-century sermon, the church father John Chrysostom succinctly summarized the power the Torah scroll held for Jewish congregations (and some members

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Figure 5.11  Torah Niche, Dura-Europos synagogue. Source: Scanned image, Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europos Collection.

of his Christian congregation): “Why do you revere [the synagogue] when you should disdain it, despise it and avoid it? ‘The Law and the books of the Prophets can be found there,’ you say.”51 Much to Chrysostom’s dismay, the presence of the Law—the Torah and the Prophets—was enough to make the synagogue a sacred space, worthy of reverence.

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Few would argue that the Torah was not a holy object. I want to go one step further and argue that the emplacement of the images of Esther, the widow of Zarephath, and the women of the Exodus next to the Torah shrine functions to augment their importance, and even to confer the sanctity of the Torah onto those images and the narratives they represented. In other words, these stories of women became charged with a sense of holiness as worshippers focused their attention, to use Smith’s terminology, on the western wall of the synagogue, where the Torah was located.52 This attention would have been heightened during the ritual reading of the Torah. Multiple ancient texts, including those by Josephus and Philo and the New Testament, describe the practice of reading the Torah in the synagogue. Tosefta Sukkah, a late second-/early third-century CE rabbinic document describes this practice: And a wooden bima was to be found in the center [of the hall, referring to an Alexandrian synagogue], and the ḥazzan of the synagogue would stand in the corner [of the bima] with kerchiefs in his hand. When one came and took hold of the scroll to read [a section from the Torah], he [the ḥazzan] would wave the kerchiefs and all the people would answer “Amen” for each blessing. He would [again] wave the kerchiefs and all the people would respond “Amen.”53

These ritual practices imbued the Torah with additional sanctity. As Smith notes, sacrality is not inherent—things are made sacred through ritual.54 The Torah stories that would have been read to the congregation included the Megillah, or scroll of Esther; the book of Exodus; and stories of Elijah, the prophet featured in the painting of the widow of Zarephath. As these narratives were read to the congregation, they would have likely been simultaneously rendered into Aramaic, the lingua franca of this community in Late Antiquity.55 The purpose of these translations, or targumim, would have been not only to make scripture comprehensible to a non-Hebrew-speaking audience but also to “present the biblical text as it was explained and broadened in accordance with the halachic, theological, and moral perceptions central to the world of the Sages [rabbinic authorities].”56 As the congregation heard biblical narratives read, in both the holy tongue of Hebrew and the more familiar Aramaic, their attention would also be fixed on the wall paintings that were associated with those narratives. This pastiche of narratives, visual and aural, can be compared to a familiar medium in early Judaism, written rabbinic midrash. As Wharton argues that “the heterogenous juxtaposition of scriptural and non-scriptural fragments [in written midrash] produced a new space—an intertextual space—for the production of responses relevant in some way to the contemporary community,” I would add the lived experience of the congregation, which included Torah and haftarah reading, liturgy, and

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visual images, also produced an intertextual space where narratives acquired multiple, synchronous meanings. Hagith Sivan summarizes: The individuals who orchestrated donations and paid for the representations projected a common area where the public, children and adults, could experience the interplay of verbal and pictorial techniques of biblical interpretation. . . . They converted biblical words into images that provided a perfect accompaniment of synagogal sounds and smells.57

The emplacement of the Torah and its interpretations, both written and visual, in the synagogue space with all its sounds and smells meant that it was more than just entertainment. The narratives that were read were elevated to a level of sanctity that demanded reverence from the attendant worshippers. This included stories of women, such as Esther, the women of Exodus, and the widow of Zarephath, and their interpretations as protectors of the Jewish community. Within the synagogue, the congregation, which we are virtually certain included women, prayed in the sacred language of Hebrew, oriented their bodies toward the Torah and Jerusalem, and heard the stories of their ancestors. By performing these ritual actions, they designated the synagogue as a sacred space and its paintings and the Torah as sacred objects and lifted up the stories of biblical women. These women provided a model of how to influence others and compel them to act in ways that would protect the vulnerable. Their stories would have resonated with the Jewish community at Dura, especially women, who could identify with all three women in various respects. The widow of Zarephath modeled assertive action in partnership with the divine in order to care for the vulnerable. Pharaoh’s daughter modeled subtle resistance against the dominant political powers to preserve an endangered life. The women of the Dura synagogue may have especially related to Esther’s position: trying to maintain their Jewish identity and protect their brothers and sisters in faith in a complex and sometimes threatening environment. When it comes to the survival of the Jewish people in the face of imperial pressure, women, indeed, were “part of the same miracle.”

NOTES 1. I am grateful for Dr. Mark Ellison and Dr. Catherine Taylor for the opportunity to share my work in this volume and for their hard work in compiling it. I also wish to thank Andie Watson, my Gilda Slifka Intern at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, for the support and assistance provided during summer 2020. Any errors are my own.

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Andre Grabar refers to Dura Europos as a “Roman frontier town” in The Beginnings of Christian Art, vol. 9 of Arts of Mankind (London: Hudson & Thames, 1967), 59. 2. This mistaken assumption that Judaism was an aniconic tradition comes from the belief that the Jews interpreted in a literal way the second commandment: “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (NRSV translation; see Exod. 20:4 and Deut. 5:8). This assumption prevailed among scholars of Judaism even up to the late twentieth century. For example, in 1986, Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger claimed that “the Second Commandment and many other restrictions in the Bible undoubtedly had a negative impact on the artistic development of the Jewish people, and subsequently of Christianity and Islam.” Fear of Art: Censorship and Freedom of Expression in Art (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1986), 4. Ten years later, Michael Brenner stated, “The visual arts never played a central role in the religiously dominated premodern Jewish culture.” The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 153. For a historiographic exploration of the idea of aniconism in Jewish art, see Kalman P. Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 3. Much ink has been spilled in the attempt to discern an overall “message” of the synagogue paintings as a whole, and even whether they constituted a narrative cycle. Rachel Hachlili nicely summarizes the various positions of scholars on what message the paintings are communicating: (1) Scholars who believe several ideas are portrayed in the paintings, including Du Mesnil du Boisson and Kraeling; (2) scholars who believe the paintings show one comprehensive theme, including Grabar (the theme of the sovereignty of God), Wischnitzer (messianic theme), Goodenough (mystical theme), contra Smith and Avi-Yonah and Goldstein (messianic theme on the west wall); (3) scholars who believe the paintings do not demonstrate a unifying theme, including Rostovzeff, Leveen, Sukenik, and Wharton. Rachel Hachlili, “The Dura Europos Synagogue Wall Paintings: A Question of Origin and Interpretation,” in “Follow the Wise”: Studies in Jewish History and Culture in Honor of Lee I. Levine, ed. Zeev Weiss, Oded Irshai, Jodi Magness, and Seth Schwarz (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2010), 409–10. See also Rachel Hachlili, Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Diaspora (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 180–82. 4. On the basis of a liturgical parchment found in the synagogue that likely reflects the rabbinic grace after meals (birkat ha-mazon), suggesting a linkage between the rabbinic community and Dura, Steven Fine argues for the legitimacy of using rabbinic materials to interpret the paintings. “Liturgy and the Art of Dura Europos,” in Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 174–85. 5. Annabel Jane Wharton, “Good and Bad Images from the Synagogue of Dura Europos: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts,” Art History 17, no. 1 (1994): 15–16. Wharton is critical of attempts to “control” the meaning of the images by “identifying the text— not the image—as the locus of meaning” (9), an endeavor she sees as misguided that ultimately misunderstands and even does violence to the image.

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6. Anne-Marie Yasin, Saints and Church Spaces in the Early Christian Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 26. 7. On resistance at Dura Europos against the Roman empire, see Jaś Elsner, Roman Eyes: Visual Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), especially chap. 10, “Viewing and Resistance: Art and Religion at Dura Europos.” In Elsner’s view, the cults of the Roman empire (including Judaism) resisted Roman domination by offering “a place of self-affirmation through selfdefinition.” This self-affirmation implied a “localism” that was “in direct opposition to the state’s attempt to create a religious universalism both in the polytheistic second and third centuries and the Christian empire thereafter.” Roman Eyes, 284. 8. Lee Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 500–02. See, for example, Luke 13:10–13; Acts 16:12– 13, 17:1–4, 10–12; Philo, On the Contemplative Life 3:32–33; Leviticus Rabbah 9:9; Numbers Rabbah 9:20; Deuteronomy Rabbah 5:15; B. Avodah Zarah 38a–b; B. Sotah 22a. 9. However, the “sages” dispute this and say, “A woman cannot read Torah because of the honor of the congregation.” Levine understands this somewhat ambiguous juxtaposition of statements as reflecting a gradual restriction on women’s participation in ritual leadership. Levine, Ancient Synagogue, 507. Parallel statements are also found in Tosefta Megillah 3:11–12. Of course, the need for restricting a practice reflects such a practice’s existence and even popularity. Additionally, an important caveat is that what the rabbis prescribed and what was done in reality were often very different. 10. For a full analysis of these inscriptions, see Bernadette Brooten, “Female Leadership in the Ancient Synagogue,” in From Dura to Sepphoris: Studies in Jewish Art and Society in Late Antiquity, ed. Lee I. Levine, Zeev Weiss (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2000), 215–23; also Brooten, Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 1982; second ed. 2020); and a recent dissertation that both builds on and challenges some of Brooten’s conclusions: Carrie Duncan, “The Rhetoric of Participation: Gender and Representation in Ancient Synagogues” (PhD diss., University of Chapel Hill, 2012), ProQuest (UMI Number 3356119). 11. Brooten (Women Leaders) argues that Rufina’s title reflects her actual role in synagogue life, while Duncan (“Rhetoric of Participation”) makes the case that it rather reflects her prestige and social status, not a functional role. Ross S. Kraemer explores the debate on the meaning of ἀρχισυνάγωγος in Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 232–41. On the particular matter of Rufina as an ἀρχισυνάγωγος, see Tessa Rajak and David Noy, “Archisynagogoi: Office, Title and Social Status in the Greco-Jewish Synagogue,”  The Journal of Roman Studies 83 (1993): 75–93. For debates on Rufina as ἀρχισυνάγωγος, see Brooten, Women Leaders, 6–7, and more generally 5–33; see also Paul Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 106. In “Rufina Refined: A Woman archisynagōgos from Smyrna, Yet Again,” in Worship, Women, and War:

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Essays in Honor of Susan Niditch, edited by John J. Collins, T. M. Lemos, and Saul M. Olyan (Providence: Society of Biblical Literature, 2015), Kraemer concludes that this title is bestowed upon Rufina for the communal service she performed by burying non-family members, the θρέμματα (probably “household slaves,” but see 291n18). 12. Levine, Ancient Synagogue, 507–11. 13. Brooten, “Introduction to the Digital Edition,” in Women Leaders. For more on Jael, see Bernadette J. Brooten, “Iael προστάτης in the Jewish Donative Inscription from Aphrodisias,” in The Future of Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Helmut Koester, ed. Birger A. Pearson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 149–62; Brooten, “The Gender of Ιαηλ in the Jewish Inscription from Aphrodisias,” in Of Scribes and Scrolls: Studies on the Hebrew Bible, Intertestamental Judaism, and Christian Origins: Presented to John Strugnell on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Harold W. Attridge, John J. Collins, and Thomas H. Tobin (Lanham, MD: College Theology Society University Press of America, 1990), 163–73. 14. See Duncan, “Rhetoric of Participation.” 15. Karen B. Stern, “Mapping Devotion in Roman Dura Europos: A Reconsideration of the Synagogue Ceiling,” American Journal of Archaeology 114, no. 3 (2010): 498– 99. Kraeling suggests that the women’s faces are “personifying the powers of vegetation” (“Synagogue,” 52). David Noy and Hanswulf Bloedhorn, eds., Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis, Volume III: Syria and Cyprus (IJO III), (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 142 suggest the “the inscriptions [of male names] seem to take the place of portraits in the synagogue.” 16. See Noy and Bloedhorn, IJO III, 141–42. 17. Stern, “Mapping Devotion,” 499. 18. The assumption of separate seating in ancient synagogues was first challenged by Shmuel Safrai in “Was There a Women’s Gallery in the Synagogue of Antiquity?” Tarbitz 32 (1963), 336 (Hebrew). Brooten later developed Safrai’s ideas in Women Leaders, 103–38; as did Levine, who boldly declares “There can be little doubt that throughout late antiquity, Jews gathered in the synagogue for ritual purposes without making any distinctions in seating arrangements for males and females” in Ancient Synagogue, 505. Chad Spigel seeks to nuance this new scholarly consensus and argues for diversity in ancient synagogue seating practices (as today) in his recent article “Reconsidering the Question of Separate Seating in Ancient Synagogues,” Journal of Jewish Studies 63, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 62–83. 19. Carl H. Kraeling, The Synagogue: The Excavations at Dura Europos, vol. 8 of Final Report (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), 31. 20. Kraeling, The Synagogue, 16; description of the nature of the paintings, 147n537. 21. Erwin R. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, vol. 9: Symbolism in the Dura Synagogue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 30–37, suggests that it was a storage room for sacred objects, such as the Torah scroll; Michael White, Building God’s House in the Roman World: Architectural Adaptation among Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 95, generally follows his suggestion. Brooten (Women Leaders, 126–28) calls Kraeling’s reconstruction “shaky” but notes that the proposal of an “informal”

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separation such as seating on different benches fits with the archaeological evidence better than proposals for a separate room or gallery. 22. This intentional placement of paintings to be visible to a certain audience was not unique to the women of the synagogue. Hagith Sivan hypothesizes that the lowest register of paintings, which featured youths such as the infant Moses, the widow’s child, and Queen Esther, were deliberately placed so as to be accessible to the synagogue’s children and thus could function as a pedagogical tool that complemented their lessons on scripture. See Sivan, Jewish Childhood in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 221–28. 23. Wharton, “Good and Bad,” 11–12. She summarizes on p. 12: “Schneid identified the scene with Esther 3:18–15 . . . Du Mesnil du Boisson argues for 6:1–3 . . . Grabar suggests 8:4–8 . . . Kraeling . . . insists that only one passage, Esther 9:11–14 . . . adequately explains the image.” Naftali Schneid, The Paintings of the Synagogue of Dura Europos (Tel Aviv: Hotsaʼat Gazit 1956), 23 (Hebrew); Comte du Mensil du Buisson, “Les Nouvelles Découvertes de la Synagogue de Doura-Europos,” Revue Biblique 43, 1934 (546–630); André Grabar, “Le Thème Religieux des Fresques de la Synagogue de Doura (245–256 après J. C.),” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 123, nos. 2–3 (1941): 143–92; and 124, no. 1 (1942): 5–35; Kraeling, Synagogue, 162–64. 24. Targum Rishon says that the women were righteous and provided her with food and drink from their own hands, but Targum Sheni says that Esther gave her handmaids gifts she received because ‫( דלא הות טעמא אסתר ממיין ביתיה דמלכא‬She did not want to taste the wine from the house of the king [2:9, presumably because it was not kosher]). Megillah 13a agrees that Esther kept kosher, as Rav (a second-century Amora) says that the king ‫( שהאכילה מאכל יהודי‬fed her Jewish food). According to both Targum Rishon 2:9 and Megillah 13a, Esther’s handmaids also help her keep track of the days of the week, so that she can observe Shabbat: ‫[( שהיתה מונה בהן ימי שבת‬Rava said, there were seven handmaids] so she could count by them the days of the week). Megillah 13b adds that what is meant by 2:20, “Esther did the command of Mordecai as when she was brought up by him,” is that Esther observed the laws of menstrual purity (niddah): ‫[( שהיתה מראה דם נדה לחכמים‬Rabbi Jeremiah said,] she used to show her menstrual blood to the sages). 25. Leila Leah Bronner, “Esther Revisited: An Aggadic Approach,” in A Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith, and Susanna, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 185–88. Targumim Rishon and Sheni 5.1. 26. For the sake of ease, I refer to the “Dura artist” throughout this essay. However, those responsible for actually painting the Dura Europos synagogue frescoes were likely to be a local workshop of artisans, who also painted the local Christian building and pagan temples. Robin Jensen contends that because of the similarity of style in these spaces, “it seems likely that both Jews and Christians availed themselves of the same atelier to decorate their houses of worship, a workshop that had already produced murals for pagan temples and other public buildings in the area. This single workshop was, moreover, quite able to adapt to the different religious needs of each community and the different spatial circumstances of each religious building.” See Robin M. Jensen, “The Dura Europos Synagogue, Early-Christian Art, and Religious Life in Dura Europos,” in

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Jews, Christians, and Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue: Cultural Interaction During the Greco-Roman Period, ed. Steven Fine (London: Routledge, 1999), 184. See also Annabel Jane Wharton, Refiguring the Post-Classical City (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 60–61. Of course, the synagogue paintings would have been commissioned by members of the community, who would have had at least some say in which narratives were depicted on the walls and how they were portrayed. 27. Dalia Levit-Tawil, “Queen Esther at Dura: Her Imagery in Light of ThirdCentury CE Oriental Syncretism,” Irano-Judaica: Studies Relating to Jewish Contacts with Persian Culture Throughout the Ages 4 (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East, 1999), 279. 28. “[The costume] of Esther may show a mixture of Oriental- and Hellenisticinfluenced features (especially her turreted crown, known from representations of Tyche).” Shalom Sabar, “The Purim Panel at Dura: A Socio-Historical Interpretation,” in Lee I. Levine and Zeev Weiss, eds., From Dura to Sepphoris: Studies in Jewish Art and Society in Late Antiquity (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2000), 160n26. 29. On Esther’s character in the biblical book of Esther, see Michael V. Fox, Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2001), who states that “Esther’s tactics are exactly those of everyone else in the Persian court—gaining one’s way by manipulating the man in power.” Sidnie Ann White argues that Esther was meant to “teach Jews how to live a productive life in the Diaspora.” “Esther: A Feminine Model for the Jewish Diaspora,” in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, ed. Peggy L. Day (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 164. 30. Beauty (Tg. 2 2:2–8, Esther Rabbah 2:15), humility (Tg. 1 2:1–2, 5:1–4, Tg. 2 5:1), and righteousness (Tg. 1 1:7, Tg. 2 2:7, Megillah 13a, Esther Rabbah 2:7). 31. Susan B. Matheson, “The Goddess Tyche,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (1994), 23–25. Atargatis/Astarte was the “syncretistic goddess” who appeared in this context as the character Tyche, the city’s protector. Levit-Tawil, “Queen Esther,” 280–81. 32. Matheson, “Goddess Tyche,” 25. The personification of a city as a woman with maternal characteristics would have been familiar to the Durene Jews. The personification of Jerusalem, or Zion, as female is recorded as early as the Psalms and only becomes more vivid after the Babylonian exile in 587/6 BCE. It would have been natural for the Jewish community to map female, maternal characteristics onto another figure who personified the city in which they lived. See David Pechansky, Twilight of the Gods: Polytheism in the Hebrew Bible (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), especially chap. 7, “Lady Zion: The Beautiful Goddess”; and Christl Maier, Daughter Zion, Mother Zion: Gender, Space, and the Sacred in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008). 33. Levit-Tawil, “Queen Esther,” 281–82. 34. One other example of Tyche can be seen at Dura, also at the Temple of Adonis, where she is shown in a bas-relief with her consort Hadad. She lacks any distinctively “Tyche” imagery, however. Matheson, “Goddess Tyche,” 25.

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35. Shimon Weiser, Targum Onḳelos Ha-mugah ṿeha-meduyaḳ: Be-tosefet Yalḳuṭ Rishonim (Bene Beraḳ: Hotsaʼat Sifre-ḳodesh “Mishor,” 2006). In Targum Onkelos, the verb used in Exodus 2:5 to describe Pharaoh’s daughter’s action (‫ ישט‬in the aphel) is almost exclusively used to describe stretching forth one’s hand (though the object is usually ‫)יד‬, never to describe sending forth another person (in that case TO would use ‫)שלך‬. Like TO, the MT uses ‫ שלך‬in the qal to describe sending forth another person, which it does here in 2:5. I am grateful to Dr. David Wright for his insight on this matter. Kraeling understands this as clear evidence that the Dura artist depended on targumim (specifically, Targum Onkelos) for his interpretation of the story (Synagogue, 355). 36. “Neither . . . the artists [nor] the Jewish community which they serve show the slightest feeling that nudity would be improper in the pictorial decorations of a religious House of Assembly.” See Kraeling, Synagogue, 176n676. 37. Warren G. Moon, “Nudity and Narrative: Observations on the Frescoes from the Dura Synagogue,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 60, no. 4 (Winter, 1992): 595–97. 38. Moon, “Nudity,” 596. 39. For fuller analyses of these two panels, please contact the author for her papers “A Gracious Woman Gets Honor: Women in Ex. 1:8–2:15 in Jewish Interpretive Tradition” (unpublished manuscript) and “Prayer, Petition, and Even Prophecy: The Widow of Zarephath in Word and Image” (unpublished manuscript). 40. For an exploration of the significance of the ethnicity and gender in the Elijah narratives, see Stephanie Wyatt, “Jezebel, Elijah, and the Widow of Zarephath: A Ménage à Trois That Estranges the Holy and Makes Holy the Strange,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 36, no. 4 (2012): 435–58. 41. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols, 228. 42. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols, 228. 43. Kraeling, Synagogue, 188; emphasis mine. 44. Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 104. 45. Yasin, Saints, 27; see especially 26–34 on J. Z. Smith. 46. Yasin, Saints, 44. 47. The shallowness of the space suggests that it held only the scrolls necessary for a given service (ex. the scroll of Genesis) and not all the scrolls that would be used year-round. Eric M. Meyers, “The Torah Shrine in the Ancient Synagogue: Another Look at the Evidence,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 4, no. 4 (1997): 309. 48. On Shabbat, holidays, market days (Mondays and Thursdays), fast days, and Rosh Chodesh. 49. Meyers, “Torah Shrine,” 309. 50. Fine, Art and Judaism, 191–98. 51. Homily Against the Jews 1.5.2; quoted in Meyers, “Torah Shrine,” 312–13. 52. Kraeling’s contention that the Elijah panel’s “prominent position on the west wall, immediately vis-à-vis the women’s entrance . . . was deemed more appropriate than that of Elijah’s sacrifice” is worth noting here, though as Brooten notes, the

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evidence that women were consigned to the benches on the south wall is “shaky.” See above, n21. 53. Trans. Daniel K. Falk, “Jewish Prayer Literature and the Jerusalem Church in Acts,” in The Book of Acts in Its First Century Setting, vol. 4, The Book of Acts in Its Palestinian Setting, ed. Richard Bauckham (Grand Rapids and Carlisle, MI: W. B. Eerdmans and Paternoster Press, 1995), 273. 54. Smith, To Take Place, 105. Drawing on obsolete English verbs to sacrate or to sacre. 55. See P. S. Alexander, “Jewish Aramaic Translations of Hebrew Scripture,” in Mikra: Text Translation, Reading, and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. M. J. Mulder (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), esp. “Sitz Im Leben,” 240–41. 56. Avigdor Shinan, “The Late Midrashic, Paytanic, and Targumic Literature,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 4, The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period, edited by Steven T. Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 692. 57. Sivan, Jewish Childhood, 221–22.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, P. S. “Jewish Aramaic Translations of Hebrew Scripture.” In Mikra: Text Translation, Reading, and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, edited by M. J. Mulder, 217–53. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1988. Bland, Kalman P. The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Brenner, Michael. The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Brooten, Bernadette. “Female Leadership in the Ancient Synagogue.” In From Dura to Sepphoris: Studies in Jewish Art and Society in Late Antiquity, Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series, no. 40, edited by Lee I. Levine and Zeev Weiss, 215–23. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2000. Brooten, Bernadette J. “The Gender of Ιαηλ in the Jewish Inscription from Aphrodisias.” In Of Scribes and Scrolls: Studies on the Hebrew Bible, Intertestamental Judaism, and Christian Origins: Presented to John Strugnell on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, edited by Harold W. Attridge, John J. Collins, and Thomas H. Tobin, 163–73. Lanham, MD: College Theology Society University Press of America, 1990. Brooten, Bernadette J. “Iael προστάτης in the Jewish Donative Inscription from Aphrodisias.” In The Future of Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Helmut Koester, edited by Birger A. Pearson, 149–62. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991. Brooten, Bernadette J. Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues. Brown Judaic Studies 36. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982.

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Bronner, Leila Leah. “Esther Revisited: An Aggadic Approach.” In A Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith, and Susanna, edited by Athalya Brenner, 176–197. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. Carmilly-Weinberger, Moshe. Fear of Art: Censorship and Freedom of Expression in Art. New Providence, NJ: R. R. Bowker, 1986. Duncan, Carrie. “The Rhetoric of Participation: Gender and Representation in Ancient Synagogues.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2019. ProQuest (UMI Number 3356119). Elsner, Jaś. Roman Eyes: Visual Subjectivity in Art and Text. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Falk, Daniel K. “Jewish Prayer Literature and the Jerusalem Church in Acts.” In The Book of Acts in Its First Century Setting. Vol. 4 of The Book of Acts in Its Palestinian Setting, edited by Richard Bauckham, 261–301. Grand Rapids and Carlisle, MI: W. B. Eerdmans and Paternoster Press, 1995. Fine, Steven. Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Fox, Michael V. Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther, 2nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001. Goodenough, Erwin R. Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period. Vol. 9 of Symbolism in the Dura Synagogue. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953. Grabar, Andre. The Beginnings of Christian Art, vol. 9 of Arts of Mankind. London: Hudson & Thames, 1967. Hachlili, Rachel. Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Diaspora. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Hachlili, Rachel. “The Dura Europos Synagogue Wall Paintings: A Question of Origin and Interpretation.” In “Follow the Wise”: Studies in Jewish History and Culture in Honor of Lee I. Levine, edited by Zeev Weiss, Oded Irshai, Jodi Magness, and Seth Schwarz, 403–20. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2010. Jensen, Robin M. “The Dura Europos Synagogue, Early-Christian Art, and Religious Life in Dura Europos.” In Jews, Christians, and Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue: Cultural Interaction During the Greco-Roman Period, edited by Steven Fine, 174–89. London: Routledge, 1999. Kraeling, Carl H. The Synagogue: Excavations at Dura-Europos. Vol. 8, part 1. Brooklyn, NY: Ktav Publishing House, 1956. Kraemer, Ross S. “Rufina Refined: A Woman archisynagōgos from Smyrna, Yet Again.” In Worship, Women, and War: Essays in Honor of Susan Niditch, edited by John J. Collins, T. M. Lemos, and Saul M. Olyan, 287–300. Providence: Society of Biblical Literature, 2015. Kraemer, Ross S. Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender and History in the GrecoRoman Mediterranean. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Levine, Lee I. The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Levit-Tawil, Dalia. “Queen Esther at Dura: Her Imagery in Light of Third-Century CE Oriental Syncretism.” Irano-Judaica 4 (1999): 274–97.

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Maier, Christl. Daughter Zion, Mother Zion: Gender, Space, and the Sacred in Ancient Israel. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008. Matheson, Susan B. “The Goddess Tyche.” In Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, An Obsession with Fortune: Tyche in Greek and Roman Art, 18–33. New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, 1994. Meyers, Eric M. “The Torah Shrine in the Ancient Synagogue: Another Look at the Evidence.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 4, no. 4 (1997): 303–38. Moon, Warren G. “Nudity and Narrative: Observations on the Frescoes from the Dura Synagogue.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 60, no. 4 (1992): 587–658. Noy, David, and Hanswulf Bloedhorn, editors, Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis, Volume III: Syria and Cyprus (IJO III). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004. Pechansky, David. Twilight of the Gods: Polytheism in the Hebrew Bible. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005. Rajak, Tessa, and David Noy. “Archisynagogoi: Office, Title and Social Status in the Greco-Jewish Synagogue.” Journal of Roman Studies 83 (1993): 75–93. Sabar, Shalom. “The Purim Panel at Dura: A Socio-Historical Interpretation.” In From Dura to Sepphoris: Studies in Jewish Art and Society in Late Antiquity, edited by Lee I. Levine and Zeev Weiss, 155–63. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2000. Safrai, Shmuel. “Was There a Women’s Gallery in the Synagogue of Antiquity?” Tarbitz 32 (1963): 329–38. Hebrew. Shinan, Avigdor. “The Late Midrashic, Paytanic, and Targumic Literature.” In The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period, edited by Steven T. Katz, 678–98. Vol. 4 of The Cambridge History of Judaism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. https​:/​/do​​i​-org​​.reso​​urces​​.libr​​ary​.b​​rande​​is​.ed​​u​/10.​​1017/​​CHOL9​​​78052​​17724​​88. Sivan, Hagith. Jewish Childhood in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Smith, Jonathan Z. To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Spigel, Chad. “Reconsidering the Question of Separate Seating in the Ancient Synagogue.” Journal of Jewish Studies 63, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 62–83. Stern, Karen B. “Mapping Devotion in Roman Dura Europos: A Reconsideration of the Synagogue Ceiling,” American Journal of Archaeology 114, no. 3 (2010): 473–504. Torjesen, Karyn J. “The Early Christian Orans: An Artistic Representation of Women’s Liturgical Prayer and Prophecy.” In Women Preachers and Prophets Through Two Millennia of Christianity, edited by Beverly M. Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker, 42–56. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Trebilco, Paul. Jewish Communities in Asia Minor. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Weiser, Shimon. Targum Onḳelos Ha-mugah ṿeha-meduyaḳ: Be-tosefet Yalḳuṭ Rishonim. Bene Beraḳ: Hotsaʼat Sifre-ḳodesh Mishor, 2006. Hebrew. Wharton, Annabel J. “Good and Bad Images from the Synagogue of Dura Europos: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts.” Art History 17, no. 1 (1994): 1–25.

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Wharton, Annabel J. Refiguring the Post-Classical City. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. White, Michael. Building God’s House in the Roman World: Architectural Adaptation among Pagans, Jews, and Christians. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. White, Sidnie Ann. “Esther: A Feminine Model for the Jewish Diaspora.” In Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, edited by Peggy L. Day, 161–77. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989. Wyatt, Stephanie. “Jezebel, Elijah, and the Widow of Zarephath: A Ménage à Trois That Estranges the Holy and Makes Holy the Strange.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 36, no. 4 (2012): 435–58. Yasin, Anne-Marie. Saints and Church Spaces in the Early Christian Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Chapter 6

Female Experience at the Tomb Ritual Commemoration and Sarcophagus Imagery Sarah Madole Lewis

This chapter explores the intersection of female experience with symbolic imagery found in Roman funerary contexts. Traditional Roman sarcophagi have the potential to reflect social experience, and I focus on iconography carrying cultic implications as they relate to the female viewer. Mimetic depictions of garland wreaths and torches, alongside emotional images of loss, mirrored actual practices that women undertook in funerary contexts, including producing and offering garlands, lighting lamps, and the emotional work of grief itself. There is little doubt that the imagery of early Christian sarcophagi reflected the religious convictions of the viewer(s), yet recently Jaś Elsner has rightly called for a reevaluation of Roman sarcophagi, the study of which has moved too far away from the ritual implications of their iconography in favor of an interpretation of “culture and classicism.”1 Roman sarcophagi have been explored exhaustively for their mythological narratives, Greek precedents, and more recently, as carriers of portraits and other markers of identity.2 This chapter explores the sarcophagus as an agent for human interaction and the work of grieving and commemoration, specifically for the female viewer. Both Roman men and women grieved; however, the experiences of women and their actions at the tomb must be inferred from our (male) literary sources and the epigraphic and material record.3 Amy Richlin lists the following mourning behaviors as gendered for women: “letting your hair down; wailing; the lament itself; the nenia [dirge]; beating your body; lacerating your cheeks with your nails; tearing your clothes; wearing dark clothes.”4 Christian authors such as Tertullian and the author of the apocryphal Gospel of Peter refer to the role of women in performing funerary rituals, and as Nicola 125

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Denzey Lewis and others have shown, the extensive burial networks of the catacombs offer unparalleled evidence for the role of early Christian women in burial customs and praxeis.5 This chapter seeks to recover some of the female work and experience in the funerary realm using the iconography of Roman sarcophagi. I begin with a case study of the Tomba della Medusa and three actions pertinent to the tomb: female experience and the reception of sarcophagus imagery, the dedication of garlands, and the lighting and offering of lamps. THE FEMALE GAZE, GARLANDS, AND LIGHT/LIGHTING The tomb itself was a locus religiosus (sanctified space), and therefore the activities that occurred inside and around tombs were considered sacred. Contact between the deceased and the women of the house continued during visits to the tomb—for example, in lighting lamps on the Kalends Ides and Nones, in various ritual acts on the birthday of the deceased, and for the Rosalia and Parentalia festivals. In addition to the ritual actions, these occasions afforded the viewer the opportunity to engage with the imagery within.6 A sarcophagus depicting the death of Niobe’s children (figure 6.1), part of an assemblage found in the so-called Tomba della Medusa (ca. 134 CE) in Rome, presents an excellent case to explore gendered aspects of emotion and

Figure 6.1  Front Panel of the Niobid Sarcophagus. From the Tomba della Medusa, Rome. Ca. 134 CE. Musei Vaticani, Museo Gregoriano Profano inv. no. 10437. Source: Photo: arachne​.dainst​.org​/entity​/540​6883; Mrs. G. Gang, FA- S-GEN-5708-01.

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offerings.7 The tomb, located in Rome just east of Stazione Termini, seems to have been custom built to accommodate three sarcophagi.8 Stylistic, topological, and formal analyses suggest that all three sarcophagi were carved in the same workshop as part of a single commission.9 The two sarcophagi placed on either side of the entrance of the tomb carry dramatic narratives drawn from Greek mythology. The sarcophagus on the left side of the tomb carries three scenes from the myth of Orestes, celebrated for his filial piety. The sarcophagus on the right side of the tomb depicts the death of Niobe’s children on the main panel, a tragic tale of a mother’s loss. Thus, one could postulate that the sarcophagus on the left was intended for a son and the sarcophagus on the right for the matrona or perhaps a daughter.10 The third sarcophagus was installed directly across from the entrance to the tomb. It carries a motif of garland festoons with the two Medusa heads depicted in the lunettes, from which is derived the modern name of the tomb. It has been suggested that the central placement of this sarcophagus indicates that it belonged to the paterfamilias.11 The sarcophagi belong to the early mid-second century, at the beginning of the production of mythological frieze sarcophagi. At this time, a preference emerged for sarcophagus decoration with emotional imagery that drew attention to the act of mourning and to the mortuary nature of sarcophagi as containers for the dead. Evidence for the visibility of sarcophagi and space for the presence of bereaved family members inside of tombs is best preserved in the second century. Only the Orestes sarcophagus was sealed with clamps on either short side, while the Noibid sarcophagus and Medusa sarcophagus apparently were intended to receive additional interments. However, all three sarcophagi contained multiple depositions,12 which attests to the continued use of the tomb and to the repeated interaction with the sarcophagus imagery by various visitors during this period of activity.13 Physically accessible imagery that asserts its funereal role reflects the functionality of tombs as sites of cult, similar to first-century tombs containing libation tubes, altars, and other such markers, some of which were still in use during the second century.14 Testaments preserve evidence of whoever might enter a tomb and what activities were performed therein. For example, a will from Rome around the same time as the Tomba della Medusa tasks a freedwoman, Novia Trophime, with building and maintaining the tomb of Gaius Popilius Heracla (deceased) and his wife, Fadia Maxima (still living).15 In addition to the key role Trophime played in the patronage of the tomb, she and her freedmen and freedwomen, as well as the heirs of the deceased, were to access the tomb for cultic purposes, thus members of the broader familia were present. Another testament found in Gaul outlined precise activities to occur within the tomb on specific days, again attesting to the intention for heirs and the broadly defined familia to enter the tomb.16 Finally, the

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second-century will of L. Veturius Nepos at Feltria allotted payment to several groups to perform funerary rites, tasking a group of women (mulieres) to adorn the tomb with roses, a gendered task within this context.17 The continued use of the Tomba della Medusa, evinced by the mortuary findings, and the corollary evidence from the wills allow us to introduce the presence of a female viewer, either a member of the nuclear family or the extended familia. Upon entering the tomb, the viewer was confronted with images of mourning on both short sides of the Orestes (Charon in his boat) and Niobid (a mourner sitting in front of a tomb) sarcophagi. On the left short panel of the Orestes sarcophagus, Charon in his boat nears two shades that Charon motions toward with his left hand, his right hand steering the ship. A lit torch depicted horizontally decorates the lid above the scene. On the right side of the tomb stood the Niobid sarcophagus. The right short panel of the sarcophagus depicts the bereaved mother and a shepherd outside of a circular tomb (figure 6.2). On the far right side of the front panel, visible to the viewer once fully inside of the tomb, Niobe bemoans her fate—two of her children reaching toward her in agony as an escaped lock of hair tumbles over her right shoulder in anticipation of her grief, perhaps a reminder to our female viewer of unbound hair and woman’s performance of grief.18 The primary and secondary decoration of both sarcophagi evokes a dramatic, emotional response to their tragic imagery.19 The nonnarrative garland sarcophagus, however, eschews explicitly emotionally provocative images and recalls instead the ritual practice of offering garlands for the deceased. The concept of the “female gaze” and how it may reflect “lived female experience” in viewing these monuments merits some clarification.20 Several scholars have addressed the subject of viewers and their reception of Roman art.21 In contemporary studies in film criticism, and more recently, art history, dialogues that focus on the male “gaze” are well established, yet in the study of ancient art there remains the need to establish a “female gaze.” Jaś Elsner introduced this term for the late Roman Projecta Casket (see figure 9.3), a silver container from a woman’s toilette, asserting that “although the casket was surely made by men, and probably commissioned and paid for by men, it is nonetheless an object of the female spere. It was at least subjected to, if not partially designed for, the female gaze. . . . We simply cannot discount some female input into [its] production, formulation and reception.”22 As we have already witnessed in the case of the patronage of Novia Trophime, women did participate in the commission of funerary monuments, and their gaze is inferred by the very presence of women at the tomb.23 Some level of input for image selection by female patrons is certain, yet over generations of viewer reception, the experience of the imagery would have evolved in the context of mourning. We must allow for the presence of the full range of women in a familia, potentially comprising a range of ages, social statuses,

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Figure 6.2  Short Right Side of the Niobid Sarcophagus. From the Tomba della Medusa, Rome. Ca. 134 CE. Musei Vaticani, Museo Gregoriano Profano, inv. no. 10437. Source: Photo: arachne​.dainst​.org​/entity​/540​6893; Mrs. G. Gang, FA- S-GEN-5708-06.

and familiarity with the deceased: wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters along with female slaves and freedwomen, each of whom participated in the perpetuation of memory.24 Paul Zanker was the first scholar to consider seriously the reception of Roman sarcophagi beyond their narrative and iconographic importance.25 Zanker and later Ruth Bielfeldt addressed sarcophagi as sites of social experience, and Bielfeldt focused on the case study of the Tomba della Medusa, primarily from a male perspective.26 In terms of gendered responses to sarcophagus imagery, Bjoern Ewald has argued that the male-dominant

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narratives of many Attic mythological sarcophagi reflect a heroic, male value system.27 This traditional “male gaze” has been applied successfully to the Orestes sarcophagus from the Tomba della Medusa.28 Ewald’s argument concerning the implied male viewer, and the implications of a gendered response, can be expanded to recover the presence of the female viewer. In arguing from silence, a phrase borrowed from the classical discipline, scholars working on women, slaves, and non-elites turn to what has not been said for evidence of what we know was there.29 I propose that we can gaze from silence in the search of the ephemeral experiences of women at the tomb. The Death of the Niobids may have spoken most forcibly to our female viewer: the relief depicts in detail the harrowing execution of all of the children of Niobe by Apollo and Artemis, as Niobe, who once bragged that she had borne more children than Leto, looks away in despair.30 Given the high rates of infant and child mortality in antiquity,31 images such as the Niobid myth express meaningful aspects of “mother” and “motherhood” in the premodern world.32 While we cannot expect exact alignments between the experiences of female viewers of the past and present day, certain fundamental experiences are immutable—such as menses, defloration, marriage, childbearing, and the stages of womanhood that are associated with blood as identified by Helen King in her foundational essay “Bound to Bleed.”33 We may posit that a bereaved mother gazing upon a sarcophagus decorated with the death of children may find comfort that she is among others who have gone through the same experiences, in this case the loss of a child.34 The violence in the imagery, and the implicit strong emotional response, seem entirely appropriate in the context of childbirth, childrearing, and loss in the Roman world. In the broader familia, a birth attendant, child’s wetnurse, servant, or close companion might also emotionally engage with the Niobid imagery found on the funerary casket. To the female viewer, encountering the Orestes sarcophagus in the Tomba della Medusa, with its heroic male values, her experience might equally activate a gendered response (as mother, daughter, nurse, etc.), such as pride in one’s son (or brother, etc.). The point here is to create a space for the female viewer at the tomb, to include her in the dynamic experience of viewing the sarcophagus imagery. The female figure of Niobe mourning on the short side of the Niobid sarcophagus would have invited the female viewer to participate as she entered the tomb—or cast one last glance over her shoulder upon exiting it.35 Beyond such self-referential imagery that may have reenacted experiences of mourning, other imagery appeared on sarcophagi as components of narrative scenes and as nonnarrative symbols, attesting to the performance of ritual in funerary contexts, namely placing garland festoons on the deceased and in the tomb as well as lighting torches and lamps. In the mourning Niobe relief, the fresh garlands draped across the mausoleum

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would have reminded our female viewer of the flowers and garlands she brought with her to the tomb. GARLANDS AND LAMPS/LIGHTING A sarcophagus in Florence depicts a scene of a woman weaving garlands, which Zanker interpreted as a professional florist, the owner of a garlandmaking workshop (figure 6.3).36 On the left side of the panel, a youthful woman sits before a table topped with flowers with her left hand touching one of the two garland festoons hanging from a tree limb. A portrait of the deceased, a mature female, appears prominently at the center of the sarcophagus panel, and on the right side of the panel, she receives a garland from an Eros figure. The scene is framed by sleeping Erotes leaning on inverted torches. It is thought that women and girls wove garlands, typically in a professional context such as the one depicted on the relief.37 The women tasked with decorating the tomb of L. Veturius Nepos with roses (mentioned earlier) further point to a gendered connection between fresh offerings and female actions at the tomb.38 While depictions of garland-weaving remain unusual, garland strands like those depicted on the Florentine relief appeared commonly on sarcophagi found across the Roman world throughout the span of sarcophagus production and are associated with the ritual offering of real garlands at the tomb.39 An example is a sarcophagus draped in garland wreaths with portraits in the lunettes (figure 6.4). This sarcophagus, which was imported to Rome from Asia Minor, where such nonnarrative sarcophagus imagery prevailed, is a fabulous example of how sarcophagi could function as miniature tombs in their own right, with the gabled “roof” lid. Some sculptors carved garland swags with such specificity that their entire composition of flora was identifiable, heightening the symbolic realism.

Figure 6.3  Sarcophagus of the Garland Vendor. Late third century CE. Baptistery, Florence. Source: Photo: D-DAI-Rome 65.2201.

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Figure 6.4  Front Side of a Garland Sarcophagus. Second century CE. Manufactured in Asia Minor, imported to Rome. Walters Art Museum inv. no. 23.29. Source: Photo: The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

The eponymous sarcophagus that was installed in the central niche of the Tomba della Medusa played a mimetic role with its garland decoration, mirroring the act of the (female) visitors who brought wreaths of fresh greens and flowers with which to decorate the tomb. This iconographic mirroring of ritual would have been especially true for the Rosalia and Violaria festivals— events that were named for the fresh flowers that were brought as offerings to the deceased—as well as the Parentalia.40 The association of wreath-making/ flower-offering with women may have deepened the connection between image and experience for the female viewer. Archaeological evidence for garlands confirms the funerary habit of garland dedication. Katherina Meinecke gathered documented examples in the area of Rome, with the Ipogeo delle Ghirlande from Grottaferrata outside of Rome as one of the best examples. In this first-century tomb, two sarcophagi contained the remains of a mother and son, and their bodies were covered in garlands comprised of roses, lilies, and violets.41 In the context of our search for female presence, action, and experience within funereal contexts, one wonders if these mortuary offerings were placed on the deceased by women in the family or by professional pollinctores (undertakers). Although the preservation and documentation of such archaeobotanical evidence is uncommon, it underscores the function of garland imagery in funerary contexts. Garland iconography is so commonly found in Roman tombs (in wall-painting,

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sarcophagi, altars, mosaics) that the modern viewer may overlook its fundamental role as a permanent symbol of its botanical counterpart. In her recent study of the reliefs from the first-century Tomb of the Haterii, Jennifer Trimble noted that depictions of garlands reflected actual practices and also that images of torches and lamps were “central to the funerary experience.” She continues, “None of the lights depicted [in the reliefs from the Tomb of the Haterii] could be seen without the help of real lamps, lit for the occasion, and their light, like the presence of a viewer, was essential to the functioning of the carvings.”42 Garlands and light were prevalent funerary tropes, thus we now turn to evidence for female participation in the ritualized context of the lamps and lighting within the funerary setting. Ancient literary sources reflect the importance of lamps in the funerary setting and female experience. An example appears in the story of the Widow of Ephesus by Petronius in which a mourning widow stayed in her husband’s tomb for five nights. A maidservant remained with her and refreshed the oil in the lamp as needed.43 This story presents us with women of two statuses both engaged in funerary behaviors: mourning, staying with the corpse, and keeping the tomb illuminated. The servant stokes the flames, which echoes a scene in the “Crane relief” from the Tomb of the Haterii in which an older woman tends to a lit altar beside the kline sepulcher of Hateria (or one of her daughters; see figure 6.5).44 In the relief, the female servant stoking the flame is depicted as being much smaller than the figure displayed on the kline, a hierarchic scale that reflects her lesser status. Both the literary and visual vignettes remind their audience of the actions performed inside the tomb, in both cases by women. They also hint at social divisions of labor among women within the tomb, a topic that merits further study but is beyond the scope of the present chapter. Further evidence of the ritualized importance of lamps in funerary contexts is found in the Greek Magical Papyri, not necessarily directed at female actors but which nevertheless expands this discussion of ritual light and lighting. These papyri include spells using light at the tomb and advise adding incense or fragrant oil nard to the lamp.45 These spells were done to evoke a visitation from the deceased in the dreams of the bereaved (recalling the Widow of Ephesus sleeping in her husband’s tomb). In physical acts such as lighting and offerings lamps, offering libations, singing, and reciting prayers, the connection with the deceased was framed by images, along with sounds, smells, and physical sensations. Epigraphic evidence also attests to the funerary customs of lighting lamps.46 Light (and darkness) is featured prominently in one of the most popular myths to appear on Roman sarcophagi: the nightly visit of the moon goddess Selene to her sleeping lover, the mortal Endymion. This narrative appears in sarcophagus reliefs as early as 140 CE but rises to prominence in the late

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Figure 6.5  Detail of Crane Relief Depicting Tomb Interior. From the Tomb of the Haterii, Rome. Ca. 100 CE. Musei Vaticani, Museo Gregoriano Profano inv. no. 9997, 9998. Source: Photo: arachne​.dainst​.org​/entity​/533​1749; FA2190-10.

second and the early third centuries. The scene always includes at least one lit torch, the presence of which makes sense because the moon appears at night when the world is otherwise dark. However, it makes little sense that a personification of the moon would need additional light in order to see. Thus, the presence of torches directs the viewer toward other associations, such as the connections between light, sight, and ritual. Lit torches played an important role during the funeral procession and, perhaps more emphatic here in the context of this love story, during the wedding procession and on the wedding night. Xenophon of Ephesos describes in his novel a tapestry hanging in a bridal chamber in which “Eros was leading the way, with a lighted torch.”47 These and other literary references encourage us to look more broadly at the pervasive ritual symbolism of both torches and Eros figures on Endymion sarcophagi. One example in particular directs us to an important monument that reflects a female experience: a sarcophagus dedicated by a daughter to her mother. This late Severan sarcophagus found at Ostia features the moon goddess, Selene, accompanied by three light-bearing Eros figures visiting her beloved, Endymion (figure 6.6).48 This image carries multivalent symbolism

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Figure 6.6  Front Side of an Endymion Sarcophagus. From Ostia, ca. 220 CE. Metropolitan Museum of Art inv. no. 47.100.4a,b. Source: Photo: Mont Allen. Artwork is in the public domain.

embedded in flying Eros figures holding torches and the figure of Sleep holding poppies, seemingly innocuous “add-ons” to fill the space. The Eros figures and poppies symbolize both death and sleep and perhaps the potions used to induce either states. Light and love, death as sleep, and dreams—as in the hopes to see the departed in sweet dreams—are known from the context of popular magic. The inscription on the lid identifies Aninia Hilara as the dedicator of the sarcophagus to her mother, Claudia Arria, which represents a rare instance of such a transaction from a daughter to her mother. No mention is made of any male relatives. In her analysis of this sarcophagus, Jean Sorabella proposed that the selection of this narrative for a mother-daughter dedication might be interpreted in the context of storytelling, as in a favorite bedtime story.49 Other lovers (Eros and Psyche, Ares and Venus) appear on the lid, recalling vignettes from novels and other contexts like pantomimes or, as Sorabella suggests, oral storytelling, moments shared among mothers and daughters and other female members of the household. To the right of the inscription is a portrait of the deceased. The omission of a male co-dedicant or heir suggests that Claudia Arria was not married at the time of her death, so her sarcophagus burial and commemoration depended on the patronage of her daughter. The standard practice was for widows and widowers to commission funerary monuments for the deceased partners or for individuals or married couples to make arrangements while still living. This sarcophagus is highly unusual in its documentation of a rare and poignant example of a mother-daughter dedication. For the sarcophagus viewer holding a lamp, the stone relief activated a self-referential experience, in this case a daughter mourning the loss of her mother.

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Evidence for lamps and lighting is also preserved in the Tomba della Medusa, where the excavators found several terracotta lamps and identified the remains of metal attachments in the ceiling for the suspension of lamps.50 In addition to the vestiges of functional light equipment (and possibly lamp offerings), light symbolism appears on the short sides of the Orestes sarcophagus on the left side of the tomb: a lit torch lying on its side (most distinctly appears above the scene with Charon), which might illuminate the journey of the deceased to the underworld or simply reinforce the sepulchral symbolism as our female viewer entered the chamber and was confronted with this image. One can imagine the transition entering the tomb, vision shifting from daylight to interior darkness, then to partial light as flames cast dancing shadows on sarcophagus reliefs and the tomb walls beyond.51 The offering of lamps as grave goods and lighting lamps at the tomb is one example of continuity between Roman and Christian religions.52 Evidence in the Roman catacombs reveals shelves for visitor lamps, but they do not account for lamps pressed into mortar or placed inside of the grave—material evidence that expands the functional use of lamps to ritual offerings bound to human actions and experiences. Leonard V. Rutgers discussed hundreds of lamps found in the Jewish catacombs, with twentysix found in a single grave.53 The catacombs also preserve evidence for offerings such as flowers and perfumed oils, which were placed in vessels pressed into mortar surrounding loculus graves. This evidence for offerings of flowers and perfumed oils is best preserved at the fifth-century Ad Decimum site outside of Rome, located close to the Ipogeo delle Ghirlande tomb previously mentioned.54 The continuity of ritual offerings and activities connects Christian and Jewish female mourners with their traditional Roman counterparts. SARCOPHAGI IN THEIR FUNERARY CONTEXTS I have primarily focused on one tomb, its accessibility, and the experiences of the viewers in attendance, with a focus on the female viewer. At this point, one might wonder about the visibility of sarcophagi in tombs other than the Tomba della Medusa. Mixed evidence on this question exists for tombs in the vicinity of Rome, which complicates the connection between sarcophagus imagery and our bereaved female visitor.55 Two things should be underscored about the use of sarcophagi beyond their basic function as a mortuary container. First, the sarcophagus imagery was visible to bereaved family members at some point; therefore, we can infer a meaningful connection between image and viewer.56 Second, cultic acts occurred if not inside the tomb then

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in close proximity to it, and the images that appear on sarcophagi may be considered in this light. Marble sarcophagi were incredibly expensive, unwieldy objects that had to be moved from the quarry to the sculptural workshop and ultimately to the tomb.57 For marble sarcophagi found near the city of Rome, where no local marble source exists, this meant long-distance trade. Scholars increasingly favor a “made to order” interpretation of sarcophagus production rather than stock production and “off the rack” selection of prefabricated reliefs.58 This ad hoc commission interpretation implies a meaningful significance for the sarcophagus imagery—even when the imagery carries an ensemble of stock narrative imagery—selected by patrons for themselves and for other family members. The location of the sculptural workshops, whether near the necropolis or elsewhere, remains unknown, which is important for the question of whether there were opportunities for the display of the sarcophagus before it was interred in the tomb.59 The visibility of sarcophagus imagery before and after installation is of particular relevance for tombs that remained in use over time—as sarcophagi were added to an increasingly crowded assemblage inside the tomb—and for sarcophagi in subterranean contexts. Because of the relative frequency with which sarcophagi became obstructed or obscured from view, Meinecke proposed that the primary interaction with sarcophagi occurred alongside the display of the corpse in the Roman home.60 However, as Barbara Borg notes, sarcophagi were also installed in tombs prior to the death of their intended interment.61 She further suggests that transportation of the large, multiton marble chest and its installation in the tomb at the occasion of the funeral procession and possibly during the funeral itself offered the bereaved opportunities to reflect on personalized associations with the sarcophagus and its imagery.62 In the case of the Tomba della Medusa, it seems likely that at least two of the sarcophagi were installed prior to the death of its primary interments, unless the commission occurred while the entire family was living. Though the subject of the sarcophagus viewing context is broad and complex, its relevance to women’s viewing of sarcophagus reliefs makes it a subject of foundational importance for my primary question of female experience. CONCLUSION The Tomba della Medusa provided us with a case study for the experience of the female viewer interacting with emotional images of loss in the context of ritual acts of remembrance such as lighting lamps and offering garlands.

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For this exercise, we have sought to recover the experiences of the daughters, sisters, and mothers that survived to mourn one another, as well as the women in the familia broadly conceived. Death and its commemoration were highly ritualized, and thus we may locate these experiences within the context of religious and cultic behaviors. The role of women at the tomb was not limited to Roman or Christian women. In fact, it is evidenced much earlier, and so to conclude, I introduce one final monument that reflects female participation in ritual mourning beyond the iconography of garlands, light, and grief that appear on Roman sarcophagi. This kind of symbolic and narrative imagery appeared in other media: in tomb interiors, wall-paintings, floor mosaics, and notably, in figured

Figure 6.7  Lekythos with Woman Pouring Libations at a Grave. Attributed to the Bosanquet Painter. Ca. 440 BCE. Metropolitan Museum of Art inv. no. 23.160.39. Source: Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Artwork is in the public domain.

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marble sarcophagi, which were not merely decorative objects but functional mortuary containers for honored deceased family members. Women were depicted as primary actors during various stages of the funerary process in images since at least the Greek Geometric era, which was centuries before these Roman images were made and evinces the long history of female participation.63 In the Classical period, female figures appeared on numerous white ground lekythoi engaged in “women’s work” at the tomb (figure 6.7).64 In one example, a female figure stands before a grave topped by a tall stele. Holding a jug (oinochoe) in her left hand, with her right hand she tilts a libation bowl (phiale) toward the funerary platform.65 Here, an array of offerings reflects previous cultic activity: four small perfume flasks (lekythoi) and two garlands, one in the form of a crown and the other an open festoon. A filet has been tied around the upper part of the stele. On the other side of the stele stands the deceased, a nude male youth depicted in his heroic prime. In this quiet image, the woman’s work at the tomb is shown as a repeated action, evidenced by the various offerings. These gifts and the libation captured in the depiction—and thus offered in perpetuity—mirror the physical offerings and fleeting actions taken by actual women: the performance of grief and ritualized mourning, as well as the offerings (filets and garlands, wine and perfume, and food) visualized on many white ground lekythoi. It has not been my intention to preclude the presence of a male gaze, or male participation in ritual commemoration at the tomb, but rather to focus on the female experience. The emotional work of grief and the space of the tomb was a female domain.66 The “lived experience” of women in funerary contexts encompasses varied experiences at the tomb: in the cool, dank chambers, lit by flickering torchlight; the air thick with fresh garland wreaths, wine, and newly refilled unguentaria; the space crowded with the familia. Sarcophagi are material witnesses to their presence. It is in this context that we must place our female viewer and her ephemeral ritual experience. NOTES 1. Jaś Elsner and Wu Hung, “Editorial,” RES 61/62 (2012): 11–12; see also Elsner’s comments in the introduction to Life, Death, and Representation: Some New Work on Roman Sarcophagi, ed. Jaś Elsner and Janet Huskinson (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2011), 10–11. For an earlier interpretation of sarcophagi with explicit cultic significance, see Helga Herdejürgen, “Sarkophage mit Darstellungen von Kultgeräten,” in Symposium über die Antiken Sarkophage: Pisa 5–12, September 1982, MarburgerWinckelmann-Programm, ed. Bernard Andreae (Marburg: Kunstgeschichtlichen Seminars, 1984), esp. 19–21.

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2. For example, the contributions in edited volume by Elsner and Huskinson, Life, Death; see those in Flesheaters: An International Symposium on Roman Sarcophagi; University of California at Berkeley 18–19 September 2009; Sarkophag-Studien 11, ed. Christopher H. Hallett (Berlin: Reichert, 2019). 3. Amy Richlin, Arguments with Silence: Writing the History of Roman Women (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 267–88. 4. Richlin, Arguments, 276. The nenia might be sung by children of both sexes but is associated with magic/women, 280–81. Note that these behaviors continue through the Roman period into the fourth century across the Mediterranean, as demonstrated by a sermon of Basil of Caesarea, Homilia in Ebriosos, lxiv; see also Darja Šterbenc Erker, “Gender and Roman Funeral Ritual,” in Memory and Mourning: Studies on Roman Death, ed. Valerie Hope and Janet Huskinson (Oxford/Oakville, CT: Oxbow Books, 2011), 44–45. 5. For example, Tertullian, On Monogamy 10.4; The Gospel of Peter 12.50– 13.57; Nicola Denzey, The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007), for example, xix; Janet H. Tulloch, “Women Leaders in Family Funerary Banquets,” in A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity, Carolyn Osiek and Margaret Y. MacDonald, with Janet H. Tulloch, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 164–93. 6. See J. M. C. Toynbee, Death and Burial in the Roman World (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 61–64; Paul Zanker and Bjoern Ewald, Mit Mythen Leben: Der Bilderwelt der Römischen Sarkophage (Munich: Hirmer, 2004), 34–36. On the nine day-long Parentalia festival (Feb. 13–21), Fanny Dolansky writes, “was a feast for the senses and one that gave especial prominence to the visual,” in “Honouring the Family Dead on the Parentalia: Ceremony, Spectacle, and Memory,” Phoenix 65 (2011): 126. 7. Ruth Bielfeldt provides an excellent in-depth study of the tomb and its sarcophagi, although she does not address gender, in Orestes auf römischen Sarkophagen (Berlin: Reimer, 2005), 306–21. She does introduce this in an article, “Orest im Medusengrab. Ein Versuch zum Betrachter,” Römische Mittelungen 110 (2003): 97–130. 8. The dimensions of the tomb and the three sarcophagi suggest the sepulcher and caskets belonged to an intentional design. 9. The two mythological sarcophagi have the same relative date, dimensions, lid type, and carving style, and both were propped on Atlantid supports; Bielfeldt, Orestes, 313–16. Vatican Museums, Gregoriano Profano inv. nos.: Garland 10443; Orestes 10450; Niobe 10437. 10. Bielfeldt discusses this sarcophagus in terms of mors immatura, although a mother who prematurely lost a child is equally possible; Orestes, 318. 11. Bielfeldt, “Medusengrab,” 125. 12. Katherina Meinecke, “Funerary Cult at Sarcophagi, Rome and Vicinity,” in Iconographie funéraire romaine et societé: Corpus antique, approches nouvelle?, ed. Martin Galinier and François Baratte (Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2013), 43.

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13. Another example of use over time is the Tomb of C. Valerius Herma (mausoleum H in the Vatican necropolis), which was used over two centuries and contained the remains of some 250 burials. See the summary of Barbara Borg, Crisis and Ambition: Tombs and Burial Customs in Third-Century AD Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 135–39. Also see Barbara Borg, Roman Tombs and the Art of Commemoration: Contextual Approaches to Funerary Customs in the Second Century CE (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 158–66. 14. For example, the Via Triumphalis excavations near the Vatican or the Isola Sacra necropolis at Portus. 15. Found in the St. Peters necropolis, from the mid-second century; Alf. Merlin, “Publications relatives a l’antiquité Romaine,” L’Année Epigraphique 1946 (1945): 42–43, no. 136. 16. The will from Gaul dates to the first or second century, CIL XIII, 5708. Toynbee, Death, 62–63. 17. CIL V 2072. The exact role of these women remains unclear in relation to the other named performers, but it is noteworthy that women as a group are mentioned. Zanker notes the importance of roses in funerary ritual; Zanker and Ewald, Mit Mythen Leben, 34. 18. Richlin, Arguments, 276–79. 19. This aligns with Borg’s assertion that dramatic mythological sarcophagi were mostly used for women and children (typically of the freed class); Crisis, 203. 20. Denzey, Bone Gatherers. 21. For example, Bielfeldt, Orestes, 14; on sarcophagi, see Paul Zanker, Un’Arte per l’impero: Funzione e intenzione delle immagini nel mondo Romano (Milan: Electa, 2002), 157–83; for a general discussion of nonelite viewers, see John R. Clarke, Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans Visual Representation and NonElite Viewers in Italy, 100 BC–AD 315 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 22. Jaś Elsner, “Visualising Women in Late Antique Rome: The Projecta Casket,” in Through a Glass Brightly: Studies in Byzantine and Medieval Art and Archaeology Presented to David Buckton, ed. Chris Entwhistle (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2003), 31. 23. See Carolyn Osiek on female patronage, “Roman and Christian Burial Practices and the Patronage of Women,” in Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Context; Studies of Roman, Jewish and Christian Burials, ed. Laurie Brink and Deborah Green (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 243–70. 24. Osiek, “Patronage,” 247. 25. Zanker, Un’Arte. 26. Zanker, Un’Arte, 157–183; Bielfeldt, “Medusengrab.” 27. Bjoern Ewald, “Men, Muscle and Myth: Attic Sarcophagi in the Cultural Context of the ‘Second Sophistic,’” in Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic, ed. Barbara Borg (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter), 240–42; Ewald, 253, invites the female presence for kline sarcophagi, which only appear at the end of the second century. See also Zanker and Ewald, Mit Mythen Leben, 216. 28. Bielfeldt, Orestes.

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29. For example, the title of Richlin’s 2014 volume, Arguments with Silence: Writing the History of Roman Women. 30. A brief introduction to motherhood and the female viewer is Zanker and Ewald, Mit Mythen Leben, 216–17. 31. See for example, Beryl Rawson, “Death, Burial, and Commemoration of Children in Roman Italy,” in Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, ed. David L. Balch and Carolyn Osiek (Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), 277–97. 32. See Zanker in Zanker and Ewald, Mit Mythen Leben, 216–17. 33. Helen King, “Bound to Bleed: Artemis and Greek Women,” in Images of Women in Antiquity, ed. Alan Cameron and Amelie Kurht (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 111–12. 34. See Maureen Carroll, “Mother and Infant in Roman Funerary Commemoration,” in Infant Health and Death in Roman Italy and Beyond: Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Volume 96, edited by Maureen Carroll and Emma-Jayne Graham (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2014), 159–78. 35. Also noted by Zanker and Ewald, Mit Mythen Leben, 44. 36. Zanker and Ewald, Mit Mythen Leben, 35, fig. 25. The sarcophagus is in the baptistery of Florence. 37. An early textual reference is found in the Thesmorphiazusae of Aristophanes, line 455, in which a woman must return to the market to weave garlands. 38. The male members of the Ciarnenses and the Herclanenses, the other two groups noted in CIL V 2072 were tasked with lighting incense and offering cooked meat and wine, a potential gendering of these tasks within this particular will. 39. As Elsner has written, the depiction of garlands “implies offerings,” Jaś Elsner, “Ornament, Figure and mise en abyme on Roman Sarcophagi,” in Ornament and Figure in Graeco-Roman Art: Rethinking Visual Ontologies in Classical Antiquity, ed. Nikolaus Dietrich and Michael Squire (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 360; in the same volume, see Jennifer Trimble, “Figure and Ornament, Death and Transformation in the Tomb of the Haterii,” 347; see also Herdejürgen, “Kult”; Bielfeldt, Orestes, 317–18. 40. See Dolansky, “Parentalia” 137, n. 47, for Parentalia inscriptions that mentions flowers and garlands. 41. Meinecke, “Funerary Cult,” 32. 42. Trimble, “Haterii,” 347–8. 43. Petronius, Satyricon 111–12. There is much more to this vignette beyond the scope of this essay, in particular as it relates to women. 44. Trimble, “Haterii,” fig. 12.9 discussion on 341. 45. Athanassia Zografou writes, “Lamps are omnipresent in PGM recipes (2nd c. BC–5th c. AD),” in “Magic Lamps, Luminous Dreams: Lamps in PGM Recipes,” in Light and Darkness in Ancient Greek Myth and Religion: Greek Studies; Interdisciplinary Studies, ed. Menelaos Christopoulos, Efimia D. Karakantza, and Olga Levaniouk (Lanham, MD:  Lexington Books, 2010), 277; the nard recipe is discussed later, 281. 46. For example, CIL VI. 10248 from Rome; CIL X.633 from Salernum.

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47. Xenophon i.8, Bryan P. Reardon, Collected Ancient Greek Novels (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 133. 48. Zanker and Ewald, Mit Mythen Leben, 322–23. 49. See Jean Sorabella for the literary evidence, “A Roman Sarcophagus and Its Patron,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 36 (2001): 72. 50. Bielfeldt, “Medusengrab,” 121. 51. Trimble (“Haterii,” 348) underscores the importance of real lamp light to activate the tomb interior. 52. For example, in Egypt; Zografou, “Magic,” 286. For an excellent study on Roman lamps, see Ruth Bielfeldt, “Lichtblicke – Sehstrahlen: Zur Präsenz römischer Figuren- und Bildlampen,” in Ding und Mensche in der Antike: Gegenwart und Vergenwärtigung, ed. Ruth Bielfeldt (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), 195–238. 53. Leonard V. Rutgers, The Jews in Late Ancient Rome: Evidence of Cultural Interaction in the Roman Diaspora (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 86. 54. Paolo Dalmiglio, La Catacomba Ad Decimum della via Latina (Rome: Pontifica Commissione di Archeologia Sacra, 2013). 55. See Borg, Crisis, 229–36; also see Katherina Meinecke, “Invisible Sarcophagi: Coffin and Viewer in the Late Imperial Age,” in Patrons and Viewers in Late Antiquity (Aarhus Studies in Mediterranean Antiquity X), ed. Stine Birk and Birte Poulsen (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2012), 83–105. 56. See Zanker, “Putting the Deceased into the Picture: ‘Pictorial Devices’ as Visual Cues,” in Flesheaters, 9–25. 57. See Jaś Elsner in the introduction to Life, Death, 1–14; more generally, see Robert Couzin “The Christian Sarcophagus Population of Rome,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 27 (2014): 275–303. 58. Russell remains the clearest articulation of this. Ben Russell, “The Roman Sarcophagus ‘Industry’: A Reconsideration,” in Life, Death, 119–47. See also Sarah Madole, “A Case Study in Attribution: Two East Greek Sarcophagi in Italy,” Römsche Mitteilungen 124 (2018): 269–99. 59. Meinecke has suggested that the sarcophagus was displayed along with the corpse during the laying out (collocatio) in the home, in “Invisible Sarcophagi,” 102–03. 60. Meinecke, “Invisible Sarcophagi” 102–03. 61. Borg, Crisis, 237, n. 113. 62. Borg, Crisis, 237–39. 63. For literary examples of female agents, see Kerri J. Hame, “Female Control of Funeral Rites in Greek Trajedy: Klytaimnestra, Medea and Antigone,” Classical Philology 103 (2008): 1–15. The best evidence is the iconography found on Greek vases, e.g., H. Allen Shapiro, “The Iconogaphy of Mourning in Athenian Art,” American Journal of Archaeology 95 (1991): 629–56. 64. For example, Jenifer Neils, “‘Women Are White’: White Ground and the Attic Funeral,” in Papers on Special Techniques in Athenian Vases, ed. Kenneth Lapatin (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008), 61–72. Neils argues that the use of white ground was an intentional gendering of the vase and moreover that

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the technique was most commonly applied to “female” vases types such as lekythoi and alabastra. See also Elvia Giudice, Il tymbos, la stele e la barca di Caronte: L’immaginario della morte sulle lekythoi funerarie a fondo bianco (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2015). 65. Metropolitan Museum of Art inv. no. 47.100.4a,b. 66. Richlin, Arguments, 268.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bielfeldt, Ruth. “Orest im Medusengrab: Ein Versuch zum Betrachter.” Römische Mittelungen 110 (2003): 97–130. ———. Orestes auf römischen Sarkophagen. Berlin: Reimer, 2005. ———. “Lichtblicke – Sehstrahlen: Zur Präsenz römischer Figuren- und Bildlampen.” In Ding und Mensch in der Antike: Gegenwart und Vergenwärtigung, edited by Ruth Bielfeldt, 195–238. Heidelberg: Winter, 2014. Borg, Barbara. Crisis and Ambition: Tombs and Burial Customs in Third-Century AD Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ———. Roman Tombs and the Art of Commemoration: Contextual Approaches to Funerary Customs in the Second Century CE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Carroll, Maureen. “Mother and Infant in Roman Funerary Commemoration.” In Infant Health and Death in Roman Italy and Beyond, edited by Maureen Carroll and EmmaJayne Graham. Supplement, Journal of Roman Archaeology 96 (2014): 159–78. Clarke, John R. Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans Visual Representation and NonElite Viewers in Italy, 100 BC–AD 315. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Couzin, Robert. “The Christian Sarcophagus Population of Rome.” Journal of Roman Archaeology 27 (2014): 275–303. Dalmiglio, Paolo. La Catacomba Ad Decimum della via Latina. Rome: Pontifica Commissione di Archeologia Sacra, 2013. Denzey, Nicola. The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007. Dolansky, Fanny. “Honouring the Family Dead on the Parentalia: Ceremony, Spectacle, and Memory.” Phoenix 65 (2011): 125–57. Elsner, Jaś. “Visualising Women in Late Antique Rome: The Projecta Casket.” In Through a Glass Brightly: Studies in Byzantine and Medieval Art and Archaeology Presented to David Buckton, edited by Chris Entwhistle, 22–36. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2003. ———. “Ornament, Figure and mise en abyme on Roman Sarcophagi.” In Ornament and Figure in Graeco-Roman Art: Rethinking Visual Ontologies in Classical Antiquity, edited by Nikolaus Dietrich and Michael Squire, 353–91. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018.

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Elsner, Jaś. Introduction to Life, Death and Representation: Some New Work on Roman Sarcophagi, edited by Jaś Elsner and Janet Huskinson, 1–14. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010. Elsner, Jaś and Wu Hung. “Editorial.” RES 61/62 (2012): 5–21. Erker, Darja Šterbenc. “Gender and Roman Funeral Ritual.” In Memory and Mourning: Studies on Roman Death, edited by Valerie Hope and Janet Huskinson, 40–60. Oxford/Oakville, CT: Oxbow Books, 2011. Ewald, Björn. “Men, Muscle and Myth. Attic Sarcophagi in the Cultural Context of the ‘Second Sophistic.’” In Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic, edited by Barbara Borg, 229–73. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2004. Giudice, Elvia. Il tymbos, la stele e la barca di Caronte: L’immaginario della morte sulle lekythoi funerarie a fondo bianco. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2015. Hame, Kerri J. “Female Control of Funeral Rites in Greek Tragedy: Klytaimnestra, Medea and Antigone.” Classical Philology 103 (2008): 1–15. Herdejürgen, Helga. “Sarkophage mit Darstellungen von Kultgeräten.” In Symposium über die Antiken Sarkophage: Pisa 5–12, September 1982, Marburger-WinckelmannProgramm, edited by Bernard Andreae, 7–25. Marburg: Kunstgeschichtlichen Seminars, 1984. King, Helen. “Bound to Bleed: Artemis and Greek Women.” In Images of Women in Antiquity, edited by Alan Cameron and Amelie Kurht, 109–27. London: Croom Helm, 1983. Madole, Sarah. “A Case Study in Attribution: Two East Greek Sarcophagi in Italy.” Römische Mitteilungen 124 (2018): 269–99. McCann, Anna M. Sarcophagi in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978. Meinecke, Katherina. “Funerary Cult at Sarcophagi, Rome and Vicinity.” In Iconographie funéraire romaine et societé: Corpus antique, approches nouvelle?, edited by Martin Galinier and François Baratte, 31–49. Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2013. ———. “Invisible Sarcophagi: Coffin and Viewer in the Late Imperial Age.” In Patrons and Viewers in Late Antiquity (Aarhus Studies in Mediterranean Antiquity X), edited by Stine Birk and Birte Poulsen, 83–105. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2012. Merlin, Alf. “Publications relatives a l’antiquité Romaine.” L’Année Epigraphique 1946 (1945): 38–44. Neils, Jenifer. “‘Women Are White’: White Ground and the Attic Funeral.” In Papers on Special Techniques in Athenian Vases: Proceedings of a Symposium Held in Connection with the Exhibition The Colors of Clay: Special Techniques in Athenian Vases, at the Getty Villa, June 15–17, 2006, edited by Kenneth Lapatin, 61–72. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008. Osiek, Carolyn. “Roman and Christian Burial Practices and the Patronage of Women.” In Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Context; Studies of Roman, Jewish and Christian Burials, edited by Laurie Brink and Deborah Green, 243–70. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008.

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Rawson, Beryl. “Death, Burial, and Commemoration of Children in Roman Italy.” In Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, edited David L. Balch and Carolyn Osiek, 277–97. Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003. Reardon, Bryan P. Collected Ancient Greek Novels. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008. Richlin, Amy. Arguments with Silence: Writing the History of Roman Women. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Russell, Ben. “The Roman Sarcophagus ‘Industry’: A Reconsideration.” In Life, Death and Representation: Some New Work on Roman Sarcophagi, edited by Jaś Elsner and Janet Huskinson, 119–47. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010. Rutgers, Leonard V. The Jews in Late Ancient Rome: Evidence of Cultural Interaction in the Roman Diaspora. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Shapiro, H. Allen. “The Iconography of Mourning in Athenian Art.” American Journal of Archaeology 95 (1991): 629–56. Sorabella, Jean. “A Roman Sarcophagus and Its Patron.” Metropolitan Museum Journal 36 (2001): 67–81. Toynbee, J. M. C. Death and Burial in the Roman World. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971. Trimble, Jennifer “Figure and Ornament, Death and Transformation in the Tomb of the Haterii.” In Ornament and Figure in Graeco-Roman Art: Rethinking Visual Ontologies in Classical Antiquity, edited by Nikolaus Dietrich and Michael Squire, 327–52. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. Tulloch, Janet H. “Women Leaders in Family Funerary Banquets.” In A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity, by Carolyn Osiek and Margaret Y. MacDonald, with Janet H. Tulloch, 164–193. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006. Zanker, Paul. Un’Arte per l’impero: Funzione e intenzione delle immagini nel mondo Romano. Milan: Electa, 2002. ———. “Putting the Deceased into the Picture: ‘Pictorial Devices’ as Visual Cues.” In Flesheaters: An International Symposium on Roman Sarcophagi; University of California at Berkeley 18–19 September 2009; Sarkophag-Studien 11, edited by Christopher H. Hallett, 9–25. Berlin: Reichert, 2019. Zanker, Paul, and Bjoern Ewald. Mit Mythen Leben: Der Bilderwelt der Römischen Sarkophage. Munich: Hirmer, 2004. Zografou, Athanassia. “Magic Lamps, Luminous Dreams: Lamps in PGM Recipes.” In Light and Darkness in Ancient Greek Myth and Religion: Greek Studies; Interdisciplinary Studies, edited by Menelaos Christopoulos, Efimia D. Karakantza, and Olga Levaniouk, 276–94. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010.

Chapter 7

Assessing the Roles of Women in New Syrian Funerary Reliefs in Japanese Collections Kerry Hull and Lincoln H. Blumell

The ancient site of Palmyra, Syria, has produced a large sculptural and epigraphic corpus of material from the Roman period (ca. 64 BC–AD 273). Of the roughly three thousand extant funerary portraits from this site, nearly half depict females.1 Accordingly, this corpus provides a rich iconographic record to investigate the role of women in ancient Palmyrene, and perhaps larger Syrian, society. In this study, we will broach this subject by presenting an edition of an unpublished Palmyrene funerary inscription accompanied by a female funerary portrait that we recently discovered in a private collection in Japan. Using this new monument as a point of departure, we will examine various aspects of female lifestyle, status, and embodied lives, particularly as they relate to the pudicitia gesture. As part of this examination, we will also discuss the iconography of two funerary stelae from Manbij (Syria), both of which depict women, that are currently housed in the Okayama Orient Museum in Japan and that we recently published.2 Finally, we will examine another female funerary relief from Palmyra that is housed in the Hirayama Ikuo Silk Road Museum in Japan to help illustrate specific iconographic markers related to women, such as the high-whorl spindle, distaff, and key, as we query their intended messaging. LIFE AND DEATH IN PALMYRA The ancient city of Palmyra, Syria, or Tadmor (its earlier Arabic name), was a burgeoning city during the early Roman period. Palmyra fell under the auspices of Rome when Pompey annexed it in 64 BC and fell fully under Roman control during the reign of Tiberius (AD 14–37). Since Palmyra 147

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was situated at a key juncture between the Parthian and Roman empires, it became an important “caravan city” where Roman, Greek, and Parthian cultures merged. Though Palmyra was under Roman rule, Greek and Aramaic were privileged over Latin as the languages most commonly attested in the epigraphic record.3 Most of the tombs from Palmyra that have produced funerary inscriptions and sculptures consist of family or tribal burials in which hundreds of individuals were interred in a single mortuary complex. Of these, two primary mortuary complexes dominate: (1) a hypogeum, or subterranean tomb, which became the preferred burial type by the middle of the second century AD, and (2) above-ground tower tombs or mausoleums. In both kinds of complexes, burial slots, or loculi, were often sealed with sculpted funerary busts bearing images of the deceased. About one-third of these loculi reliefs have inscriptions, usually biographic and written primarily in Palmyrene Aramaic, but some are written in Greek and to a lesser extent Latin.4 The Palmyrene conception of the tomb and loculi reliefs remains somewhat enigmatic. On the one hand, funerary sculptures may have been meant to provide glimpses into the personalities of the deceased while living—or at least perhaps how they or others wanted them to be remembered. Yet on the other hand, Palmyrene portraiture is well known to be generic and formulaic at times, seemingly targeting an “idealized beauty.”5 While individuals are often shown “expressionless”6 in rigid frontality—a highly uncommon feature in Mediterranean art—certain emotive states can be discerned in some instances. Linguistic evidence, however, suggests that loculi busts intended to embody aspects of the individual. Indeed, these busts were sometimes called npš’ in Aramaic, which means “soul,” “person,” or “self,” and is cognate to the Hebrew nefesh, meaning the “soul,” “life,” or “emotion” of an individual.7 THE ROLES OF WOMEN IN PALMYRA Epigraphic evidence has greatly contributed to our knowledge of the role of women in Palmyrene society. While female funerary iconography has also aided our understanding, as Eleonora Cussini cautions, relying strictly on female iconography to apprehend the role of women in Palmyra can at times be misleading;8 reliefs tend to stress the domestic sphere, whereas epigraphic data reveal that women performed various roles that extended well beyond the traditional domestic realm.9 For example, in the epigraphic record we learn of women commissioning funerary reliefs (PAT 0840), buying and selling properties (PAT 2727), erecting funerary reliefs to honor relatives (PAT 1417, PAT 0334, PAT 0356), and dedicating monuments and inscriptions (PAT 1417).

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Turning to female Palmyrene iconography, the spindle and distaff have traditionally been considered markers of feminine gender and have usually been thought to symbolize a woman’s work in the domestic sphere, more particularly in the occupation of lanificium (work in wool). In some reliefs, women seem to be pointing directly to the spindle and distaff with their right hand,10 which has been interpreted deictically as if to draw attention to them.11 While this could be a way to call explicit attention to their work in the domestic domain, and more specifically that these women, and perhaps even their families, were involved in textile production12 (as the spindle and distaff could represent other facets of a woman’s life), other possibilities exist.13 For example, in Roman culture the spindle and distaff at once represented the quotidian responsibilities of women while also serving as an ideological precedent for a virtuous woman as the materfamilias.14 Before the mid-second century, the spindle and distaff were the items most often held by women in Palmyrene sculpture. This changed, however, after about AD 200, when for reasons not fully understood, women were rarely depicted holding them. Some have proposed that this iconographic modification is suggestive of a change in the role of women, or possibly a shift in characteristics that became salient in female society.15 Of the women in Palmyrene funerary sculpture that hold the spindle and distaff, over half also raise their hand near their face,16 a feature also commonly found in greater Syria. For example, a recently published funerary relief from the modern Syrian city of Manbij (ancient Hierapolis), currently housed in the Okayama Orient Museum in Japan, shows a woman, Fortunata, with her right hand raised against her right cheek in the pudicitia pose while her left hand holds a spindle and distaff (figure 7.1).17 Another recently published gravestone from the same locale and collection similarly depicts two women symmetrically positioned with their left arms raised up, with their hands on their cheeks, and they hold in their right hands a spindle and distaff (figure 7.2). Some have therefore suggested that for Palmyra the spindle and distaff may have been gradually replaced as “attributes of the female signifier” by the raised-hand gesture during the second century.18 In sum, almost by default, female roles in Syrian society have traditionally been interpreted through the lens of spindles and distaffs, indicative of domestic abilities; however, they may contain deeper symbolic meanings such as virtue, industry, and creation.19 The diachronic implications of the spindle and distaff as semiotic markers, however, are still not well understood in Palmyra. Does the shift during the second century away from representing the spindle and distaff represent a change in female roles in Palmyrene society, perhaps indicating, as some have argued,20 an increasing emancipation21 of women? Possibly, but iconographic analysis alone will not fully answer this question.22

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Figure 7.1  Funerary Bust of Fortunata, from Manbij, Dated to September 6, AD 103, Okayama Orient Museum, Japan. Source: Photograph: Lincoln Blumell.

Pudicitia In the Roman world, perhaps the best-known gesture of a woman was that of the pudicitia, in which a woman rests one arm across her waist as she raises her other hand onto or near her face. Often a woman will hold the edge of her himation (or palla), which is sometimes draped over the head in the form of a veil. The pudicitia gesture is commonly interpreted as representing the “modesty,” “virtue,” or even “chastity” of the woman, one who fully embodies a proper female in society—what one scholar calls the “exemplar of feminine docility and faithfulness.”23 The pudicitia gesture is also thought to characterize a woman as a capable householder24 and perhaps even has higher associations with spiritual fortitude and fertility.25 Additionally, the raising of the hand up to the face may have had an apotropaic function.26 In other cases, the pudicitia gesture seems closely associated with scenes of mourning.27 At Palmyra, the pudicitia gesture appears in nearly three-quarters of female funerary busts and never with males (which is not true for Rome, however), perhaps suggestive of its role in representing mourning in addition

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Figure 7.2  Limestone Funerary Monument from Manbij, Okayama Orient Museum, Japan. Source: Photograph: Lincoln Blumell.

to a woman’s virtue. In particular, the reaching up and touching of the veil could at once symbolize modesty,28 while the act of pulling the veil over her face to hide her tears symbolizes mourning.29 Keys Keys are another potential indicator of women’s roles in ancient Syrian society that can be interpreted through iconographic and epigraphic investigation. A loculus relief from Palmyra in the Hirayama Ikuo Silk Road Museum30 provides a good example in which the representation of a key is part of female accouterment (figures 7.3 and 7.4). The Aramaic text on the right side of the monument identifies the woman: 1. ’qm’  Aqma, 2. brt   daughter of, 3. ’sy‘   Asya. 4. ḥbl   Alas! Aqma is shown elegantly dressed in a cloak and tunic, wearing bracelets and a trapezoidal brooch, all with gold paint as extant polychromy. Hanging from the brooch is a key with Greek letters written on it. Typically, the key appears either hanging from the brooch or held in the woman’s hand. An important clue to the meaning of the key in this context comes from a text on

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Figure 7.3  Aqma, Daughter of Asya. Hirayama Ikuo Silk Road Museum, Japan. Source: Photographs: Kerry Hull.

a monument housed in Copenhagen in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek museum. In Palmyrene Aramaic it reads bt ‘lm’, or house of eternity” (CIS II, 4323), a euphemism (CIS II, 4323, 4323 bis et ter), a euphemism for “tomb” that is attested in Syriac, Nabataean, and Jewish Aramaic, in addition to Palmyrene Aramaic.31 If these are to be interpreted as literal keys to the tomb of which women were in charge of mortality,32 this could suggest a religious role in funerary rites. These keys may in fact be for tombs or may represent keys to the afterlife.33 In this regard, it is noteworthy that women almost always appear when lion-head door knockers are depicted in Palmyrene iconography.34 Might this suggest they held the keys to the gates of eternity?35 It is a plausible interpretation and would indicate an important afterlife role for women.36

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Figure 7.4  Close-Up of Key Hanging from Brooch with Greek Letters. Hirayama Ikuo Silk Road Museum, Japan. Source: Photographs: Kerry Hull.

A NEW PALMYRENE FEMALE FUNERARY RELIEF SCULPTURE In 2019, we discovered an unpublished female loculus relief from Palmyra in Kirishima, Japan, at the Matsushita Museum of Art, a private museum that opened in 1983. The museum’s first director, Kanetomo Matsushita, was an artist and physician with a passion for collecting art. Dr. Matsushita traveled extensively throughout the Middle East and Europe in the mid-twentieth century and acquired a remarkable collection of art from the ancient world, especially from Egypt and the Near East. Among a number of other Palmyrene and Syrian sculptures in their collection, the Matsushita Museum of Art has a limestone female funerary bust that, on stylistic grounds, clearly comes from Palmyra (figure 7.5). The monument measures 52 cm high and 48 cm wide. A photo of the sculpture appears on page 45 of the museum’s catalog,37 but the object has not received scholarly attention or been formally published. The image carved in high relief shows the bust of an elegantly dressed female, identified in the inscription by the name L’wmt. As is typical for women in Palmyra on funerary reliefs, the

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Figure 7.5  Loculus Relief from Palmyra, in the Matsushita Museum of Art, Japan. Source: Photo: Kerry Hull.

Matsushita relief shows L’wmt wearing a tunic, a cloak, and a veil that covers her head. The cloak is attached to the tunic by a brooch above her left breast. A veil covers the turban on her head and falls vertically along her right side. Her brow is thick and pronounced. A diadem with a turban headdress appears above the forehead, a combination distinctive in Palmyrene funerary monuments.38 The specific designs on female headdresses at Palmyra may be indigenous motifs associated with specific clans or families.39 On the Matsushita relief, the diadem below the turban has a repoussé floral design with panels to each side with a stacked leaf-like motif. Very similar frontlet designs are found on other Palmyrene monuments.40 L’wmt’s right arm rests horizontally across her lower chest and is covered gently by the pleats of her cloak. Her right hand holds the edge of her cloak, although several of the fingers are slightly damaged. While the left arm is

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broken off at the elbow, it is clear that her arm was raised up to or near the veil adjacent to her left cheek in the well-known pudicitia pose, representing here either the Roman notion of an idealized matrona (industrious, honorable, fertile), the act of mourning, or perhaps simply adding the notion of gravitas to the moment.41 At Palmyra, the latter meaning seems to be the dominant one, but assigning a definitive semiotic value to the pudicitia pose at Palmyra is problematic.42 Several items of jewelry appear on the Matsushita relief. Jewelry on female monuments generally increases in popularity in Palmyra around AD 150–20043 and becomes a standard way to depict elite women, quite unlike their Roman counterparts at the time.44 While erosion to the chest area of the Matsushita relief inhibits a detailed analysis, at least three necklaces are visible. The first fits tightly around L’wmt’s neck and may be composed of pearls. Additionally, she wears earrings, evidenced by the remains of a dumbbell earring on her left ear. Earrings are one of the most commonly found items of jewelry in Palmyrene tombs of females and are primarily made of bronze and silver.45 While no epigraphic date is provided on the monument,46 dating the Matsushita loculus relief is possible thanks to Inholt’s original division of Palmyrene funerary sculptures into three major time periods: Period I, AD 50–150; Period II, AD 150–200; and Period III, AD 200–273 (with some revisions by Colledge).47 Period I women show very little adornment such as jewelry, and they commonly hold a spindle and distaff in their left hand. In Period II, women begin to hold their veils with their right hand.48 The spindles and distaffs of Period I fade out by the mid-second century,49 and wearing jewelry begins to surge. In Period III, jewelry use continues to increase, and women start to hold their veil with their left hand.50 In the Matsushita relief, L’wmt, adorned with necklaces and earrings and holding her veil with the left hand, is suggestive of a Period III (AD 200–273) dating for the bust. Additional indicators of a Period III dating come from the brooch and earrings. While very little detail remains, the brooch is noticeably large, a feature characteristic of Period III styles at Palmyra.51 Also, the dumbbell style of earring is typical for Period III at Palmyra, lending further weight to its thirdcentury dating.52 Note that a comparable Palmyrene relief sculpture with the same diadem design, gestures, dumbbell earrings, and other features likewise dates to AD 210–230.53 Sadurska54 suggests that this final stage of Palmyrene society when lavish jewelry becomes widespread in the iconography represents “tiefgreifende ökonomische und soziale Veränderungen” (“profound economic and social change”) throughout Palmyra. The upper-right portion of the relief bears a four-line55 epitaph in Palmyrene Aramaic (figure 7.6):

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Figure 7.6  L’wmt, Daughter of Kîtôt, Matsushita Museum of Art.Source: Photo: Lincoln Blumell.

1. l’wmt L’wmt, 2. brt  daughter of, 3. kytwt Kîtôt. 4. ḥbl   Alas! The text contains the woman’s name and her patronym. The name L’wmt is significant as it is the only known attestation in the Palmyrene corpus. The structure of the name, however, is somewhat enigmatic. As the first letter is a lamad, it is possible the name is a prepositional phrase construction, with the l- being the preposition “for” or “belonging to.” Names sometimes take the form of prepositional phrases,56 such as lhdd (“For/Belonging to Hadad”)57 (PAT nos. 0043:4, 0067:2, 0072:1), lšgl’ (“For/Belonging to Šangilā”)58 (PAT no. 2590Rev:1), lrmn (“For /Belonging to Ramman”),59 and lšmš (“For/ Belonging to Šamaš”).60 If L’wmt is a prepositional construction, the name

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itself would be ‘wmt, which is similarly unattested. Another possibility is that it is a verbal sentence, as in the name-phrase lwṭb (“May [DN] do good”).61 The second name, Kytwt (Kîtôt),62 is known from Palmyra, particularly within a family in the first half of the first century AD. A grandfather and grandson of the Mattabôl tribe both bear the name Kytwt and are associated with the family who built Tower no. 44 at Palmyra in the Valley of the Tombs in the Western Necropolis. One inscription (PAT 0463, CIS 4115 [de 41]) at the site speaks of both of these individuals named Kytwt63: kytwt | br tymrṣw br kytwt br tym’ rb’ dy mn pḥd bny | [mt]bwl (“Kîtôt, son of Taîmarsû, son of Kîtôt, son of Taimā rb’,64 who is from the tribe of Benê Mattabôl”). Another inscription (PAT 0464) from Tower no. 44,65 dating to AD 40, explains the genealogy of Kîtôt, son of Taîmarsû, who is the owner of the tomb66: [byrḥ sywn] šnt 3.100+40+10+2 | [ṣlmy’ ‘ln] dy kytwt br | [tymrṣw wdy myš] brt | [mlkw ‘tt]h wdy lšmš | [brh wdy šlmn] brh wdy | mlkw ‘lymh [In the month Siwan], the year 351, [these statues are those] of Kîtôt, son of [Taîmarsû, and of Maîshâ], daughter of [Malku], his wife, and of Lishamsh, [his son, and of Shalman], his son, and of Malku, his servant.

Kîtôt, son of Taimā rb’, is associated with the AD 9 date, which is one of the earliest at Palmyra.67 The second date of this tomb is AD 40,68 corresponding to year 351 in the Seleucid era.69 Both of these males named Kîtôt are part of the Sokkayaî, one of the families in the Mattabôl tribe,70 who built two tombs in Palmyra associated with the Tower of Kîtôt.71 However, these Kîtôt individuals date far too early to fit our iconographic dating of the Matsushita relief to Period III (AD 200–273). There are several other occurrences of the name Kîtôt that occur at Palmyra that we could consider. There is a Kytwt, who is the son of Mezabbana, a relationship that is expressed three times on PAT 0091: kytwt mzbn’, “Kîtôt (son of) Mezabbana.” In addition, an inscription from a tomb wall (PAT 0089) reads kytwt mzbn’, “Kîtôt (son of) Mezabbana.” Similarly, another tomb graffiti inscription (PAT 0083) mentions kytwt mzbn’ ’t’qb, “Kîtôt (son of) Mezabbana, (son of) ‘Ate’aqab.” Piersimoni72 dates this Kîtôt to AD 180, which is reasonably close to the iconographic dating we propose for the Kîtôt mentioned on the Matsushita relief. Finally, one inscription on a male funerary bust in the Antakya Museum (inv. 9041) contains another instance of the name Kytwt: Kyt[w]t br | ml’ zbd’ ḥbl, “Kîtôt son of Male (son of) Zabḍa. Alas!” Meischner and Cussini73 date this monument to the late second century, which would correspond well with the iconographic dating of the Matsushita relief. We therefore provisionally suggest this to be the best candidate for Kîtôt, father of L’wmt.

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Since all loculi reliefs at Palmyra certainly represent individuals of wealth who could afford such elaborate burials,74 we can assume L’wmt was likewise a woman of means in Palmyra. Her physical accouterments such as dress and jewelry further evince her status. CONCLUSION The Matsushita relief introduces us to a woman named L’wmt, daughter of a man named Kîtôt. This funerary bust presents the only known example of the female name L’wmt in Palmyra or greater Syria. While we are unable to outline a secure prosopography for L’wmt, a possible candidate for her father Kîtôt from extant sources seems to be an individual from the late second century AD in Palmyra, which corresponds comfortably to our dating of the Matsushita relief to Period III (AD 200–273) based on iconographic evidence. The rich adornment and elegant pudicitia gesture on the Matsushita relief evoke notions of propriety, elegance, and important female virtues such as spiritual fortitude and industriousness, those of the Roman matrona. In Palmyra, however, the ostensible pudicitia pose may not have the singular function of showing a woman’s femininity, grace, and domestic abilities as it also overlaps considerably with cultural roles as mourners. Spindles and distaffs—common to many female funerary busts in Palmyra—likewise seem to be polyvalent symbols, representing at once the domestic sphere but also signaling the attributes of virtue and industry. Epigraphic data make clear that Palmyrene women could be involved in building monumental tombs, commissioning funerary reliefs, honoring relatives, buying and selling properties, offering inscriptions to gods, and restoring religious buildings. In addition, recent evidence suggests that women could have been scribes in Palmyra, based on a funerary bust showing a female holding a stylus.75 Furthermore, females depicted wearing or holding keys may indicate that they were thought to hold the keys to either the tomb itself in this life, the “house of eternity,” or to the Otherworld, thereby providing insight into their roles in life and death. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to express gratitude to Ms. Naoko Ibuse, curator of the Matsushita Museum of Art, for her kind assistance during our three-day research visit to the museum and for permission to publish the Matsushita relief. In addition, we thank Hiroshi Sudo, curator of the Okayama Orient Museum, for permission to photograph and publish the monuments from

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Manbij as well as for his hospitality and helpfulness during our visit. We would like to thank Rubina Raja, director of the Palmyra Portrait Project, for her kind assistance in identifying the Matsushita relief as unpublished. We are also grateful to Michal Gawlikowski for providing informative insights on the inscription of the Matsushita relief. SOURCE ABBREVIATIONS AND SIGLA CIS Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum. Pars secunda, tomus tertius. Inscriptiones Palmyrenae (Paris: Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 1926). PAT Delbert R. Hillers and Elenora Cussini. Palmyrene Aramaic Texts (Baltimore, 1996).

NOTES 1. Rubina Raja, “‘You Can Leave Your Hat On’: Priestly Representations from Palmyra: Between Visual Genre, Religious Importance and Social Status,” in Beyond Priesthood: Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Roman Empire, ed. Richard L. Gordon, Georgia Petridou, and Jörg Rüpke (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2017), 417–42. See also Maura K. Heyn, “Gesture and Identity in the Funerary Art of Palmyra,” American Journal of Archaeology 114, no. 2 (2010): 631–61.  2. Lincoln H. Blumell and Kerry Hull, “Two Greek Epitaphs from the Middle Eastern Cultural Center in Tokyo, Japan,” Journal of Epigraphic Studies 2 (2019): 77–84. 3. Jean-Baptiste Yon, “Bilinguisme et trilinguisme à Palmyre.” MOM Éditions 37, no. 1 (2008): 195–211. 4. Most Palmyrene loculi reliefs were looted in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries and now can be found across the globe, from Wyoming to Japan. 5. Rachel Meyers, “Female Portraiture and Female Patronage in the High Imperial Period,” in A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, eds. Sharon L. James and Sheila Dillon (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 353–56. 6. Signe Krag and Rubina Raja, “Representations of Women and Children in Palmyrene Funerary Loculus Reliefs, Loculus Stelae, and Wall Paintings,” Zeitschrift für Orient-Archäologie 9 (2016): 134–78, note that serenity and calmness are hallmarks of Palmyrene sculptural depictions. These authors also note that facial expressions were only one way in which individualism was depicted in Palmyrene art, others being gestures, inscriptions, and constellations of family members. 7. M. A. R. Colledge, The Art of Palmyra (London: Westview Press, 1976), 62. For a fuller discussion of nefesh, see A. J. Kropp and Rubina Raja, “The Palmyra Portrait Project,” Syria: Archéologie, Art et Histoire 91 (2014): 393–408. 8. Eleonora Cussini, “Beyond the Spindle: Investigating the Role of Palmyrene Women,” in A Journey to Palmyra; Collected Essays to Remember Delbert R.

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Hillers, ed. Eleonora Cussini (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 27–43. As Cussini cautions (p. 38), “We may conclude by noting that assumptions on a secondary role of Palmyrene women based on gendered iconography and specifically on the presence of the discussed items in female portraits are misleading and do not do justice to the picture resulting from the inscriptions.” 9. Eleonora Cussini, “Transfer of Property at Palmyra,” Aram 7 (1995): 27, 33, 36–38. See also Cynthia Finlayson, Review of Roman Palmyra: Identity, Community, and State Formation, by Andrew M. Smith II, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 372 (2014): 246–49.  10. For example, F. Hvidberg-Hansen and G. Ploug, Palmyra Samlingen: Katalog, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Copenhagen: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, 1993), 67; CIS 4488; CIS 4354; CIS 4008. 11. Heyn, “Gesture and Identity,” 641. 12. B. Fowlkes-Childs and M. Seymour, The World between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019), 169. 13. Catherine G. Taylor, Late Antique Images of the Virgin Annunciate Spinning: Allotting the Scarlet and the Purple (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 17, 27, notes that crossculturally the spindle and distaff have powerful symbolic associations with virtue, wisdom, and industry. 14. Taylor, Late Antique Images, 14 and 51. On another note, while some neighboring cultures clearly associated the spindle and distaff with certain goddesses, such as the Hittite goddess of fortune; Ishtar, the Akkadian and Sumerian goddess; Anat and Ashirtu, the Canaanite goddesses; Uttu, the Mesopotamian goddess; and the Fates, the Greek goddesses of fortune and destiny, there is little evidence of such a connection in Palmyra that would suggest elevating this female symbol to destiny “weaving” deities. 15. Colledge, Art of Palmyra, 151. 16. Heyn, “Gesture and Identity,” 636. 17. Blumell and Hull, “Two Greek Epitaphs,” 78, figure 1. Based on epigraphic evidence, we date this monument to September 6, AD 103. 18. Heyn, “Gesture and Identity,” 636. 19. Taylor, Late Antique Images. For a discussion of possibly links of the spindle and distaff to a Syrian goddess who controlled fate and “wove” destinies, see Cynthia Finlayson, “The Women of Palmyra: Textile Workshops and the Influence of the Silk Trade in Roman Syria,” Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, https​:/​/ di​​gital​​commo​​ns​.un​​l​.edu​​/tsac​​​onf​/3​​85. 20. Anna Sadurska, “L’art et la société. Recherches iconologiques sur l’art funéraire de Palmyre,” Archeologia 45 (1994): 17. 21. The status of women in Palmyrene society increased steadily into the third century AD, culminating in Zenobia becoming queen. Earlier portrayals of women in a patriarchal society such as Palmyra, however, “reinforce[d] their subordinate position in the community” (Maura K. Heyn, “Embodied Identities in the Funerary Portraiture of Palmyra,” in Palmyra: Mirage in the Desert, ed. Joan Aruz [New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art 2016], 116). A. M. Smith II, Roman Palmyra:

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Identity, Community, and State Formation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 102, similarly notes that “an obvious social distinction existed at Palmyra based on gender. Males dominated Palmyrene society; women were subordinates.” For arguments against “emancipation” representing a change in domestic responsibilities, see Maura K. Heyn, “Status and Stasis: Looking at Women in the Palmyrene Tomb,” in World of Palmyra. Palmyrenske Strudier, ed. Rubina Raja and Andreas Kropp (Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2016), 200. 22. Finlayson, “Review.” See also Cussini, “Beyond the Spindle.” 23. M. George, “Family Imagery and Family Values in Roman Italy,” in The Roman Family in the Empire: Rome, Italy, and Beyond, ed. M. George (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005), 41. 24. Heyn, “Gesture and Identity”; cf. G. Davies, “The Body Language of Palmyra and Rome,” in Positions and Professions in Palmyra = Palmyrenske Studien/ Palmyrene Studies, vol. 2, eds. T. Long and A. H. Sørensen (Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters, 2017), 20–36. 25. Taylor, Late Antique Images, 218. 26. L. Dirven, “Aspects of Hatrene Religion: A Note on the Statues of Kings and Nobles from Hatra,” in The Variety of Local Religious Life in the Near East: In the Hellenistic and Roman Periods, ed. T. Kaizer (Boston: Brill, 2008), 237. 27. Zanker argues it has nothing to do with mourning per se; rather it emphasizes a woman’s modesty and restraint. See P. Zanker, “The Hellenistic Grave Stelai from Smyrna: Identity and Self-Image in the Polis,” in Images and Ideologies: SelfDefinition in the Hellenistic World, eds. A. Bulloch, E. S. Gruen, A. A. Long, and A. Stewart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 222–26. Cf. R. R. R. Smith, 1991, Hellenistic Sculpture: A Handbook (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 84. N. Kaltsas and D. Hardy, Sculpture in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 199. I. B. Romano, Classical Sculpture: Catalogue of the Cypriot, Greek, and Roman Stone Sculpture in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2011), 33. 28. Anna Sadurska, “Die palmyrenische Grabskulptur,” Das Altertum 34 (1988): 22, has argued that the veil could also be viewed symbolically as “trennmarkierung zwischen der Welt der Lebenden und der Toten” (“the dividing line between the world of the living and the dead”) in funerary reliefs. 29. In a similar vein, Thetis, mother to Achilles, wore a black veil to hide her grief in Iliad 24, 83–96, 90–91. 30. This monument (C4523) has been previously published by Klaus Parlasca, “Ikonographische Probleme palmyrenischer Grabreliefs,” Damaszener Mitteilungen 3 (1988): 215–21. See also Jean-Baptiste Yon, Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie, XVII/1: Palmyre (BAH 195) (Beirut: IFPO, 2012), 418 no. 561. We are grateful to Rubina Raja for pointing us to both of these sources. The monument, however, had been lost to scholars until we located it in storage at the Hirayama Ikuo Silk Road Museum in Japan in 2018. 31. J. F. Healey, Aramaic Inscriptions and Documents of the Roman Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 238.

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32. Łukasz Sokołowski, “Portraying the Literacy of Palmyra: The Evidence of Funerary Sculpture and Their Interpretation,” Études et Travaux XXVII (Institut des Cultures Méditerranéennes et Orientales de l’Académie Polonaise des Sciences, 2014), 393. 33. Colledge, Art of Palmyra, 70. See also Maura K. Heyn, “Female Portraiture in Palmyra,” in A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, eds. S. James and S. Dillon (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 439. 34. For example, Hvidberg-Hansen and Ploug, Palmyra Samlingen, 67; CIS 4488. 35. H. J. W. Drijvers, “After Life and Funerary Symbolism in Palmyrene Religion,” in La soteriologia dei culti orientali nell’Impero Romano, eds. U. Bianchi and M. J. Vermaseren (Leiden: Brill, 1982), 720. 36. Heyn, “Female Portraiture in Palmyra,” 439, also suggests a more quotidian meaning as simply a key to a jewelry box or representing the woman’s control of domestic matters. 37. Kanesuke Matsushita, Fumiko Furue, and Hideo Suimoto, 松下美術コレクショ (Kagoshima: Matsushita Museum of Art, 1993). 38. D. Mackay, “The Jewellery of Palmyra and Its Significance,”  Iraq 11, no. 2 (1949): 78. Cf. N. U. R. I. T. H. Kenaan-Kedar, “Sculpted Palmyrian Funerary Female Portraits with Extensive Jewelry Sets: A Revisionist Reading of Their Meanings and Impact,” in  Art History 2012—The Future Is Now: Studies in Honor of Vladimir Peter Goss Celebrating His 70th Birthday , eds. M. Capetić, D. Dujmović, V. Jukić, and A. Nikoloska (2012), 108–20. 39. As Sadurska notes, Palmyrene women “tragen meistens einheimische Gewänder, die sich sehr deutlich von der griechisch-römischen Tracht unterscheiden.” See Anna Sadurska,  “Die palmyrenische Grabskulptur,” 18. See also Finlayson, “Women of Palmyra.” Cf. Cynthia Finlayson, “Veil, Turban, and Headpiece: Female Status and Funerary Portraiture at Palmyra, Syria” (PhD diss, University of Iowa, 1998). 40. Cf. Hvidberg-Hansen and Ploug, Palmyra Samlingen, 123. 41. As Heyn, “Gesture and Identity,” 634, has noted, of the 262 funerary reliefs depicting women, 70 percent (187 cases) raise either their right or left arm. 42. Heyn, “Gesture and Identity,” 634, however, has cautioned that the pudicitia gesture at Palmyra “could just have been a conventional way to portray women, modeled on Roman example without the concomitant social baggage.” 43. Colledge, Art of Palmyra, 70. 44. Jewelry is depicted with women significantly more often in Palmyra than in Rome. A. Raat, “Diadems: A Girl’s Best Friend? Jewellery Finds and Sculptural Representations of Jewellery from Rome and Palmyra in the First Two Centuries AD” (master’s thesis, Leiden University, 2013), 94. 45. Raat, Diadems: A Girl’s Best Friend?, 63–64. See also Kyohite Saito, “Palmyrene Burial Practices from Funerary Goods,” in A Journey to Palmyra: Collected Essays to Remember Delbert R. Hillers, ed. Eleonora Cussini (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 44–45. L. De Jong, The Archaeology of Death in Roman Syria: Burial, Commemoration, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 81–82. 46. Roughly 10 percent of Palmyrene reliefs contain an epigraphic date. Kropp and Raja, “Palmyra Portrait Project,” 397.

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47. Colledge, Art of Palmyra, 53–64. 48. Heyn, “Embodied Identities,” 199–200. 49. Heyn, “Gesture and Identity,” 632. 50. Heyn, “Female Portraiture in Palmyra,” 44. 51. Mackay, “Jewellery of Palmyra,” 179. 52. Raat, Diadems: A Girl’s Best Friend?, 63–64, notes that “dumb-bell earrings are only represented on busts in the period ca. 140–200 AD.” See also FowlkesChilds and Seymour, “World between Empires,” 173. Cf. Mackay, “Jewellery of Palmyra,” 180–81. 53. Harald Ingholt, Studier over Palmyrensk Skulptur (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Forlag, 1928), 145, PS 472. 54. Sadurska, “Die palmyrenische Grabskulptur,” 19. 55. There is evidence of a fourth line of text, but the poor condition of that area of the monument precludes further analysis. 56. E. Marcato, Personal Names in the Aramaic Inscriptions of Hatra (Venezia: Edizioni Ca’Foscari Digital Publishing, 2018), 74–75. 57. Klaus Beyer, Die aramäischen Inschriften aus Assur, Hatra und dem übrigen Ostmesopotamien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 114. 58. J. K. Stark, Personal Names in Palmyrene Inscriptions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 80. 59. Stark, Personal Names, 93. 60. Stark, Personal Names, 93. 61. Beyer, Die aramäischen Inschriften, 114. Cf. Marcato, Personal Names, 74. 62. The root underlying the name Kytwt is not at all clear. According to Caquot and Stark, Kytwt “pourrait être un nom de scheme qaytūl,” possibly formed on the root kit, but a *kyt or *kwt root is unattested. André Caquot and J. K. Stark, “Personal Names in Palmyrene Inscriptions,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 182, no. 2 (1972): 201. Stark, Personal Names, 92, notes that none of the suggested etymologies for Kytwt is compelling. 63. Gawlikowski, “Monuments funéraires de Palmyre,” 185. 64. The term rb’ is commonly found at the end of genealogies. For a full discussion of the term and its use, see Smith, “Identity, Community,” 88–97. 65. Tower 44 was recently destroyed by ISIS. See Dana Ballout, “Islamic State Destroys Ancient Tombs in Palmyra,” Wall Street Journal, September 4, 2015. 66. Andrew M. Smith, “Identity, Community, and State Formation at Roman Palmyra” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2004), 184. 67. P. Piersimoni, “The Palmyrene Prosopography” (PhD diss., University of London, 1995), 584. 68. Smith, “Identity, Community,” 184, dates it to 355 in the Seleucid calendar (AD 44). 69. See E. Will, “Le relief de la tour de Kithot et le banquet funéraire à Palmyre,” Syria 28, nos. 1–2 (1951): 70. 70. Jean-Baptiste Yon, “Index,” in Les notables de Palmyre [online] (Beyrouth: Presses de l’Ifpo, 2002), http://books​.openedition​.org​/ifpo​/3777.  71. Piersimoni, “Palmyrene Prosopography,” 538–39.

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72. Piersimoni, “Palmyrene Prosopography,” 592. 73. Jutta Meischner and Eleonora Cussini, “Vier palmyrenische Grabreliefs im Museum von Antakya,” Archäologischer Anzeiger 2 (2003): 97, 100–01. 74. E. Cussini, “Regina, Martay and the Others: Stories of Palmyrene Women, Orientalia 73(2), Nova Series (2004): 236n7. 75. Smith, “Identity, Community,” 102, figure 4.12.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ballout, D. “Islamic State Destroys Ancient Tombs in Palmyra.” Wall Street Journal, September 4, 2015. Beyer, K. Die aramäischen Inschriften aus Assur, Hatra und dem übrigen Ostmesopotamien (datiert 44 v. Chr. bis 238 n. Chr.). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998. Blumell, L. H., and K. Hull. “Two Greek Epitaphs in the Middle Eastern Cultural Center in Tokyo, Japan.” Journal of Epigraphic Studies 2 (2019): 77–84. Caquot André, and J. K. Stark. “Personal Names in Palmyrene Inscriptions.” Revue de l’histoire des religions 182, no. 2 (1972): 200–02. Colledge, M. A. R. The Art of Palmyra. London: Westview Press, 1976. Cussini, E. “Beyond the Spindle: Investigating the Role of Palmyrene Women.” In A Journey to Palmyra: Collected Essays to Remember Delbert R. Hillers, edited by E. Cussini, 27–43. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Cussini, E. “Regina, Martay and the Others: Stories of Palmyrene Women.” Orientalia 73, no. 2 Nova Series (2004): 235–44. Cussini, E. “Transfer of Property at Palmyra.”  ARAM Periodical 7, no. 1 (1995): 233–50. Davies, G. “The Body Language of Palmyra and Rome.” In Positions and Professions in Palmyra = Palmyrenske Studien/Palmyrene Studies, vol. 2, edited by T. Long and A. H. Sørensen, 20–36. Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters, 2017. De Jong, L. The Archaeology of Death in Roman Syria: Burial, Commemoration, and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Dirven, L. “Aspects of Hatrene Religion: A Note on the Statues of Kings and Nobles from Hatra.” In The Variety of Local Religious Life in the Near East: In the Hellenistic and Roman Periods, edited by T. Kaizer, 209–46. Boston: Brill, 2008. Drijvers, H. J. W. “After Life and Funerary Symbolism in Palmyrene Religion.” In La soteriologia dei culti orientali nell’Impero Romano, edited by U. Bianchi and M. J. Vermaseren, 709–33. Leiden: Brill, 1982. Finlayson, C. Review of Roman Palmyra: Identity, Community, and State Formation, by A. M. Smith II. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 372 (2014): 246–49. Finlayson, C. “Veil, Turban, and Headpiece: Female Status and Funerary Portraiture at Palmyra, Syria.” PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1998.

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Finlayson, C. “The Women of Palmyra: Textile Workshops and the Influence of the Silk Trade in Roman Syria.” Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, https​:/​/di​​gital​​commo​​ns​.un​​l​.edu​​/tsac​​​onf​/3​​85 Fowlkes-Childs, B., and M. Seymour. The World between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019. George, M. “Family Imagery and Family Values in Roman Italy.” In The Roman Family in the Empire: Rome, Italy, and Beyond, edited by M. George, 37–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Gawlikowski, M. “Palmyra 1992,” Polish Archeology in the Mediterranean 4 (Reports 1992) (1993): 111–18. Gawlikowski, M. “The City of the Dead.” In A Journey to Palmyra: Collected Essays to Remember Delbert R. Hillers, edited by E. Cussini, 44–73. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2005. Healey, J. F. Aramaic Inscriptions and Documents of the Roman Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Heyn, M. K. “Embodied Identities in the Funerary Portraiture of Palmyra.” In Palmyra: Mirage in the Desert, edited by J. Aruz, 110–19. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010. Heyn, M. K. “Female Portraiture in Palmyra.” In A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, edited by S. James and S. Dillon, 439–41. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2012. Heyn, M. K. “Gesture and Identity in the Funerary Art of Palmyra.”  American Journal of Archaeology 114, no. 2 (2010): 631–61. Heyn, M. K. “Status and Stasis: Looking at Women in the Palmyrene Tomb.” In World of Palmyra. Palmyrenske Strudier, edited by R. Raja and A. Kropp, 197– 209. Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2016. Hughes, L. “The Chaste Roman Matron: Recasting Roman Sculpture’s Visual Paradigm.” Unpublished manuscript, n.d. Hvidberg-Hansen, F., and G. Ploug. Palmyra Samlingen: Katalog, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Copenhagen: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, 1993. Ingholt, H. Studier  over Palmyrensk Skulptur. Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Forlag, 1928. Kaltsas, N., and D. Hardy. Sculpture in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002. Kenaan-Kedar, N. U. R. I. T. H. “Sculpted Palmyrian Funerary Female Portraits with Extensive Jewelry Sets: A Revisionist Reading of Their Meanings and Impact.” In Art History 2012—The Future Is Now: Studies in Honor of Vladimir Peter Goss Celebrating His 70th Birthday, edited by M. Capetić, D. Dujmović, V. Jukić, and A. Nikoloska, 108–20. 2012. Krag, S., and R. Raja. “Representations of Women and Children in Palmyrene Funerary Loculus Reliefs, Loculus Stelae, and Wall Paintings,”  Zeitschrift für Orient-Archäologie 9 (2016): 134–78. Kropp, A. J., and R. Raja. “The Palmyra Portrait Project.” Syria: Archéologie, Art et Histoire 91 (2014): 393–408.

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Mackay, D. “The Jewellery of Palmyra and Its Significance.” Iraq 11, no. 2 (1949): 160–87. Marcato, E. Personal Names in the Aramaic Inscriptions of Hatra. Venezia: Edizioni Ca’Foscari Digital Publishing, 2018. Matsushita, K., F. Furue, and H. Suimoto. 松下美術コレクション . Kagoshima: Matsushita Museum of Art, 1993. Meischner, J., and E. Cussini. “Vier palmyrenische Grabreliefs im Museum von Antakya.” Archäologischer Anzeiger 2 (2003): 97–105. Meyers, R. “Female Portraiture and Female Patronage in the High Imperial Period.” In A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, edited by S. L. James and S. Dillon, 353–56. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Nosch, M. L., and C. Gillis. Ancient Textiles: Production, Crafts and Society, vol. 1. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2007. Parlasca, K. “Ikonographische Probleme palmyrenischer Grabreliefs.” Damaszener Mitteilungen 3 (1988): 215–21. Piersimoni, P. “The Palmyrene Prosopography.” PhD diss., University of London, 1995. Raat, A. “Diadems: A Girl’s Best Friend? Jewellery Finds and Sculptural Representations of Jewellery from Rome and Palmyra in the First Two Centuries AD.” Master’s thesis, Leiden University, 2013. Raja, R. “You Can Leave Your Hat On”: Priestly Representations from Palmyra: Between Visual Genre, Religious Importance and Social Status. In Beyond Priesthood: Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Roman Empire, edited by R. L. Gordon, G. Petridou, and J. Rüpke, 417–42. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. Romano, I. B. Classical Sculpture: Catalogue of the Cypriot, Greek, and Roman Stone Sculpture in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2011. Sadurska, A. “Die palmyrenische Grabskulptur.” Das Altertum 34 (1988): 14–23. Sadurska, A. “L’art et la société. Recherches iconologiques sur l’art funéraire de Palmyre.” Archeologia 45 (1994): 11–23. Saito, K. “Palmyrene Burial Practices from Funerary Goods.” In A Journey to Palmyra: Collected Essays to Remember Delbert R. Hillers, edited by E. Cussini, 150–65. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Smith, R. R. R. Hellenistic Sculpture: A Handbook. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991. Smith II, A. M. Roman Palmyra: Identity, Community, and State Formation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Sokołowski, Ł. “Portraying the Literacy of Palmyra: The Evidence of Funerary Sculpture and Their Interpretation.” Études et Travaux XXVII. Institut des Cultures Méditerranéennes et Orientales de l’Académie Polonaise des Sciences, 2014, 367–403. Stark, J. K. Personal Names in Palmyrene Inscriptions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.

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Stol, M. Women in the Ancient Near East, translated by H. Richardson and M. Richardson. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. Taylor, C. G. Late Antique Images of the Virgin Annunciate Spinning: Allotting the Scarlet and the Purple. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Will, E. “Le relief de la tour de Kithot et le banquet funéraire à Palmyre,” Syria 28, nos. 1–2 (1951): 70–100. Yon, J. B. “Bilinguisme et trilinguisme à Palmyre.” MOM Éditions 37, no. 1 (2008): 195–211. Yon, J. B. “Index.” In Les notables de Palmyre [online]. Beyrouth: Presses de l’Ifpo, 2002. http://books​.openedition​.org​/ifpo​/3777. Yon, J. B. Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie, XVII/1: Palmyre (BAH 195). Beirut: Ifpo, 2012. Zanker, P. “The Hellenistic Grave Stelai from Smyrna: Identity and Self-Image in the Polis.” In Images and Ideologies: Self-Definition in the Hellenistic World, edited by A. Bulloch, E. S. Gruen, A. A. Long, and A. Stewart, 212–30. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Chapter 8

Foreseeing the Divine Bridal Chamber A Household of Mosaics from Shahba-Philippopolis Catherine Gines Taylor

During the late ancient period, religious experience for women was tied to the materiality of the domus and the culture of the household. Religious groups, orders, and cults used the household setting as the site of worship and ritual. Christianity was likewise, from the beginning, a household movement1 that used spaces within the house for gatherings and worship. Across the Roman Empire, houses were interactive environments in which both women and men were integrated. Some households were led by the materfamilias or domina who would be expected to serve as the host of banquets in her home. Women also served in various roles as patrons and hosts for early Christian house churches.2 The art and material culture found within the domus was inextricably tied to women’s religious experience in antiquity. Female depictions in household mosaic decoration, like those from Shahba-Philippopolis for example, call for consideration of the consequences for female viewership in these spaces. In 1925, French archaeologist Maurice Dunand discovered three mosaic floor panels within the same house (now destroyed) in Shahba-Philippopolis, Syria. These panels include a triad of female personifications, the marriage procession of Peleus and Thetis, and a large triclinium decorated with a nuptial banqueting scene. For the sake of clarity and description, the panels will be referred to, respectively, as the Euteknia panel, the Peleus and Thetis panel, and the Nuptial Banquet panel. Their stylistic similarities indicate that they were likely commissioned together and were from the same workshop. This series of three mosaics, today housed separately in the Museum of Damascus and the Museum at Suweida, were rapidly uncovered by Dunand. He continued to excavate sites in the Jebel Druze region in quick succession 169

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with little care for analysis of the archaeological strata.3 It was briefly reported that “three mosaics with very good workmanship”4 were part of this cache, dating to the first quarter of the fourth century. The aesthetic and iconographic value of this mosaic program cannot be denied. The narrative ensemble of these mosaics, as well as the striking display of multiple female figures, is remarkable. Dunand himself could not refrain from claiming: “These mosaics are the most beautiful that have yet been found in Syria.”5 When Dunand described the floor mosaics, it was not common practice to read the iconography with any interpretation beyond their literal so-called “pagan” orientation, nor was it common to see them as particularly religious. Janine Balty6 has described this series of mosaics as a kind of visual referent for the bride of the house whose nuptial vows and promises of fertility are represented in the wedding or hospitality feast.7 For Balty, the allegorical figures represent the attributes of the good wife and instruct her in proper paideia, encouraging future children within the marriage. Moreover, Balty suggests that these scenes are an expression of an ideal life and are perfectly pagan in their revivalist push to reify Hellenic style in the region.8 While I do believe that Balty is correct in pointing to the influence of Neoplatonism in late ancient Syria, I would like to suggest that Neoplatonic themes were entwined with late ancient beliefs common to Saint Thomas and Valentinian Christianities,9 which were also popular in Syria at the time.10 Early Christian iconographic interpretation was “not confined to conventional renderings of established figural formulas,”11 and the highly transformative milieu of the third and fourth centuries fostered art that deployed a variety of iconographic meanings. Moreover, it is possible to retrieve more complex readings of the Shahba house mosaics in light of descriptive evidence found in patristic sources, philosophical treatises, noncanonical scripture, and inscriptions. The sequence of mosaics addressed in this chapter is one that calls for the three panels to be read together. They feature obscure personifications and sophisticated narratives that relate to each other and to the expected viewer— a viewer educated and able to generate meaning from visual art, texts, and practice. I suggest that the mosaic images from Shahba-Philippopolis can be read as an authoritative delivery of gnosis, an initiated kind of knowledge within the grand and syncretic12 cosmography of Christianity. Furthermore, the progression of scenes—initiate attendants, the queen goddess in the act of dextrarum iunctio, processions toward the bridal chamber, and finally the bride at the table offering the cup to her embracing partner over the panis quadratis—prominently features a trinity of female personifications and clearly emphasizes the authoritative and imperative nature of the female participant in this economy of rites. Private ritual and material iconographies were well fitted to the domestic sphere where familial and household

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networks, inclusive of the elite as well as more humble characters, could be instructive in models of behavior and worship. These “holy” spaces were also located at the heart of women’s religious experience. This chapter will attend to new interpretations for these three fourthcentury mosaics at Shahba-Philippopolis, Syria. I will first situate the art of mosaics within the household context and, second, uncover the tableaux of the three mosaics by describing the context, narrative, and iconographic details of the extant panels. Third, this study will take up the problems of contextual interpretation and situate these mosaics within their historical framework. Fourth, I will make a case for the hybridity of Graeco-Roman philosophies with Christian ideologies, both of which were flourishing in fourth-century Syria.13 Fifth, and finally, I will turn to some early textual sources that speak to the conflation of Christian practices, initiation, and ascent before I conclude. With the proverbial veils of ignorance pulled aside, I hope to provide new insights into the material space of these three mosaics and the domestic space where ancient viewers came to a new kind of materialized knowledge and witnessed the feminine (and masculine) divine with their physical and spiritual eyes. HOUSEHOLD MOSAICS IN CONTEXT In 1961, Frank Brown asserted that “the [public] architecture of the Romans was, from first to last, an art of shaping space around ritual.”14 Three decades later, John R. Clarke made the same claims for the domestic setting where “rituals include worship of household gods, ceremonies of coming-of-age, marriage, birth, and death.”15 The habitual practice of rite itself designated the house as a ritually constructed space. Christians used houses in this way; they did not simply wait for the development of official space in order to find fellowship. In fact, in working with scriptural texts like 1 Corinthians, Jorunn Økland has designated the dining room or triclinium as the site-specific space for ritual within the household setting.16 Artistic and household patronage have always been dependent on factors of time, location, and proximal influences. Philippopolis, later called Shahba, enjoyed the fortune of being the native home of Philip “the Arab,” emperor from 244 to 249, whose rule coincided with the millennial anniversary of the founding of Rome.17 Philip patronized new construction in his hometown, located eighty-seven miles south of Damascus and approximately one hundred miles due east of the Sea of Galilee within the southwestern region of Syria. The emperor imperialized the city’s layout (figure 8.1) by quartering the city with a cardo and decumanus and setting city walls with gates at the cardinal points. Today, the ruins center on several structures including a

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Figure 8.1  Map of Shahba-Philippopolis. Source: Map drawn by George Pierce, 2021.

palace complex, an exedra facing the forum, a hexastyle temple, a theater, and a bath complex. Not more than fifty meters from the baths is a museum, a former Roman-style villa, which still houses a cache of mosaics from the area.18 Philippopolis continued to flourish, as is evident by the mosaics that date to as early as the Constantinian era. According to the archaeological report by the Institut Français du ProcheOrient, the Shahba house where our three mosaics were found was located north of a Roman street dividing the city from east to west, between the tetrapylon that once marked the very center of the town and the south gate.19 The report also confirms that this was one of two houses in Philippopolis noted for its intact atrium. Unfortunately, the report did not include the architectural layout of the villa at Shahba, an essential element when considering the interpretation of buildings.20 Even in its absence, we can speculate on possible visual pathways. A comparable plan for the house is exemplified in the footprint of the museum set over villa ruins at Shahba today. Here is included a schematic drawing of an atrium-style Roman house to help imagine a possible layout for the mosaics (figure 8.2). The villa is roughly rectangular with a tablinum, several cubicula, and a series of larger rooms—one of which was

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Figure 8.2  Model of a Roman Atrium-Style Villa with Suggested Mosaic Arrangement. Source: Reconstruction drawn by George Pierce, 2021.

certainly designated as the triclinium or dining room—all set around a central atrium. Within typical Roman-style villas, some rooms were public facing, while others were exclusively private. Cubicula were primarily private areas for the familial household, while the tablinum, usually situated to the side of the atrium and opposite the entrance, would have been an official space for receiving clients and was therefore the most public. Even public-facing spaces were subject to the rules of hospitality, and guests needed an explicit invitation to enter. Mosaic programs situated within the domestic sphere occupied these intimate spaces, but intimate space in the late ancient world was not as cloistered as might be imagined. The domus was the locus of private living and at the same time acted as the center point for hospitality, intellectual life, discussion, and religious practice for a variety of socially constructed audiences. The mosaic programs of the Shahba villa reflect larger social interests by way of historical, mythological, and allegorical representation. They were also overt displays of status, wealth, and social class. While mosaics certainly demonstrate a level of luxury and decoration, there is also evidence to suggest that deliberate iconographic programs had the capacity for multivalent interpretation. Mosaic was an expensive art form imported to this region in Syria, made for a very limited and elite group of people familiar with Greek learning.21 Triclinia were common sites of religious cult practices, as seen, even if fragmentarily, in famous houses in Antioch like the “House

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of the Mysteries of Isis” where a moment of initiation is depicted.22 Scenes of Dionysiac revelry and drinking were also common within Roman-style dining rooms, perhaps to evoke promised feasting and merrymaking, though sometimes also accompanied with warnings against excess. In her 2015 address on the state of early Christian iconographic interpretation, Bente Kiilerich notes the enigmatic nature of mosaic decoration within early Christian settings and the problems that persist in decoding the meaning and significance of early Christian imagery.23 These difficulties are particularly evident in domestic settings where the question of “visibility and invisibility of early Christian images”24 demands careful exploration of specific narratives in relationship with the architectural space. Decorative floors in sacred buildings were limited in their use of iconography. “Holy images were not to be stepped on and defiled” (Cod. Theod. I.viii). However, salvific themes like the story of Jonah, the good shepherd, and an abundance of organic and vegetal designs had a way of showing up in floor mosaics without explicit restrictions and could be read as signifying peace, salvation, eternity, and eternal life when read through a symbolic lens.25 Kiilerich further submits that these same designs could equally find themselves on the floors of private houses, and “although the mosaics display no specifically Christian iconography, they may be interpreted with a potential Christian signification.”26 In much the same way, the three monumental panels at Shahba-Philippopolis are not overtly Christian in their narratives, but feature complicated iconographic programs with the potential to be read according to nontraditional Christian interpretation. Moreover, the elaborate expenditure necessary to commission mosaic work on this scale points to the fact that these scenes were deliberate and purposeful though, perhaps, also disguised or hidden in their meaning. While houses were used for more orthodox practices, domestic spaces were also preferred by peripheral or schismatic groups for meetings and worship. The house provided space in which to share ideas privately and outside of the purview of those who policed orthodoxy as evidenced within the Theodosian Code. For example, Christians counted as heretics gathered together in hidden assemblies and gatherings that took place within private domestic settings and the “walls of private houses after the likeness of churches” (Cod. Theod. 16.5.11).27 Kim Bowes has identified the use of private or domestic space as a kind of “shorthand for heretical practice,” as perceived by the institutional church; her research has revealed a rich variety of community models where “extra-church rituals . . . presented the institutional church with a fundamental challenge.”28 Diverse Christian communities convened in domestic spaces and used these same gathering places to help form their identities. In particular, the private household was the locus of “survival, recruitment, and even self-definition”29 for Christianities that grew alongside those promoted by emperors

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and bishops. Harry O. Maier notes that despite all attempts to control the diversity of Christian household groups, they were ultimately impossible to regulate.30 Christian and Jewish groups, as well as mystery religions and philosophical movements, used domestic spaces for their own purposes and often found themselves supported under the auspices of patrons who defied edicts, decrees, and canon law.31 During the third and fourth centuries, the household provided an ideal site of respite; it proffered those who aligned themselves with heterodoxy, what Maier has termed the topography of heresy, “an alternative landscape.”32 THE SHAHBA-PHILIPPOPOLIS MOSAICS IN VISION Art was engaged with several material-ocular phenomena that had instructive value in late antiquity. Images, symbols, and visual signs were an intrinsic part of the late Roman oikumene (world view). The act of didactic looking and the transformative practice of seeing were informed by the philosophical imperative to “know thyself.”33 The late ancient world privileged the “specular capacity”34 of the viewer as the gateway to the imaginative landscapes of the mind’s eye. Viewers in late antiquity recognized the eye’s “instructive potential” for introspection and for shaping systems of belief.35 Vision36 and knowledge shared a well-established relationship and were readily informed by theories of intimate intromission and extramission between the viewer and the image. Intromission and extramission were ancient optical theories made popular within the writings of Galen, Apuleius, Seneca, and others.37 For intromission, objects cast off the emission of particles as simulacra meant to penetrate the eye of the viewer, and at the same time, the material effluence from the eye of the viewer could extend its own touch toward the object in the process of extramission.38 The dual ordeal of vision and envisioning was a penetrative39 one wherein the body was pierced and changed, and the optical experience worked upon the soul. To look was to reveal relationships between the self and the other in a context of either emulation or rejection. These visual relationships applied within the household, patronage structures, and larger community dynamics.40 In the specular tradition of late antiquity, art could act as a mirror. The materiality of mosaics, particularly mosaics with figural and narrative scenes, participated with the late ancient viewer in acts of intromission and extramission. The mirrored gaze of the viewer reflected back the impulse toward self-knowledge and the reflexive desire to understand one’s soul. Even within an early Christian context, the concept of the mirror was used. In Ode 13 from the Odes of Solomon, written in Syriac and available to diverse communities during the first and second century, the Lord is compared to a mirror:

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Behold, the Lord is our mirror. Open (your) eyes and see them in Him. And learn the manner of your face, Then declare praises to His Spirit. And wipe the paint from your face, And love His holiness and put it on. Then you will be unblemished at all times with Him. Hallelujah.41

To appreciate how this imagery might have played out in the Shahba villa, let us turn now to the mosaics themselves. Euteknia Panel The Euteknia panel (200 × 120 cm) was the first mosaic discovered by Dunand within the villa (figure 8.3). Today housed at the Museum of Damascus, this personification scene is self-contained within an elaborately bordered frame of tesserae, forming a kind of window onto an allegorical world. Three

Figure 8.3  Euteknia Panel with Personifications of Dikaiosyne and Philosophia, Ca. First Quarter of the Fourth-Century CE. Museum of Damascus, Syria. Source: Reproduction rights license @agefotostock.

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classically derived female figures are dressed in complementary variations of tunics with pallas and are situated in the middle foreground of the picture plane with their names inscribed in Greek above their heads. The central figure is seated with her feet elevated on the dais.42 The figure is identified as Eutekneia [sic], the very personification of the nominal form of euteknos, meaning “blessed with children” or “fruitfulness.”43 Her hair is parted in the center and pulled back at the sides; she appears to be wearing a simple gold crown delineated by a line of red tesserae at its base. Her gaze is to her right, as is her gesture. The figure standing on the right is identified as Dikaiosyne, meaning justice or right judgment. She is standing in a frontal pose that leans into a kind of linear contrapposto toward her right. She likewise gestures with her right hand, ultimately drawing attention to the final figure. This figure, identified as Philosophia, or philosophy, stands at the left within the tableau. She is frontally posed, her right hand making a blessing or modified adlocutio gesture while she looks back toward her companions. Each of the figures wears scarlet purple shoes, and their garments share variations on the same complementary color palette.44 Clearly, they are meant to be seen and read in harmony with one another. Euteknia, flanked by her assisting sister muses, is the poetical embodiment of a woman blessed with progeny. She is enthroned, and her figure incorporates the physical attributes of both prudent judgment/righteousness and philosophy, as if they are her own guides, working in concert with her attributes as one blessed with children. Euteknia is seated, made imperial, and given pride of place as the master student; she is elevated in the hierarchy of the three figures. The gestures and movement of the female personifications indicate that the viewer is visually caught in the middle of something more dynamic than can be contained within this frame. The setting is a minimalist interior space with columnar structures connected by a draped or tented cloth. The overall impression of the architectural elements foregrounds the figures while also designating the space as set apart. The space is also furnished with a cross-barred, high-backed chair with a gold cushion and drape. A dais is awkwardly angled in front of the throne and a capsa,45 or scrinium, complete with a multitude of scrolls, is in the left foreground next to the figure of Philosophia. All three figures gesture simultaneously toward the scrinium46 and corporeally insist with their gaze and line of sight that the viewer consider the interpretation of texts—not just a single scroll but a box full of scrolls. While scrolls and scrinia were commonly used as attributes of philosophers or teachers, they may also represent the literary means by which the mosaic can be read and understood. In the mosaic, a raised veil—a parapatesma (cloth of honor)—privileges Euteknia’s position as she is seated on her golden cushion in the center of the image. She is established as one who has acquired the physical attributes

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of Philosophia and Dikaiosyne because her clothing incorporates all of the colors found in the garments of the other personifications. She bodily comprehends them and rests at ease on her dais; she is crowned and takes on the same visage as her attendants. Again, the parapatesma has been deliberately pulled back. In the late ancient world, curtains were used in both sacred and secular contexts to divide and decorate architectural spaces. From the fourth century, curtains were hung across the doors of early Christian churches and sometimes from ciboria and around baptismal fonts.47 The barrier or curtained veil is visually lifted within the mosaic to allow the viewer access to the realm of philosophy and righteous judgment as a preparatory state of being for Euteknia, one blessed with children. Yet, the woman Euteknia is depicted without children. Balty suggests that the blessing of children refers to literal offspring and that these children are good as a result of their education in philosophy and righteousness. I propose instead that the figure of Euteknia, while it may allude to a particular woman of the household, more plausibly personifies an abstraction by which the woman, to be discussed later, blessed mankind with a certain kind of offspring—children—perhaps even Valentinian initiates who also called themselves the seed. Euteknia, as a personification, gestures the viewer forward, beyond the picture plane, as if to indicate that the narrative sequence continues. Within the Graeco-Roman world, personifications signified abstract concepts and typically followed the convention of being female. Naming our triad of females by inscription allows the viewer a clear attribution in the absence of other identifying characteristics.48 Personifications, meant to enlighten the viewer, were used by Christians and non-Christians alike. Both the name and concept of Euteknia seem particularly relevant and informative in at least one place in the Apostolic Fathers. Ignatius of Antioch (d. 135–140 CE) addresses a series of women at the end of his Letter to the Smyrneans. The letter concludes by saluting the household of Gavia, which “could reflect her role as a leader of a house church but could also reflect merely her prominence as a hospitable mother in the faith.”49 The rare attestation of a woman called Euteknus is mentioned in the same salutation as an excellent or incomparable acquaintance of Ignatius alongside two other women, Alce and Daphnus.50 But why would patrons be so keen to represent these abstract personifications within the household setting? Ruth Leader-Newby argues against the notion that they were merely cultivated as decoration or for their own sake, as part of the Hellenistic landscape, and favors a more philosophical interpretation.51 One question that scholars have continued to debate is whether late ancient viewers had grown unfamiliar with the literature and iconography of classical subject matter. Did the late ancient viewer need labeled name inscriptions in order to understand the symbolic representation of a personification and to draw upon their familiarity with their literary references?

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Leader-Newby takes up this question and presents the possibility of public spectacle in the form of theatrical performances and public processions, the entertainments of everyday life, as source material for late ancient floor mosaics.52 She proposes that the Euteknia mosaic was inspired by some sort of tableaux vivant, conceived and performed on an intellectual level.53 I would further pose the possibility that these personifications may have played a role in the semiprivate performance of cultic ritual, initiation, or induction. The abstract nature of these personifications—especially when coupled with the other two mosaics, which depict a mythological marriage and procession and a grand nuptial banquet feast—points to a kind of initiated spectacle. Classical archaeologist Barbara Borg notes that personifications are not randomly chosen—they are not exchangeable especially when they are named explicitly.54 For Borg, the ancient viewer, in reading the mosaics at Shahba-Philippopolis, would necessarily become an allegorist. The viewer could read the names inscribed above each female figure and reference the familiar literary sources associated with those same concepts. This process obscured the borders between the divine potential of the personification and the applied “poetic fiction,” as Borg will call it, of interpretation by the viewer.55 The message expressed by a personification permits the viewer to use the allegory in various contexts like cult, marriage, daily life, and so forth. Although the archaeological orientations for the Euteknia and the Peleus and Thetis panels are lost, the composition for this pair of mosaics clearly favors a processional, dynamic, and climactic participation that moved the viewer from one panel to the next.56 Peleus and Thetis Panel This second mosaic, the Peleus and Thetis panel (figure 8.4), was discovered only a few days after the first, and it is also a rectangular panel (3 m × 1.2 m). Housed today at the Museum at Suweida, about 12.5 miles south of Shahba, it is interrupted by a number of lacunae and is framed by a geometric and corded twist border. Nine figures are aligned in a procession to celebrate the nuptials of Peleus, friend to Heracles, and Thetis, one of the shape-shifting Nereids. The nuptial procession panel is divided into two scenes. In the center of the panel, sceptered Zeus himself watches over the mythical marriage. The enthroned god stands in as the patrilineal attendant to King Peleus. Thetis is seated, also enthroned with an honorary cloth set up behind her in emulation of Euteknia, her feet resting on a dais. This immortal Nereid, loved by Zeus but given in marriage to the mortal Peleus, is flanked by her father—the barechested, wild-bearded Nereus, a sea god. Rays of light emanate from his head as a nimbed crown. Thetis and Peleus join hands in a gesture of dextrarum iunctio,57 an ancient gesture whereby the actual joining of hands is a token

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Figure 8.4  Marriage of Peleus and Thetis Panel from Shahba-Philippopolis, Ca. First Quarter of the Fourth-Century CE. Suweida National Museum, Syria. Source: Photo: Marcel Dunand, Rapport sur une mission archéologique au Djebel Druze in Syria, VII (1926), plate LXVII.

of marriage. Here, this gesture also emphasizes the very moment when the immortal is joined to the mortal. Although other power couples are also part of the artistic milieu from this region—including panels depicting Ariadne and Dionysius and Aphrodite and Ares, each of which is shown together and with attendants—they are not overtly part of a marriage scene or joined in dextrarum iunctio. The union of Peleus and Thetis is unique in that the joining of this mortal/immortal couple will result in the birth of the warrior-hero Achilles. The traditional attending lineup of the gods is here truncated into only two figures, who also act as personifications. Komos, the personification of ritual procession, usually depicted drunken and in Bacchic revelry, stands halfdraped to the left of Nereus. He holds an aulos, a double flute-like instrument, at the head of the procession. Although he looks back toward the marriage scene, his body is set at a three-quarter angle as if to move forward beyond the mosaic’s framed boundaries. To the right of Zeus, the elegant, semidraped figure of the god Hymen stands in an exaggerated Lykeios pose, resting as if he had exerted some effort and carrying a flaming torch as part of the ritual procession. Being a god of marriage ceremonies, Hymen, son of Apollo, was a required participant of marriages within Hellenistic culture. The hymenaios was the lyric poetry sung as part of the procession of the bride to the groom’s

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house.58 Hymen’s torch59 lights the way for four maidens, perhaps attendant initiates, who bear gifts and process toward the wedding.60 Balty associates these four objets with the ritual bath required before marriage: the shell to serve as a basin, the amphora containing water, a chest for fresh linens, and finally, though the lacunae make it difficult to decipher, a box with round facets. This box was likely meant to hold cosmetics and oils for anointing, and it may have had a reflective surface61 not unlike the remarkable Projecta Casket (see figure 9.3).62 Above these attendants, the inscription Therapeinai, identifying these women as devotees to Thetis, could be read in an early photograph.63 The ritual nature64 of this scene is emphasized by implements of cleansing, anointing, clothing, and beautifying before the culminating act of being joined by the right hands. But this is no ordinary marriage; this is a marriage meant to create something new, to join something part divine, part human. It was a marriage that would ultimately result in the birth of the semidivine hero Achilles. The objects held by the Therapeinai also point toward initiation, the joining of the mortal with the immortal, even a rebirth or ritually appointed gnosis into a new way of being. The symbolic nature of these iconographic attributes aided the viewer in understanding the nature of the scene and could hardly escape hybrid correlations with the practices of baptism, anointing, putting on the clothes of redemption, and entering the bridal chamber. An inscription dating to the Antonine period (ca. 138–193 CE), today in the Capitoline Museum, points to a similar Valentinian initiation ritual replete with torches, bridal chambers, and banquets: Fellow brothers celebrate for me with     torches the baths of bridal chambers. They hunger for banquets in our rooms, Singing hymns to the Father and    praising the Son. May there in that place be flowing of     a single spring, and of truth.65

The inscription was found in Rome along the Via Latina, and Einar Thomassen speculates that it may have hung within the triclinium of a suburban villa. Thomassen further elaborates on the theater of congregates who might process from the place of baptism, “singing hymns and carrying torches, to the banquet that was to take place in the house.”66 Likewise, the processionary character of the nuptial party in the Peleus and Thetis mosaic invites the viewer to participate in this special event, even as initiates themselves, and at the same time obligates them to move beyond the picture plane.

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The public display of the marriage procession signaled the upstanding paideia of the household. Inscriptions used above the personifications served an important and explicit role in identifying what was once abstract or mythological into a more permanent, physical, visual, and even practiced reality. Truly, “the value of those stories we call myths does not depend on whether people ‘really believed in them’ as historical facts but on whether the model or concept of reality the story creates is valuable.”67 If indeed the Euteknia and Peleus and Thetis panels oriented the viewer toward the triclinium, the viewer could find themselves drawn into the culminating feast of the wedding chamber and a manifestation of union that had only been alluded to in these scenes of personification, myth, and allegory. Nuptial Banquet Panel Shortly after the two rectangular mosaic panels were unearthed, a third mosaic was found. This final mosaic (8 × 8 m; figure 8.5) features a geometric border and a circle (2.5 m diameter) inscribed in the center of a delineated interior square. The large nuptial banquet scene is set as a floor mosaic in the triclinium or dining room of the house. The central circular medallion features six figures—a reclining couple surrounded by at least two pendant couples—all enjoying the hospitality of the banquet. The feast is set around

Figure 8.5  Nuptial Banquet Scene from Shahba-Philippopolis, First Quarter of the Fourth-Century CE. Suweida National Museum, Syria. Source: Photo: Marcel Dunand, Rapport sur une mission archéologique au Djebel Druze in Syria, VII (1926), plate LXVIII.

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a sigma table accentuated by objects representing xenia (hospitality) and fertility,68 with diners on a stibadium, or reclining couch. Decorative motifs including ducks, pigeons, fish, and grain fill the tableaux, and a large amphora is set on a tripod from which to serve wine. The late antique dining room was an ideal arena to display the paideia of the household in a way similar to a public audience chamber and was an apt venue for a nuptial scene. The layout of mosaic decoration for triclinia, as seen in the Shahba domus, signifies the function of the room. Couches could be set out on the border areas while leaving the central figural panel visually accessible to anyone who entered the room and to those reclining at their meal.69 So, what was the message that this household wanted to communicate to its guests and clients? Again, Balty interprets these elements as those that constitute a scene of revelry typical of a well-supplied Dionysiac feast, underscoring the so-called pagan nature of the mosaic.70 Yet, Dionysiac scenes were also polyvalent in their meaning and had cultic or religious significance, especially when Dionysus and Ariadne were shown together to symbolize the joining of the human with the divine.71 One of the most striking parts of the Nuptial Banquet panel is the absence of overt drunkenness or excess. This scene is actually quite circumspect and without any of the bawdy behavior typical of revelries. At the top of the circle, a female figure seated at the head of the table offers a cup to her male companion on the right. A loaf of bread, divided in the fashion of the panis quadratus,72 is directly below the couple (figure 8.6). She holds a rose bud in her left hand—a sensual symbol associated broadly with love and specifically with Venus and other goddesses like Cybele and the Great Mother.73 Prized as a rare flower, the rose also represented a fertile but transitory state. Her companion, dressed in white with purple clavi, gazes back at her, wraps his right arm around her shoulder, and strokes a hare with his left hand. Both Christians and non-Christians used the hare in epitaph as a symbol of fertility and virility as well as regeneration, rebirth, and the realm of the eternal.74 Likewise, bread and wine were standard accompaniments to feast scenes for both Christians and so-called pagans, as represented in both Graeco-Roman and Christian refrigerium and agape feast scenes.75 The Nuptial Banquet mosaic provides the viewer with several signs that help to decipher the scene. The symbol of the circle inscribed within a square provides an important interpretation of marriage. Mathematically and symbolically, that symbol represented the locus and juncture of heaven with earth,76 the spiritual space where the immaterial realm joined with the comprehensible material world.77 The circle represented the eternity of heaven, with no beginning or end, while the square represented earth with its four cardinal directions, four corners and winds. This schema is also found in mosaic floors of churches and

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Figure 8.6  Detail from the Nuptial Banquet Scene, First Quarter of the Fourth-Century CE. Source: Artist’s rendering by Tyler Alexander, 2021.

synagogues to represent the conjunction of heaven and earth. By this token, the infinite (circle) is able to be expressed in the finite (square), now within a domestic setting at Shahba-Philippopolis. The sign of the circle within the square designated the spatial confines of the wedding chamber and created a kind of liminal, inhabited space—a space where heaven and earth reflected each other. Balty associates the circle within a square emblematically. She uses cosmological symbols like the zodiac or the circle-within-a-square to describe the dome of heaven where victories attend within the spandrels, holding the saffron-colored belt that accompanied the bridal vestments.78 She aligns the symbols of marriage with the old Roman foundations of social order: in emulating the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, the actual married couple abiding at the Shahba villa brought the dignity of divine marriage to

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bear on their own marriage.79 I agree with this part of Balty’s assessment but suggest that there may be even more sophisticated levels of meaning at work in the iconography. Three Mosaics, One Context The ideals and practices represented in these mosaics were not exclusive to so-called pagan mysteries. Late ancient Christian texts like the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Thomas were noted for calling devotees the children of Adam and of the bridal chamber.80 These are they who are initiated, who have been trained up in order to enter into the bridal chamber and participate because they are uniquely qualified by their learning. The early Syriac Odes to Solomon also present a striking textual comparison that explicitly describes an initiated couple like that at the head of our banquet feast: Like the arm of the bridegroom over the bride, So is my yoke over those who know me. And as the bridal feast81 is spread out by the bridal pair’s home. So is my love by those who believe in me.82

It is hard to deny the similarities between these ritual texts, Gnostic motifs, and the Shahba-Philippopolis mosaics—the progeny of the fruitful household; the woman blessed with children, Euteknia; and a figurative bridal chamber in the triclinium with its nuptial banquet panel. The porous and polyvalent nature of these iconographies makes it difficult to ascertain an exclusively Graeco-Roman orientation for the Shahba-Philippopolis mosaics. The rise of relatively wealthy people settling in Shahba-Philippopolis who commissioned this foreign, imported style of decoration for the villa should also be considered with the burgeoning rise in Christians who came to prominence within this local community.83 Still, overt Christian iconography in mosaic pavements is rare, not just in the Djebel Hauran region but all over Syria. Only a few exceptions exist from the fourth century, and even those deploy traditional old Hellenic themes in new Christian contexts.84 For example, animal tableaux from Christian buildings in Antioch and Seleucia provide “a rather seamless transition of the hunt theme from the house of the Roman dominus to the house of the Christian Lord.”85 What may appear to be simple legendary or mythic narratives on the surface can move beyond superficial storytelling and gesture toward a more sophisticated level of interpretation.86 Mosaics offer the viewer a kind of mirror87 to reflexively see themselves, to ponder over the tableaux, to read the didactic symbols, and to use them “even for emulation through the activities depicted alongside them.”88 Viewers were meant not merely to read themselves into the narrative

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scenes but to expand their interpretations, which “in their directness will often go far beyond literary treatments.”89 READING THE ICONOGRAPHY Mosaic was an artistic tradition steeped in Hellenistic style and iconography from the second to the sixth century with rich iconographic programs found throughout Syria. Artistic patronage of the quality and magnitude of these mosaics was a deliberate act meant for an informed, privileged, and even initiated audience. Painting and sculpture were understood to be mere imitations, but imitations nonetheless, of divine forms and were instructive in following the Neoplatonic admonition to “make yourself as like as possible to God.”90 Art itself was a tool—an aid in philosophical reflection and propaganda—and at times it was a sign of vanity, but it was also something more. Art functioned as a tool for human self-improvement and social selfidentity, a kind of simulacrum through which the divine was recognizable in the self and in others.91 The image had the potential to initiate the viewer into wisdom.92 The deliberate choreography and richly concentrated iconographic program present in the Shahba villa existed within the proximity of diverse Christianities, a position that did not sit comfortably with emerging orthodox dictates and the charged cries against heresies.93 In the early fourth century, these Christianities included the Gnostic praxis that Elaine Pagels calls “an intensely private interior journey.”94 This interior journey of the viewer/ initiate, in the case of the Shahba-Philippopolis mosaic panels, included the particular bodies of women who acted as guides and exemplars within the borderlands of vision and imagination. Euteknia and her attendants as well as Thetis and the bride at the nuptial feast offer viewers a particular kind of journey that places them face to face with their own divine possibilities. Indulge the imagination for a moment and envision the impact such an iconographic program might have had on the matron of the house, the daughters of the household, and the female visitors who were privy to these spaces. Seeing women enthroned and as key agents in these tableaux had the potential, through the act of intromission, to indelibly alter the viewers; these iconographies underscore the part the viewers themselves played in the soteriological economy of being that extended beyond traditional household tropes. What if women (and men) who encountered these images could take in and then project—through the dual act of intromission and extramission—the concentrated knowledge, wisdom, and representations of righteous judgment in these female forms and then expend that same clarity into their belief systems, their practices, and their identity?

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Though some art historians95 caution against symbolic interpretation, we must also remember that images, symbols, signs, and figures were used to succinctly communicate complex ideas and to sustain, even legitimize, the values and belief systems of late ancient religions. Images within a domestic setting, particularly those that included history, allegory, and myth, were focal points for what Dominic Perring calls the “intellectual theater” of ideas and their associative actions.96 As bearers of soteriological and ontological truths, images were integral to the realized drama that played out abstractly within domestic spaces. Image is even mentioned in the Gospel of Philip, a noncanonical Valentinian text, which declares: Truth did not come into the world naked. Rather it was clothed [veiled] with symbol and image, for it cannot be received in any other way. There is rebirth into another time, and there is the image of that rebirth, but it is truly imperative that one not be reborn in symbol only. So what, then, is the resurrection and its image or symbol—for resurrection comes through the icon? And what is the image of the Bridal Chamber—for through its icon one is brought into the truth of the restoration of all things?97

Extracanonical texts like the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Thomas existed alongside what we now know as canonical texts; they were available in Greek, Coptic, and likely Syriac. The Nag Hammadi codices of these texts were likely copied in Coptic between 350 and 450 CE with original texts being written at least 200 years earlier,98 around 150 CE. The concept of using types and images to gain progressive knowledge of the divine is present in the philosophy of Plato, but the Gospel of Philip insists upon more than understanding a set of noetic rules or doctrines: knowledge requires direct experience. The passage of the Gospel of Philip cited earlier continues: “The Master accomplished all this through the mysteries: Baptism, Anointing, Eucharist, Restoration to the fullness of being, and the Bridal Chamber, saying, ‘I have come to make the inner as the outer, and the outer as the inner.’ Everything he said he spoke by means of signs and images concerning that place which is transcendent to this one.”99 Shahba-Philippopolis was not alone in the production of mosaics that reflect Gnostic iconographies and draw on Graeco-Roman themes during the fourth century. Perring points to several mosaics, including the pavements at Lullingstone in Kent as well as those found at Frampton and Hinton St. Mary, as examples from fourth-century Britain where ritual symbolism and iconographies draw on so-called Gnostic ideas.100 One common element to Gnostic thought, image, and initiation was that salvation was an act of ascent that could not be accomplished without the attainment, even mastery, of hidden knowledge (gnosis). The concept of ascent signals a progressive or

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hierarchal revelatory experience. The tripartite instructive nature of the three female personifications in the Euteknia panel and the processionary nature of the Peleus and Thetis panel invite consideration within a Gnostic context as images meant to inform and guide or initiate the viewer. The hybrid nature and interpretation of these images had a deep resonance with Christian and non-Christian viewers in the late third and the early fourth centuries.101 These images would be particularly potent for viewers and patrons from a region known for its syncretic adaptations of religion and imagery.102 I wish to suggest here that these images evoke intersections of Christian, Gnostic, and Hellenized Neoplatonic ideas and may reflect a rather nuanced visual program that illuminates the disposition and destiny of the mortal soul. Furthermore, I wish to foreground the notion that these female allegorical figures were necessary in illuminating a revelatory path meant to bring participants into an ascendent, even divine, state of being. They acted as visual guides in initiation rites and were integral figures in the joining together of earthly and heavenly realms in the nuptial bridal chamber. GRAECO-ROMAN PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIAN SIGNS Syria was one of the richest, most diverse, and strategically important provinces of the late ancient world. From approximately 300, ShahbaPhilippopolis was a suffragan diocese, ultimately under the auspices of the patriarchate of Antioch. It was heir to great Hellenistic civilizations and was an important epicenter for a multitude of Christianities and the controversies that surrounded them. Saint Thomas Christianity, the teachings of Valentinus, and a rich noncanonical variety of texts informed Christian belief; they were part of the landscape of late ancient Syria well into the fourth century and beyond.103 Diversity of Christian belief survived within the borders of late ancient Syria and, unlike more urban centers, continued without close censure in more peripheral areas of the empire such as Shahba-Philippopolis. In 381, Theodosius I issued a decree that would further define orthodox doctrines and introduce a period of suppression. Consequently, modes of Christianity that adopted the teachings and rich oeuvre of noncanonical texts, at least in part, and their so-called heretical beliefs were brought under increased scrutiny during this period. However, our mosaics take us to a period fifty years prior, when lively debates and the porous boundaries of doctrinal interpretation were the rule of Christianity rather than the exception. Around the year 313, Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, began work on his Praeparatio evangelica. Not only was it an apologetic work to prove the superiority of Christianity over pagan religions, it set out to demonstrate how

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the wisdom of the Hebrews prepared people to receive the Gospel of Christ.104 Eusebius pursued this effort to push against the commonly held belief that Greek philosophy was a precursor, even a forerunner, to the Christian message. “Early Christians argued that God had already sowed the older cultures with ideas and themes that would grow to fruition once they were interpreted in a fully Christian context.”105 In his attempt to refute Greek philosophy, Eusebius shares sections of Plato’s Phaedo or Concerning the Soul in which Socrates discusses the fate of souls “according to the affinities of their habits.”106 Socrates is asked: “Are not the happiest among them and those who pass into the best place the men who have practised the civil and political virtue which is called temperance and justice (dikaiosyne), without the aid of philosophy (philosophia) and intellect?” Socrates answers by speaking about the ascendency of the soul: “None grows wings except the soul of the guileless philosopher, or of the philosophic lover.”107 Speaking of the pious, Socrates will say: “And of this class those who have thoroughly purified themselves by philosophy live for the time to come altogether free from troubles, and attain to abodes still more beautiful than the former, to describe which is neither easy, nor is the time at present sufficient.”108 Plato’s ideas, filtered through Eusebius, bring together a state of progression from right or prudent judgment to philosophy herself. The concepts of dikaiosyne and philosophia are coupled in the progression or advancement of the soul, which eventually attains “abodes more beautiful than the former.”109 Even earlier, Clement of Alexandria taught that Christians entered the path from ignorance to gnosis or knowledge of God at different points in their learning and development.110 Clement composed a series of miscellanea, called the Stromata, in which Book One positively affirms the role of philosophy for Greek converts. The preface of Clement’s work describes the utility of his compositions and his aims in establishing truth in order to benefit posterity. He further iterates the importance of his writing and claims, “It is a good thing, I reckon, to leave to posterity good children. This is the case with children of our bodies. But words are the progeny of the soul. Hence we call those who have instructed us, fathers. Wisdom is a communicative and philanthropic thing.”111 Clement immediately sets up the correlation between the child and the father as a benevolent and instructive student-teacher relationship. Furthermore, he means for his words to be children of the soul—his arguments to result in the offspring of conversion. He likewise pairs philosophy and righteous judgment as measures for posterity, arguably if not emphatically, for fruitful Christians blessed with children. Chapter 5 of the Stromata is specifically titled “Philosophy the Handmaid of Theology,” and again Clement couples philosophia and dikaiosyne, philosophy with right judgment or righteousness: “Before the advent of the Lord, philosophy was necessary to the Greeks for righteousness. And now it

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becomes conducive to piety; being a kind of preparatory training to those who attain faith by demonstration.”112 Clearly, the early conflation of Hellenistic learning with the processes of conversion was recognized along the path to becoming Christian. Clement continues in the treatise to discuss how eclectic philosophy paves the way for divine virtue and learning, even learning the mysteries of the soul. Fascinatingly, these states of learned development— philosophy and righteous judgment or discernment—appear in the striking mosaic of Euteknia, where they guide her in her didactic role as one blessed with children. This panel clearly displays a penchant for complex allegory in a composition that reflects the notion of the mosaic as a picture, framed and bound.113 Here is imaged a revealed allegory of becoming well learned through gnosis and moving beyond this frame toward mystical knowledge necessary for the progression of the soul. Again, the gestures of the three female personifications point the viewer toward the nuptial banquet, the mystery of the bridal chamber—all represented artistically, ideologically, and physically in close proximity. John Chrysostom, born in the mid-fourth century to Greek parents in Syria, took up some of these same tropes; he addressed the right way for parents to bring up children in his “Concerning Vainglory and the Education of Children.” Chrysostom admonishes parents to teach children the master principle of wisdom in order to banish folly, for “this is the great and wondrous function of philosophy, that he may know God and all the treasure laid up in Heaven, and Hell and all the kingdom of the other world.”114 To be taught wisdom by way of philosophy was to lead to a fruitful end. Chrysostom continues, “If we lead him to the bridal chamber with a training such as this, consider how great a gift he will be to the bride.”115 Chrysostom even discusses the way that such a marriage should be celebrated: Let us celebrate the marriage without flutes or harp or dancing; for a groom like ours is ashamed of such absurd customs. Nay, let us invite Christ there, for the bridegroom is worthy of Him. Let us invite His disciples; all things shall be of the best for the groom. And he himself will learn to train his own sons in this way, and they theirs in turn, and the result will be a golden cord.116

The recommended practices and demeanor for those entering the bridal chamber moves away from Dionysiac revelry and squarely changes it into a space not only for dining but also for spiritual joy, teaching, and communion—a place where even Christ is invited. It is almost as if the space is comprehended as paraliturgical in nature. The triclinium at Shahba-Philippopolis demonstrates this same visual atmosphere with its banqueters inhabiting a more restrained space, quite unlike the semidraped revelries of Dionysiac celebrants.

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Orthodox theologians, like Ephrem the Syrian, writing just after the period of our mosaics, use the imagery of the bridal chamber as space wherein to comprehend the mysteries of God within the eschaton. Ephrem repudiates the serpent who stripped Eve and equates women clothed in the light of salvation through Christ with the redemption of Eden and conversion. He muses, “The serpent cannot strip off your glory; in Eden women shall be clothed in light, resembling you.”117 Sebastian Brock correlates this light with the salvific wedding garment from the parable in Matthew 22:12 in which the eschatological banquet is attended by the Firstborn himself, wrapped “in a body as a veil to hide His glory.”118 Ephrem carries the image of the marriage banquet into the theme of paradise. As he meditates upon the Last Judgment, he draws together the space for the proverbial wedding feast of the initiated with the bridal chamber of the saved: I saw there beautiful people, and I was desirous of their beauty and I saw the place of the good where they were standing, and I was eager for their position. I saw their bridal chamber opposite, which no one who has not a lamp may enter; I saw their joy, and I myself sat down in mourning, not possessing works worthy of that bridal chamber. I saw them clothed with the Robe of Light and I was grieved that I had prepared no virtuous raiment.119

Susan Ashbrook Harvey has stated, “Syrian spirituality shared with that of early Christendom as a whole the tendency to literalize symbols.”120 Instead of representing a noetic or intellectual practice, the imaged bridal chamber may have become a site for gaining Gnostic understanding, for being clothed with light; it was the place where one’s reflection, one’s likeness or simulacrum, was met face to face. CHRISTIANITIES AND RITUAL PRACTICE Variant movements in emergent Christianity were unfavorably singled out by early patristic leaders like Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon. His Adversus Haereses (ca. 180) depicted groups of Christians such as the Valentinians as foils by which to hold up the authority of orthodox claims.121 The attention given by Irenaeus to the Valentinians and their Gnostic beliefs is an indication of their “prominence on the multifaceted landscape of Christian groups in the second century.”122 The Valentinian school flourished well enough for Tertullian to describe them as “a very large body.”123 Valentinians were present in Syria well beyond the age of Irenaeus and Tertullian. Indeed, there are accounts of attack by so-called orthodox adherents on Valentinian Christians—who called themselves children of the bridal chamber, “the spiritual seed”124—in Syria into the late fourth century.125

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These children of the bridal chamber are further discussed in the Excerpts of Theodotus, a series of various Valentinian sources compiled by Clement of Alexandria during the latter part of the second century. The excerpts discussed below were likely related to primary sources used by Irenaeus in his Against Heresies.126 They seem to point to specific Valentinian beliefs and rituals that Irenaeus found heretical. In excerpt 54, there is a compelling description of the three natures produced from Adam. The first nature was “irrational, which was from Cain’s (nature); the second was rational and just, which was Abel’s (nature); and the third was spiritual which, was Seth’s (nature). . . . Because Seth is spiritual, he does not shepherd nor does he plow, but he bears a child as (do) spiritual beings.”127 Adam, in his earthly nature, takes on “garments of skin,”128 and from his three natures (through Seth) comes the formation of the spiritual element. The next several excerpts describe the necessity of Jesus Christ also taking upon himself a body, spun for him out of material substance and imprinted within the body of the Virgin Mary. Excerpt 61 declares that Jesus necessarily had a body that was rejected, insulted, and crucified while Jesus also declared: “I am the Life, I am the Truth.”129 There seems to be some perplexity as to how the body of Jesus could die with “life present within him.”130 Jesus is then described as a spiritual being in a material body, subject to death which was “outmaneuvered by cunning.”131 In his descent, in his dying, he is described as “sending up a beam of power”132 that destroys death and simultaneously raised up the mortal bodies that have cast off passion or life. This unique description of the Harrowing of Hell allows for the spiritual natures (mankind), who believe, to receive salvation, “having received their souls as ‘wedding garments.’”133 The ultimate rest for believers, called the Lord’s Day in excerpt 63, is envisioned in the Ogdoad or divine realm—also interpreted as a set of eight divine beings, paired as male and female. These “spirituals,” the offspring of Seth, are “with the mother, wearing their souls, the garments, until the culmination. But the other faithful souls are with the creator, but at the culmination they also go up into the Ogdoad. Then the marriage feast shared by all who are saved, until all are made equal and know each other.”134 64 Thereupon the spiritual elements that have laid aside their souls, together with the mother who escorts the groom, also escort the grooms, their angels, enter into the bridal chamber within the boundaries, and come to the vision of the father, becoming intellectual eternities, in the intellectual and eternal marriages of the syzygy. 65 The “master” of the banquet, the best man of the marriage “and friend of the groom who stands before the bridal chamber, hearing the voice of the groom, rejoices.”

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This is his “fullness of joy” and rest.135

These excerpts describe a scene strikingly similar to the Shahba-Philippopolis representation of the bridal chamber, whereupon the children of Seth, those that take on the natures and body of Adam, are joined together in couples in a cosmic environment set apart geometrically by the circle set within the square. This heavenly realm may even represent the Ogdoad or divine realm in which divine beings are coupled. At the head of the sigma table at the nuptial banquet, we find the female consort who reclines upon “garments of skin.” The couple136 is depicted as syzygy (suzugos), or “yokefellows”137— partners of the opposite sex who make up a complete unit—paired together in this marriage feast, this banquet in which they also find repose and rest. Contemporary with the more obscure Excerpts text was the Gospel of Philip. There is a rather perplexing description of a “mirrored” bridal chamber in the text that functions as a space where apotropaic, even salvific power is bestowed upon men and women.138 Although non-Valentinian texts like the Gospel of Thomas and the Authoritative Teaching also mention a bridal chamber, it is the Valentinian Gospel of Philip that details a rite of marriage most thoroughly and locates the bridal chamber as a mystery site.139 The Valentinian school operated within the Christian church rather than as a separate sect and required congregants to undergo a five-year period of preparation within individual house churches before being taught the mysteries.140 The concept of the bridal chamber was not unique to Valentinians. The syncretic nature of these Christian mysteries was also found in the language of marriage common to ancient Dionysiac, Eleusinian, Isiaic, and Mithraic mysteries.141 Valentinus seems to have appropriated the bridal chamber concept from the Thomas Christians. The didactic nature of entering a physical space and receiving knowledge is underscored by the Gospel of Philip: “If anyone becomes a child of the bridal chamber, he/she will receive light.”142 This state of attaining light seems to come as part of a progression or initiation. Children of the bridal chamber are permitted entrance every day,143 further indicating that the rites were accessible, even considered a quotidian or household affair. Irenaeus recorded several details with reference to the bridal chamber. “For some of them prepare a [bridal chamber] and perform a sort of mystic rite (pronouncing certain expressions) with those who are being initiated, and affirm that it is a spiritual marriage which is celebrated by them after the likeness of the conjunctions above.”144 Other rites undertaken by initiates included, again according to the Gospel of Philip, “a baptism and a chrism and a eucharist and a redemption and a bridal chamber.”145 These acts are listed separately, as a ritual and didactic progression, and include baptism with water; anointing; a Eucharist or taking of emblems like bread and wine;

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a redemption, perhaps in the form of putting on a garment146; and finally entering the bridal chamber.147 This cultic journey is reflected in the iconographic and personified symbols of the Shahba-Philippopolis mosaics: the viewer or initiate becomes a child— the fruitful seed of Euteknia blessed with children in the path of righteous judgment and philosophy—and like Thetis, they are washed clean, anointed, dressed, and prepared to be joined in the bridal chamber. Finally, the bridal chamber is the place where male and female could be united, could receive recompense for the separated Adam and Eve, could recognize their own divine self in the other, and could “receive a male power and a female.”148 The bride and bridegroom at the head of the Nuptial Banquet mosaic, whether meant to be imaged as a new Adam and Eve or not, are figures that take on the symbols of paradisiacal flora and fauna. The bride is even in repose on a spotted cushion, perhaps of animal skins, as she offers a salvific cup to her male counterpart directly over the bread of the feast. It is hard to tell where one religious mystery ends and another begins. The gestures and implied movement of the Euteknia panel personifications, the procession of initiate attendants to the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, the joining of hands, and finally the bridal chamber banquet all indicate that the observer is visually caught in the process of something more dynamic than can be contained within the frames of the mosaic. At multiple places in the Shahba-Philippopolis mosaics, we see a veil, a parapatesma, a cloth of honor that has been deliberately pulled back. This barrier or veil is visually lifted here to break through ignorance into the realm of philosophy, righteous judgment, and the apokalypsis or appearance of the initiated “child.” Viewers are called upon to witness a type of divine marriage where the mortal is joined with the immortal before finally coming to their own divinely imaged form upon entering the bridal chamber. This veil of ignorance was lifted by initiation into certain kinds of knowledge. Valentinian Christians sought the presence of God by casting off ignorance and coming to a specific knowledge of “who we were, and what we have become, where we were or where we were placed, whither we hasten, and from what we are redeemed, what birth is and what rebirth.”149 Female participants and viewers were certainly an important part of the equation of specific rites and the ceremonious traditions of ritual. Euteknia, Dikaiosyne, and Philosophia are imaged in Shahba-Philippopolis as a female triad, a trinity figured as female, where the handmaids to theology (Philosophia and Dikaiosyne) are instructive toward the personification of fruitfulness (Euteknia), the spiritual children who take part in the study of godliness.150 It was not unusual for early Christian thought to draw on feminine descriptors of the divine.151 It is enlightening to imagine the impact of such images on female devotees. The visibility of female participants, with

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equal access to knowledge and ritual, was noted by Tertullian and called heretical. He protests against “those women among the heretics” who share authority with men: “They teach, they engage in discussion; they exorcise; they cure.”152 Furthermore, he warns against “mixed Christianity of stoic, Platonic, or dialectic composition!”153 The fact that so-called heretical beliefs demanded so much censure is evidence that they were in practice.154 The Gospel of Philip foregrounds the idea of forms being reunited with their divine double: “If the image and the angel are united with one another, neither can any [evil spirit] venture to go in to the man or the woman.”155 Irenaeus, in his Against Heresies, further explains that the “conjunctions above” consist, for the Valentinians, of paired divine beings, male and female. Although the ritual is debated, Ismo Dunderberg has suggested that the bridal chamber was likely “connected with the Valentinian myth of divine couples inhabiting the divine realm called Fullness (pleroma) or linked with an idea of one’s heavenly partner (suzugos).”156 Additional Valentinian inscriptions mention the bridal chamber and indicate that, while this rite may have been metaphorically accomplished, there is nothing to indicate that it might not have been, in both time and space, realized. The funerary inscription for Flavia Sophe, discovered along the Via Latina in the nineteenth century, details the salvific Valentinian rituals that had bearing on Sophe’s status in death and afterlife and which could hardly be interpreted as merely noetic or imaginal. Geoffrey Smith argues that the inscription refers to a dead woman, Sophe, for whom rites—even the rite of redemption—had been performed.157 The front of the inscription reads: Yearning for the fatherly light, my sister and wife, Sophe, Anointed in the baths of Christ with perfume unfading, pure, You were eager to behold the divine countenances of the eternities, The great angel of the mighty council, the true Son, Processing [into] the bridal chamber and ascending into the fatherly chambers Undefiled and [ . . . you were crowned].158

The inscription clearly outlines a particular progression, an order to the ascension of the soul. Sophe was anointed with oil, perhaps after participating in baptism or the “baths of Christ.” Then, with eagerness to behold divine beings, she processed to the bridal chamber as part of the ascension of the soul. It is striking that the epitaph mentions Sophe’s anticipation to see or behold the presence or countenances of the divine, called eternities. While this experience could exist in the ritual imaginal realm, it may have also been represented in an image or icon. Likewise, the inscription notes the act of processing into the bridal chamber.

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Sophe has participated in rites while in the body, and these rituals appear to carry over consequentially into her eternal life. The reverse inscription indicates that Sophe now occupies a realm set apart for the initiated: “She lives among those who live, but she died to those who are in reality dead.”159 Life and death are still categories or conditions of the soul, even after the mortal corpse is laid aside. Not all Valentinians may have been initiated through ritual, but this inscription provides evidence that some did. If the divine reality is approached in the mirrored bridal chamber, it is possible that what was imaged at Shahba-Philippopolis for the mortal initiate was presented in a visual way as their divine double. Therefore, the bridal chamber was a place where a type of marriage took place, but as Gaye Strathearn states: “Rather than being a marriage where a man and a woman are united, the Valentinian bridal chamber was a place where individuals were united with their divine self, their angel”—their own better image.160 The soul’s search for this type of fulfillment, completion, and union is accomplished in a way that is described almost ritually in the Authoritative Teaching, a text in which a divine soul is figured as female and must overcome the distractions of the material world in order to ascend: “The rational soul who wearied herself in seeking—she learned about God. She labored with inquiring, enduring distress in the body, wearing out her feet after the evangelists, learning about the Inscrutable One. . . . She came to rest in him who is at rest. She reclined in the bridechamber. She ate of the banquet for which she had hungered. . . . She found what she had sought.”161 Valentinian Christians, among others, believed that seeking truth and the process of self-discovery was a manifestation of the divine life, revealed before one’s very eyes. This sentiment is iterated in a saying of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”162 Such an obscure saying is complemented by the imperative, “Recognize what is before your eyes, and what is hidden will be revealed to you.”163 Canonized scripture likewise acknowledges the complicated quest to see and know, to be seen and to be known: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been known.”164 The command is to look, to see, and to understand. This saying becomes rather poignant when we consider that the instruction may imply a material component, even a mosaic mirror image. The Gospel of Philip gives a more literal command to initiate transformative seeing: “You saw the spirit, you became the spirit. You saw Christ, you became Christ. You saw the Father, [you] shall become Father . . . you see yourself, and what you see you shall [become].”165

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CONCLUSION For Christians, the progression or ascent of the soul could be comprehended as part of the specular gaze. The act of spectatorship resulted in a new kind of wisdom, a participatory gnosis, and an initiated way of being. To recognize wisdom was also to recognize the “best” part of another’s soul, of one’s own soul.166 The elect could, through gnosis of Christ and of their own imaged divinity within the Kingdom of God, conceive of redemptive salvation in the flesh. The Shahba-Philippopolis mosaics present an initiated ascent through knowledge and mastery of righteousness and philosophy, an initiatory procession in honor of the mortal being joined with the immortal, and the spectacle of the ultimate wedding vestibule, the wedding banquet, and the bridal chamber. Here devotees met, at their very feet, images reflective of themselves, in paradisiacal guise at the divine nuptial feast between heaven and earth, even the great agape feast par excellence. Women certainly participated in early Christian initiatory rituals within domestic spaces and were, in fact, imaged as critical to them. The female figures in the mosaics at Shahba-Philippopolis were an essential part of this progressive cycle of ritual initiation. In fact, this mosaic program highlights women as critical to and complicit in the completion, the wholeness or pleroma, of divine knowledge and salvific attainment. The mosaics at Shahba-Philippopolis were heir to a long-established interest in the nature, progression, and destiny of the soul. This expansive interpretation of the Shahba villa mosaics suggests that a nuanced religious experience came to life in practice before the participants within the household. This experience visualized divine potential where women were active agents in the economy of salvific knowledge. Within the earliest Christianities, gazing, looking, contemplating, emulating, and active spectating were integral to gaining access to the divine. Whether in direct practice or experienced as a kind of revelatory encounter, images like those at Shahba-Philippopolis conflated the worlds of practice and mystery, the realms of heaven and earth. NOTES 1. Carolyn Osiek, Margaret Y. MacDonald, A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 144–63. 2. Dennis E. Smith, “The House Church as Social Environment,” in Text, Image, and Christians in the Graeco-Roman World, ed. Aliou Cissé Niang and Carolyn Osiek (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012), 17. 3. M. René Dussaud, “L’Archéologie Syrienne au Printemps 1925” Syria T. 6, Fasc. 3 (1925), 295–96. It was also reported that Dunand, “the young and active archaeologist,” moved on from Shahba to Safa in the regional Druze mountains where

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he “harvested” approximately three hundred Greek inscriptions, along with some Nabatean inscriptions. 4. Dussaud, “L’Archéologie Syrienne,” 296 (citing M. Dunand). 5. Dussaud, “L’Archéologie Syrienne,” 296 (citing M. Dunand). 6. Janine Balty has expertly described these three panels, for which I am personally grateful. Her scholarship has provided access to the mosaics, which is virtually impossible in person at this time. 7. Janine Balty, Mosaïques Antiques du Proche-Orient: Chronologie, Iconographie, Interprétation (Paris, 1995), 64–65. 8. Balty, Mosaïques Antiques du Proche-Orient, 144, 148. 9. The Valentinians did not use this name to refer to themselves. They simply called themselves Christians. This designation is a hersiological term used by “orthodox” writers. Cf. Einar Thomassen, ed., The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the ‘Valentinians’ (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 4. 10. Although we do not know the certain genesis of Thomas Christianity, there are multiple attestations of its presence in Syria, including the Acts of Thomas, probably written in Syriac, and the number of names associated with Syria. Cf. Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 39. Cf. Geoffrey S. Smith, Valentinian Christianity: Texts and Translations (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), 1, 9. 11. Bente Kiilerich, “The State of Early Christian Iconography in the TwentyFirst Century,” Studies in Iconography 36 (2015): 122. 12. I am using the term syncretic here to mean the combining of religious elements, not into something impure and muddled but into something transformative, winnowing truth from all sources under conditions of hybridity. Cf. David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 12–15. 13. Literary texts, alongside art and iconography, employed Christian and Graeco-Roman tropes together in ways that were, at times, indistinguishable from each other. Dennis MacDonald asserts that it would be naïve to deny the influence of Homer on early Christian texts from as early as the second century, if not earlier. For example, MacDonald investigates The Acts of Andrew as a “Christianizing of Homer” and even cites Clement of Alexandria, in chapter twelve of his Exhortation to the Heathen, as one who “saw in Odysseus tied to his mast a metaphor of Christ nailed to his cross.” Cf. Dennis MacDonald, Christianizing Homer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3–10, 23, 24. 14. Frank Brown, Roman Architecture (New York: G. Braziller, 1961), 9. 15. John R. Clarke, Houses of Roman Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), quoted in Dennis E. Smith, “The House Church as Social Environment,” in Text, Image, and Christians in the Graeco-Roman World, ed. Aliou Cissé Niang and Carolyn Osiek (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012), 9. 16. Jorunn Økland, Women in Their Place (New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 131–67. 17. Hugh Kennedy, The Monuments of Syria (London: I.B. Taurus, 2009), 281–82.

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18. Kennedy, Monuments of Syria, 282. 19. M. René Dussaud, “L’Archéologie Syrienne au Printemps 1925” Syria T. 6, Fasc. 3 (1925), 296 (citing M. Dunand). 20. The Shahba excavations took place during the Interwar period with several revolts against the French Colonial State in the region. The unrest coincided with the mandate to uncover archaeological remains, even without extensive documentation. 21. Janet Huskinson, “Surveying the Scene: Antioch Mosaic Pavements as a Source of Historical Evidence,” in Culture and Society in Later Roman Antioch, ed. Isabella Sandwell and Janet Huskinson (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2004),147. 22. Huskinson, “Surveying the Scene,” 142. 23. Kiilerich, “The State of Early Christian Iconography,” 102. 24. Kiilerich, “The State of Early Christian Iconography,” 124. 25. Churches and synagogues in the eastern Mediterranean exhibit a kind of ease with the representation of images that are not explicitly Christian or Jewish in iconography. For example, a church in Petra, published by the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman features personifications of Sophia, the seasons, Ge, and Fowler, to name a few. Cf. Kiilerich, “The State of Early Christian Iconography,” 106; Zbigniew T. Fiema, Chrysanthos Kanellopoulos, Tomasz Waliszewski, and Robert Schick, The Petra Church (Amman: American Center of Oriental Research, 2001), 219–332. 26. Kiilerich, “The State of Early Christian Iconography,” 106 27. Kimberly Bowes, “Personal Devotions and Private Chapels,” in Late Ancient Christianity, ed. Virginia Burrus (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 207. 28. Bowes, “Personal Devotions,” 209. 29. Harry O. Maier, “Heresy, Households, and the Disciplining of Diversity,” in Late Ancient Christianity, ed. Virginia Burrus (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 214. 30. Maier, “Heresy, Households,” 217. 31. Maier, “Heresy, Households,” 227–28. 32. Maier, “Heresy, Households,” 233. 33. Shadi Bartsch, The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 24–25. Ancient discussions of the maxim gnothi sauton and its proliferation into the fifth century is nuanced in the term sophrosyne, which “linked the injunction to ‘know thyself’ in a way that . . . seems to have been synonymous with ‘knowing one’s limits,’ ‘knowing one’s place in society’ . . . and finally—know your own soul and its divine qualities.” 34. Bartsch, Mirror of the Self, 16. 35. Bartsch, Mirror of the Self, 16. 36. While sight was not the only sense under consideration during antiquity, it certainly took pride of place in the formal experience with art and text. It is not possible to elaborate on all of the theories and models for sight or any other sense in this chapter; however, I recommend for further investigation, Michael Squire, ed., Sight and the Ancient Senses (London; New York: Routledge, 2016). 37. Bartsch, Mirror of the Self, 17–20.

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38. Bartsch, Mirror of the Self, 58–67. 39. Mike Pope, “Occular Penetration, Grammatical Objectivity, and an Indecent Proposal in De Rerum Natura,” Classical Philology 113 (2018): 206–9. 40. Shadi Bartsch, Mirror of the Self, 3. 41. James H. Charlesworth, ed. and trans., The Odes of Solomon (Chico, CA: Scholar Press, 1977), 63–65. 42. The mosaic panel is arranged in a way familiar to imperial arrangements that include a plethora of female goddesses iterated in enthroned scenes including those known in Syria like Atargatis, Cybele, and the Magna Mater. Some have female attendants flanking the seated figure, like in the Aldobrandini wedding fresco from the Esquiline Hill or the Tellus panel from the Ara Pacis in Rome, a trope carried over into personification images where women like Anicia Juliana sat between Magnanimity and Prudence (folio 6 verso of the Vienna Dioscurides, ca. 512). 43. “εὐτεκνία” Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, Lexicon: Abridged from Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), 734. 44. This trinity of female figures calls to mind the dedication page from the Vienna Dioscurides, Folio 6v, c. 515, complete with personifications of Megalopsychia (magnanimity, generosity, greatness of soul) and Phronesis (prudence, practical wisdom), flanking the enthroned Anicia Juliana. The princess is seated on a cushion with her feet on a raised dais with a prostrate woman at her feet and a putto at her side. Like the figure of Euteknia, she wears a diadem and scarlet shoes. The personifications’ colorful clothing (tunics and palla) are also found incorporated in the dalmatic garb of Juliana. Just like Euteknia, this sartorial choice visually clothes her in and demonstrates her embodiment of these virtues. The predominance of texts, here in diptych and codex form, is accentuated by the figures’ gestures to emphasize the same. Cf. Bente Killerich, “The Image of Anicia Juliana in the Vienna Dioscurides: Flattery of Appropriation or Imperial Imagery?” Symbolae Osloenses 76 (2001): 169–90. 45. Helmut Buschhausen, “Box: Scrinium” in Eerdman’s Encyclopedia of Early Christian Art and Architecture, ed. Paul Corbey Finney (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2017), 210. Scrinia were typically made of wood, but some also had metal bosses and even low-relief metal decorative panels. The lid of the scrinium in the Shahba-Philippopolis mosaic rests to the side of the box and has a specifically reflective quality to it. 46. The emphasis on the capsa, the box used to transport or carry scrolls, seems to recommend that the viewer should become well acquainted, even exceptionally skilled, in the reading and interpretation of text along with reading the image. Exercising right judgment and coupling it with philosophical interpretation of texts are also embodied as the virtues of Euteknia. Introspection and assessment of one’s position, even a kind of self-scrutiny or self-speculation, is inevitable for the viewer in this tableau. Looking at the mosaic requires a symbiotic reflection and illumination within the viewer as they participated in physically moving from one image to the next. 47. Guntram Koch, “Curtain,” in Eerdman’s Encyclopedia of Early Christian Art and Architecture, ed. Paul Corbey Finney (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2017), 387.

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48. Ruth Leader-Newby, “Personifications and Paideia in Late Antique Mosaics from the Greek East,” in Personification in the Greek World from Antiquity to Byzantium, ed. Edith Stafford and Judith Herrin (Aldershot; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 233. 49. Ralph P. Martin and Peter H. Davids, eds., Dictionary of the Later New Testament and its Developments (Boston, MA: Intervarsity Press, 1997), 1213. 50. Ignatius of Antioch, The Epistles of St. Ignatius Bishop of Antioch, trans. James Herbert Swraley (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1919), 101. Ign. Smyrn. 13.2. (ANF 1:92). 51. Leader-Newby, “Personifications and Paideia,” 233–35. She sides, to some extent, with Glanville Downey in that personifications reflect personal and moral values and expression while questioning the level to which scholars can fix interpretations of mosaics for ancient viewers, which is entirely dependent upon the inclinations and education of the viewer. 52. Leader-Newby, “Personifications and Paideia,” 236–39. 53. Leader-Newby, “Personifications and Paideia,” 237. 54. Barbara Borg, “Eunomia or ‘Make Love Not War’? Meidian Personifications Reconsidered,” in Personification in the Greek World from Antiquity to Byzantium, ed. Emma Stafford and Judith Herrin (Aldershot; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 195. 55. Borg, “Eunomia,” 199. 56. In an ideal archaeological record, we would know if the Euteknia and Peleus and Thetis panels ultimately led the viewer to the culminating Nuptial Banquet scene in the triclinium or the dining room. It is impossible to know whether they were consecutive in their spatial arrangement or set in tandem parallel to each other, so their orientation remains a proximate guess based on the processional nature of the scenes. It was likely that these images were encountered by more than just the immediate household as the triclinium was traditionally located just off of the main atrium within the Roman domus. 57. Janine Balty, “Un Programme de Mariage à Shahba-Philippopolis (Syrie),” Collection de l’Ecole Francaise de Rome 2, no. 352 (2005): 1312. 58. Thomas J. Mathiesen, “Hymenaios,” Grove Music Online, 2001, https​:/​/do​​i​ .org​​/10​.1​​093​/g​​mo​/97​​81561​​59263​​0​.art​​​icle.​​13647​. 59. Torch-lit processions, including followers of Komos, or komasts, some in highly erotic scenes, were popular subject matter for ancient Greek red and black figure vase paintings. 60. Balty, “Un Programme de Mariage,” 1313. 61. Within the specular tradition of late antiquity, there were several objects that acted as mirrors or reflective surfaces. While bronze mirrors appear as early as the sixth century BC, lidded boxes or containers with chased metal attached also served a mirroring purpose. These objects, the most luxurious bearing the figural image of the vanities in the form of Aphrodite, Eros, or Helen of Troy, needed only a high polish to act as a mirror. 62. Balty, “Un Programme de Mariage,” 1313. 63. Dussaud, “L’Archéologie Syrienne,” 295.

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64. In her investigation of the iconography of MN 9022, Laura Winn has identified the influence of both the Roman religious and nuptial spheres and that conflated the role of bride and priestess within the cross-cultural context local to Campania Italy. Winn points to several visual precedents for reading nuptial imagery with an interpretive overlay of religious initiation that occurred at the cult level. For example, Winn discusses both the Aldobrandini Wedding fresco from first-century BCE. Esquiline Rome, now at the Vatican Museum, and the Procession of Cyble or Magna Mater scene from the Via dell’Abbondanza, Pomeii, demonstrate the Roman practice of integrating religious and nuptial spheres in ways that were naturally integrated into everyday life. Just as wedding rites admitted the bride into her new family, so mystical initiations could transfer individuals “into a new religious frame of mind and, at the same time, award them a new and higher religious degree. Mystical initiations and weddings are indeed comparable.” Cf. Laura M. Winn, “Here Comes the Bride? An Exploration of MN 9022, A Woman’s Toilette Scene in fresco from Roman Campania” (master’s thesis, University of Florida, 2011), 44–46, 57–60, 70–72. 65. “The Bridal Chamber Inscription,” in The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the Valentinians, ed. Einar Thomassen (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 350. 66. Thomassen, ed., The Spiritual Seed, 351. 67. Borg, “Eunomia,” 201. 68. Janine Balty, Mosaïques Antiques de Syrie (Brussels: Centre Belge de Recherches Archéologiques à Apamée de Syrie, 1977), 38. 69. Huskinson, “Surveying the Scene,” 139–42. Huskinson notes the popularity of this layout for similar rooms in Antioch that follow the typical Roman layout for the hierarchy of diners with traditional styles of decoration and subject matter. 70. Balty, Mosaïques Antiques de Syrie, 38–40. 71. Glen Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 41–53. 72. Round loaves of bread divided into sections were common to pagans, Jews, and Christians and appear in art on gravestones, sarcophagi, in catacombs, and in mosaics. Though the markings on bread were not always symbolic, the lines for both Hellenic peoples and Christians facilitated the breaking of bread, sometimes with the cross indicating that bread was destined for Eucharistic purposes. Cf. Irene Kabala, “Bread: Iconography,” in Eerdman’s Encyclopedia of Early Christian Art and Architecture, ed. Paul Corbey Finney (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2017), 216. 73. “Rose,” in The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images, ed. Kathleen Martin (Cologne: Taschen, 2010), 162. Roses were associated with paradise by early Christian fathers, including Basil and Ambrose, who associate the rose without thorn with terrestrial paradise; the rose being perfect before sin caused thorns to appear. The Passion of Perpetua notes that paradise is like an orchard or garden full of roses, lilies, and flowers of all kinds. Cf. “Rose,” in Cabrol and De Rossi, DACL, 14:11. 74. “Rabbit/Hare,” in The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images, ed. Kathleen Martin (Cologne: Taschen, 2010), 288. Cf. Herodotus, The Histories, 3.108. Cf. “Lièvre,” in Cabrol and De Rossi, DACL, 9:1008–1012.

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75. There are many examples of reclining figures set before a sigma table for dining. The catacombs are particularly rich in this iconographic trope. For example, the Hypogeum of Vibia in Rome introduces the figure of Vibia to the pastoral feast of the afterlife as she enters this realm through an arched gateway. The Christian gathering to celebrate a meal is also found in catacomb settings like the so-called Capella Graeca in the Catacomb of Priscilla. For arguments that these scenes are funerary meals and not agape/Eucharistic: R. Jensen, “Dining with the Dead: From the Mensa to the Altar in Christian Late Antiquity,” in Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Context. Studies of Roman, Jewish, and Christian Burials, ed. Laurie Brink and Deborah Green (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 107–43; Janet H. Tulloch, “Women Leaders in Family Funerary Banquets,” in A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity, ed. Carolyn Osiek and Margaret Y. MacDonald, with Janet H. Tulloch (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 164–93. 76. Cf. Elliott R. Wolfson, The Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995); G. Anderson, “Celibacy or Consummation in the Garden? Reflections on Early Jewish and Christian Interpretations of the Garden of Eden,” Harvard Theological Review 82 (1989): 121–48. In several late antique synagogues, mosaic floors use the circle-within-a-square design, plus images of Helios, the zodiac symbols, and personifications of the four seasons (in the spandrels at the four corners of the square), to allude to the dome of heaven and the earth below; see discussion in Jodi Magness, The Archaeology of the Holy Land: From the Destruction of Solomon’s Temple to the Muslim Conquest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 311–15. For a discussion of this motif in the Huqoq synagogue, see Magness et al., “The Huqoq Excavation Project: 2014–2017 Interim Report,” BASOR 380 (2018): 106–11, plus footnote 59 for other sources that discuss the motif. 77. Robert Lawlor, Sacred Geometry (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982), 74. 78. Balty, “Un Programme de Mariage,” 1310. 79. Balty, “Un Programme de Mariage,” 1316. Perhaps Menandre the Rhetorist here. 80. For example, Gospel of Philip, logion 72.20–23, 76.3–5, 86.4–5, 82.15–17 and Gospel of Thomas, logion 50, 106. 81. “The Syriac noun literally means “bed,” “couch,” or “bridal chamber” and metaphorically denotes “bridal feast.” Cf. Charlesworth, Odes, n.13, 147. 82. Charlesworth, Odes, 145. 83. Frank Trombley, Hellenic Religion and Christianization c. 370–529, (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 2:64. Wealthy “retired Christian civil servants and soldiers are at times the first attested believers in the small small [sic] towns and villages of fourth-century Arabia and Syria.” 84. Combining traditional Graeco-Roman and biblical motifs was a characteristic of late ancient art. For example, Christ was early associated with the Good Shepherd by way of the ancient kriophoros or ram-bearer type; the famed Projecta Casket with images of Venus is also dedicated by inscription and staurogram to a Christian woman; the personification of the Jordan River is seen in the Arian and orthodox baptistries at Ravenna; the sky god Caelus provides the footstool for Christ enthroned

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on the Junius Bassus sarcophagus; and finally, Christ arguably takes on the guise of Sol Invictus or the God Helios in mosaic decorations like those found at the Tomb of the Julii within the Vatican Necropolis, and so forth. 85. Christine Kondoleon, “The Mosaic of the Church Building of Selueucia Pieria,” in Antioch The Lost Ancient City, ed. Christine Kondoleon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 219. Another apt example is the fourth-century “gentleman’s homecoming” motif from the Dominus Iulius at Carthage. Cf. Thomas F. Mathews, The Clash of the Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 35. 86. Cf. Paul Zanker and Björn C. Ewald, Living with Myths: The Imagery of Roman Sarcophagi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 18–21; Jaś Elsner and Janet Huskinson, Life, Death, and Representation (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 2011), 9–11. 87. Cf. Rabun Taylor, The Moral Mirror of Roman Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 88. Huskinson, “Surveying the Scene,” 144. 89. Glanville Downey, “Personifications of Abstract Ideas in the Antioch Mosaics,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 69 (1938): 360. 90. Anthony A. Long, “Ancient Philosophy’s Hardest Question: What to Make of Oneself?” Representations 74 (2001): 21. Who cites Phdr. 230a; Tht. 176a; Ti. 90b–d; and Resp. 10.613a. as noted in Bartsch, Mirror of the Self, 42. 91. Bartsch, Mirror of the Self, 55. 92. Bartsch, Mirror of the Self, 9. 93. Scholars have argued that schools of Gnostic Christianity pressed GraecoRoman themes and philosophy into the service of their own allegorical teachings. Hippolytus, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Athanasius demonstrate as much with their refutations of such practices by Gnostic sects. Cf. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage Books, 1989); David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 94. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 144. 95. Roger Ling, “Mosaics in Roman Britain: Discoveries and Research Since 1945,” Brittania 28 (1997): 259–96. Cf. Arthur Darby Nock and J. D. Beazley, “Sarcophagi and Symbolism,” American Journal of Archaeology 50, no. 1 (1946): 140–170; Arthur Darby Nock, “Franz Cumont. Recherches sur le symbolisme funéraire des romains” [review], Journal of Roman Studies 38, nos. 1–2 (1948): 154–56. 96. Dominic Perring, “‘Gnosticism’ in Fourth-Century Britain: The Frampton Mosaics Reconsidered,” Brittania 34 (2003): 97. 97. Gospel of Philip, “Analogue 44,” in The Luminous Gospels, trans. Lynn C. Bauman, Ward J. Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, 97. (Page 69, Plate 115 of Jean-Yves Leloup.) 98. I follow David Brakke’s dating parameters, which are conservative, with room to imagine texts like the Gospel of Thomas being written as early as 60 CE. 99. Bauman, Bauman, Bourgeault, Luminous Gospels, 97–98.

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100. Perring, “‘Gnosticism’ in Fourth-Century Britain,” 97–127. Cf. Glanville Downey, “The Pagan Virtue of Megalopsychia in Byzantine Syria,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 76 (1945): 279–86. 101. Cf. Janet Huskinson, Roman Strigillated Sarcophagi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 180–85. 102. The syncretism of Provincia Arabia and the Djebel Hauran region is difficult to map without official monasteries or episcopates. The metropolis of Bostra had bishops at the Council of Nicaea in 325, and Philippopolis ostensibly fell under its episcopate until prelates were established in the mid-fifth century. Rural villages are not often designated as Christian according to the material evidence. The trend toward Christianity in the region was further complicated by Christians who kept their pagan names, even after baptism. Cf. Trombley, Hellenic Religion and Christianization, 2:372–4. 103. James D. G. Dunn and John William Rogerson, Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 157. 104. Aaron P. Johnson, Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius’ Praeparatio evangelica (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 227–32. 105. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 151. 106. Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, 13, 16, 215. 107. Eusebius, PE, 13, 16, 216. 108. Eusebius, PE, 13, 16, 219. 109. Ibid. 110. Margaret Smith, The Way of the Mystics: The Early Christian Mystics and the Rise of the Sufis (London: Sheldon Press, 1976), 1. 111. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 1.1. (ANF 2:299). 112. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 1.5.28.1 (translation my own). 113. Katherine Dunbabin, Mosaics of the Greek and Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 166, 169. 114. John Chrysostom, “On Vainglory 87,” in Christianity and Pagan Culture in the Later Roman Empire, together with an English translation of John Chrysostom’s “Address on Vainglory and the Right Way for Parents to Bring Up Their Children,” trans. Max L. W. Laistner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1951), 26. 115. Max L. W. Laistner, Christianity and Pagan Culture, 26. 116. John Chrysostom, “On Vainglory 88,” in Christianity and Pagan Culture in the Later Roman Empire, trans. Max L. W. Laistner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1951), 26. Laistner will cite PG 62, 390, where “Chrysostom says of a Christian marriage: ‘Let there be no noise, no turmoil. Let the bridegroom be summoned, let him receive the maiden. Let not dinners and suppers be filled with drunkenness but with spiritual joy.’ The simile of the chain is used also in PG 51, 330. Chrysostom may have borrowed it from the Neoplatonists who spoke of the golden chain of the Platonic succession.” 117. Ephrem, “Hymn on Faith 83.2,” in Hymns on Paradise, trans. Sebastian Brock (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990), 71. 118. Ephrem, “Nisibene Hymn 43.21,” in Brock, Hymns on Paradise, 71–72.

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119. Ephrem, “Letter to Publius 12,” ed. and trans. in Le Muséon 89 (1976): 284, as cited in Brock, Hymns on Paradise, 72. 120. Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 8. 121. Einar Thomassen and Christoph Markschies, eds., Valentinism: New Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 1. 122. Thomassen and Markschies, Valentinianism: New Studies, 1. 123. Tertullian, Against the Valentinians, 1. As cited in Gaye Strathearn, “The Valentinian Bridal Chamber in the Gospel of Philip,” Studies in the Bible and Antiquity 1 (2009): 87. 124. Thomassen, ed., The Spiritual Seed, 4–5. Cf. e.g., Exc. 1:1–2, 26:1; Iren. Haer. I 5:6–6:1; Tri. Trac. 115:23–116:5 125. Thomassen and Markschies, eds., Valentinianism: New Studies, 2. 126. Smith, Valentinian Christianity, 57. 127. Excerpts of Theodotus 54, trans. Smith, Valentinian Christianity, 93. 128. Excerpts of Theodotus 55, trans. Smith, Valentinian Christianity, 93. 129. John Chrysostom will attack the practice of “spiritual marriage” in which ascetic couples would join together in chaste partnerships in his “Instruction and Refutation Against Those Men Living With Virgins” and “On the Necessity of Guarding Virginity,” in Women in Early Christianity: Translations from Greek Texts, trans. Patricia Cox Miller (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 123–50. Blake Leyerle has further complicated the matter by suggesting that Chrysostom likens “spiritual marriage” to the thriving late ancient theater in Antioch and “insists that the couples’ presentation of holiness is an elaborate and deceptive façade.” This illusion is exposed when Chrysostom removes the walls of the household to reveal what is ostensibly a denouncement of ridiculous men and women who are in the throes of lust toward each other. Leyerle asserts that Chrysostom’s language is really less about the scandal of sexuality and more about the control of hierarchy. One can’t help but wonder if Chrysostom is also pointing to heretical marriage rites situated within the household and outside the auspices of the Church. Cf. Blake Leyerle, Theatrical Shoes and Ascetic Lives: John Chrysostom’s Attack on Spiritual Marriage (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 6–12, 206–7. 130. Excerpts of Theodotus 61, trans. Smith, Valentinian Christianity, 97. 131. Excerpts of Theodotus 61, trans. Smith, Valentinian Christianity, 97. 132. Excerpts of Theodotus 61, trans. Smith, Valentinian Christianity, 97. 133. Excerpts of Theodotus 61, trans. Smith, Valentinian Christianity, 97. 134. Excerpts of Theodotus 63, trans. Smith, Valentinian Christianity, 97-9. 135. Excerpts of Theodotus 64, 65, trans. Smith, Valentinian Christianity, 99. 136. It is impossible to argue from lacunae, but there appears to be space for the head couple as well as three couples, three on each side opposite each other in the Nuptial Banquet mosaic, perhaps forming a visual representation of the Ogdoad. 137. Nicola Denzey Lewis, Introduction to “Gnosticism”: Ancient Voices, Christian Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 65, 98. 138. Strathearn, “Valentinian Bridal Chamber,” 100–103.

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139. Elaine Pagels, “The ‘Mystery of Marriage’ in the Gospel of Philip Revisited,” in The Future of Early Christianity, ed. Birger A. Pearson (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 442–54. 140. Tertullian, Against the Valentinians 1. Cf. Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries, trans. Michael Steinhauser (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 359–96. 141. Gaye Strathearn, “The Valentinian Bridal Chamber” (PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University, 2004), 222–28. 142. Gospel of Philip 86.4–5 as cited in Strathearn, “Valentinian Bridal Chamber in the Gospel of Philip,” 97. 143. Gospel of Philip 82.15–17 as cited in Strathearn, “Valentinian Bridal Chamber in the Gospel of Philip,” 97. 144. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.21.3 145. Gospel of Philip 67.27–30 as cited in Strathearn, “Valentinian Bridal Chamber in the Gospel of Philip,” 92. 146. Strathearn, “The Valentinian Bridal Chamber in the Gospel of Philip,” 93, n22. Strathearn points to the Tripartite Tractate that connects redemption with putting on a garment: “For those who will put it on and those who have received redemption wear it” (128.22–24). 147. Einar Thomassen notes the parallels between the Valentinian interpretation of the divine female Sophia joining with her partner in syzygic union and the initiate’s union with his or her angel within the bridal chamber resulting in an integrated whole person, effecting divinity. While Thomassen notes that the actual performance of the bridal chamber rite may have been part of an initiatory baptismal context, he does concede that the “Valentinian marriage of the spiritual with his angel is to be regarded as an individualized form of the marriage of Sophia and the Saviour, which in turn is clearly a mythological representation of the theme of the church as the bride of Christ.” Cf. Thomassen, ed., The Spiritual Seed, 282, 365, 405. 148. Gospel of Philip 70.13–22 as cited in Strathearn, “Valentinian Bridal Chamber in the Gospel of Philip,” 101. 149. See Clement of Alexandria, “Excerpts from Theodotus 78.2,” in The Excerpta ex Theodoto of Clement of Alexandria, ed. and trans. Robert P. Casey (London: Christophers, 1934), 89. 150. A student of Valentinus, Marcus (c. 150 CE) recounts his vision of divine truth that “descended upon him . . . in the form of a woman . . . and expounded to him alone its own nature, and the origin of things, which it had never revealed to anyone, divine or human.” She spoke to him saying, “I wish to show you Truth herself; for I have brought her down from above, so that you may see her without a veil, and understand her beauty.” As cited in Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 20. Cf. Irenaeus, AH 1.14.1–3. 151. For a vivid discussion on the Syrian understanding of the Holy Spirit as feminine, see Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Feminine Imagery for the Divine: The Holy Spirit, The Odes of Solomon, and Early Syriac Tradition,” in Saint Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 37 (1993): 111–139. Cf. Sebastian Brock, “The Holy Spirit

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as Feminine in Early Syriac Literature,” in After Eve, ed. J. M. Soskice (London: Marshall-Pickering, 1990), 73–88. 152. Tertullian, De Praescr. 41, as cited in Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 60. Although Tertullian doesn’t associate these women with a specific group, he discusses both Valentinians and Marcionites in the very next chapter as “Motherless, houseless, creedless, outcasts, they wander about in their own essential worthlessness.” Cf. Tertullian, De Praescr. (On Prescription Against Heretics), 42 (ANF 3:264). 153. Tertullian, De Praescr. 7, as cited in Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 114. 154. What may have most disconcerted Tertullian and others like him was that Gnostic initiation, action, and authority were distinctly outside of church ordered control. 155. Gospel of Philip, 65.24–26 as cited in Strathearn, “Valentinian Bridal Chamber in the Gospel of Philip,” 102. 156. Ismo Dunderberg, Beyond Gnosticism: Myth, Lifestyle, and Society in the School of Valentinus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 6. 157. Dunderberg, Beyond Gnosticism, 116. 158. Flavia Sophe, trans. Smith, Valentinian Christianity, 313. 159. Flavia Sophe, trans. Smith, Valentinian Christianity, 313. 160. Strathearn, “The Valentinian Bridal Chamber in the Gospel of Philip,” 102–3. 161. Authoritative Teaching 34.32–34.9, in NHL 283, as cited in Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 112. 162. Gospel of Thomas 45.30–33, in NHL 126, as cited in Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 126. 163. Gospel of Thomas 33.11–13, in NHL 118, as cited in Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 126. 164. 1 Cor. 13:12, NRSV. 165. Gospel of Philip 61.29–35, in NHL 137, as cited in Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 134. 166. Bartsch, Mirror of the Self, 49.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ashbrook Harvey, Susan. Holy Women of the Syrian Orient. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987. Balty, Janine. Mosaïques Antiques de Syrie. Brussels: Centre Belge de Recherches Archéologiques à Apamée de Syrie, 1977. Balty, Janine. Mosaïques Antiques du Proche-Orient: Chronologie, Iconographie, Interprétation. Paris, 1995. Balty, Janine. “Un Programme de Mariage à Shahba-Philippopolis (Syrie).” Collection de l’Ecole Francaise de Rome 2 no. 352 (2005): 1307–1316. Bartsch, Shadi. The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Borg, Barbara. “Eunomia or ‘Make Love Not War’? Meidian Personifications Reconsidered.” In Personification in the Greek World from Antiquity to Byzantium,

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edited by Emma Stafford and Judith Herrin, 193–210. Aldershot; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Bowersock, Glen. Hellenism in Late Antiquity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Bowes, Kimberly. “Personal Devotions and Private Chapels.” In Late Ancient Christianity, edited by Virginia Burrus, 188–210. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005. Brown, Frank. Roman Architecture. New York: G. Braziller, 1961. Buschhausen, Helmut. “Box: Scrinium.” In Eerdman’s Encyclopedia of Early Christian Art and Architecture, edited by Paul Corbey Finney, 210. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2017. Casey, Robert P, ed. and trans. The Excerpta ex Theodoto of Clement of Alexandria. London: Christophers, 1934. Charlesworth, James H., ed. and trans. The Odes of Solomon. Chico, CA: Scholar Press, 1977. Denzey Lewis, Nicola. Introduction to “Gnosticism”: Ancient Voices, Christian Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Downey, Glanville. “Personifications of Abstract Ideas in the Antioch Mosaics.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 69 (1938): 349–363. Dunbabin, Katherine. Mosaics of the Greek and Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Dunderberg, Ismo. Beyond Gnosticism: Myth, Lifestyle, and Society in the School of Valentinus. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Dunn, James D. G., and John William Rogerson. Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003. Dussaud, M. René. “L’Archéologie Syrienne au Printemps 1925.” Syria T. 6, Fasc. 3 (1925), 291–98. Ephrem. Hymns on Paradise. Translated by Sebastian Brock. New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990. Huskinson, Janet. “Surveying the Scene: Antioch Mosaic Pavements as a Source of Historical Evidence.” In Culture and Society in Later Roman Antioch, edited by Isabella Sandwell and Janet Huskinson, 134–52. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2004. Ignatius of Antioch. The Epistles of St. Ignatius Bishop of Antioch. Translated by James Herbert Swraley. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1919. Jenkins, Philip. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Johnson, Aaron P. Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius’ Praeparatio evangelica. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Kennedy, Hugh. The Monuments of Syria. London: I.B. Taurus, 2009. Kiilerich, Bente. “The State of Early Christian Iconography in the Twenty-First Century.” Studies in Iconography 36 (2015): 99–134. Koch, Guntram. “Curtain.” In Eerdman’s Encyclopedia of Early Christian Art and Architecture, ed. Paul Corbey Finney, 387. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2017.

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Kondoleon, Christine. “The Mosaic Pavement of the Church Building of Seleucia Pieria.” In Antioch The Lost Ancient City, ed. Christine Kondoleon, 218–19. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Laistner, Max L. W. Christianity and Pagan Culture in the Later Roman Empire, Together with an English Translation of John Chrysostom’s “Address on Vainglory and the Right Way for Parents to Bring Up Their Children.” Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1951. Lawlor, Robert. Sacred Geometry. London: Thames & Hudson, 1982. Leader-Newby, Ruth. “Personifications and Paideia in Late Antique Mosaics from the Greek East.” In Personification in the Greek World from Antiquity to Byzantium, ed. Edith Stafford and Judith Herrin, 231–46. Aldershot; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott. Lexicon: Abridged from Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896. Ling, Roger. “Mosaics in Roman Britain: Discoveries and Research Since 1945.” Brittania 28 (1997): 259–95. Long, Anthony A. “Ancient Philosophy’s Hardest Question: What to Make of Oneself?” Representations 74 (2001): 19–36. Bauman, Lynn C., Ward J. Bauman, and Cynthia Bourgeault, trans. The Luminous Gospels. Chichester: Praxis, 2008. Magness, Jodi. The Archaeology of the Holy Land: From the Destruction of Solomon’s Temple to the Muslim Conquest. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Magness, Jodi, Shua Kisilevitz, Matthew Grey, Dennis Mizzi, Daniel Schindler, Martin Wells, Karen Britt, et al. “The Huqoq Excavation Project: 2014–2017 Interim Report.” BASOR 380 (2018): 106–111. Maier, Harry O. “Heresy, Households, and the Disciplining of Diversity.” In Late Ancient Christianity, ed. Virginia Burrus, 213–33. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005. Martin, Kathleen. The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images. Cologne: Taschen, 2010. Martin, Ralph P. and Peter H. Davids, eds. Dictionary of the Later New Testament and Its Developments. Boston, MA: Intervarsity Press, 1997. Mathiesen, Thomas J. “Hymenaios.” Grove Music Online, 2001. https​:/​/do​​i​.org​​/10​.1​​ 093​/g​​mo​/97​​81561​​59263​​0​.art​​​icle.​​13647​. Miller, Patricia Cox. Women in Early Christianity: Translations from Greek Texts. Washington, DC.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012. Nock, Arthur Darby, “Franz Cumont. Recherches sur le symbolisme funéraire des romains” [review], Journal of Roman Studies 38, no. 1–2 (1948): 154–56. Nock, Arthur Darby, and J. D. Beazley, “Sarcophagi and Symbolism,” American Journal of Archaeology 50, no.1 (1946): 140–70. Økland, Jorunn. Women in Their Place. New York: T&T Clark, 2004. Osiek, Carolyn, and Margaret Y. MacDonald. A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006. Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

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Pagels, Elaine. “The ‘Mystery of Marriage’ in the Gospel of Philip Revisited.” In The Future of Early Christianity, ed. Birger A. Pearson, 442–54. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991. Perring, Dominic. “‘Gnosticism’ in Fourth-Century Britain: The Frampton Mosaics Reconsidered.” Brittania 34 (2003): 97–127. Pope, Mike. “Occular Penetration, Grammatical Objectivity, and an Indecent Proposal in De Rerum Natura.” Classical Philology 113 (2018): 206–12. Smith, Dennis E. “The House Church as Social Environment.” In Text, Image, and Christians in the Graeco-Roman World, ed. Aliou Cissé Niang and Carolyn Osiek, 3–21. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012. Smith, Margaret. The Way of the Mystics: The Early Christian Mystics and the Rise of the Sufis. London: Sheldon Press, 1976. Strathearn, Gaye. “The Valentinian Bridal Chamber in the Gospel of Philip.” Studies in the Bible and Antiquity 1 (2009): 83–103. Strathearn, Gaye. “The Valentinian Bridal Chamber.” PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University, 2004. Thomassen, Einar, ed. The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the ‘Valentinians’. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Thomassen, Einar, and Christoph Markschies, eds. Valentinism: New Studies. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Trombley, Frank. Hellenic Religion and Christianization c. 370–529. Vol. 2. Leiden: Brill, 1994.

Chapter 9

Reimagining and Reimaging Eve in Early Christianity* Mark D. Ellison

One day in fourth-century Roman North Africa, a ceramicist made an image of Eve—a thin strip of clay about 5–6 cm in length, pressed into a mold to form a relief, which the artist then attached to the center of the discus of a premolded oil lamp (figure 9.1).1 The appliqué depicts Eve covering her nakedness with a fig leaf in her right hand, looking to her right, and making a gesture of speech with her left hand. It is identical to images of Eve standing beside Adam on other lamps, except here she appears by herself and her legs below the knees are missing, apparently having worn off or broken off.2 On her own, made of earth, cut off at the knees, from this light-giving vessel, she speaks. Eve alone has something to say here. If an early Christian woman owned and used this oil lamp, what connections might she have perceived between herself, Eve’s image, and the lamp? In what ways might the image have influenced the lamp’s utility for its owner or served to express the owner’s religious self-concept? What did Eve speak to her? We might raise similar questions regarding other early Christian artifacts bearing images of Eve, sometimes by herself, more often paired with Adam. Material and literary sources amply attest that other women in Christian scripture and tradition—figures such as the Virgin Mary, Susanna, Thecla, and St. Agnes—were popular role models or exemplars of piety for women. Relatively less attention has been given to evidence that women in late antiquity also identified with Eve and expressed their ideas about her in both word and image. With thanks to Robin M. Jensen, Annewies van den Hoek, and John Herrmann, Jr., for their encouragement of my research in its early stages, and to Carolyn Osiek, Catherine Gines Taylor, Christopher Kanyusik, Krystal Pierce, Susannah Kearon, and anonymous peer reviewers for their feedback and suggestions on earlier drafts of this chapter.

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Figure 9.1  Oil Lamp with Eve, Fourth Century, Tunisia (Roman province of Byzacena). Private Collection. Source: Photo: Annewies Van Den Hoek.

Depictions of the biblical first woman and man were among the earliest visual representations of biblical narratives and enjoyed widespread popularity in the earliest Christian art of the third and fourth centuries.3 Four characteristics of these early Christian images of Eve and Adam seem especially important for the questions at hand: (1) They appear in a variety of media, including catacomb frescoes, sarcophagus reliefs, grave slabs, gold-glass medallions, gems, and ceramics. (2) These media are predominantly private commissions and personal items, suggesting their importance to lay believers for a range of uses.4 (3) Nearly all of them belong to the sphere of domestic or private religion, where women exercised distinctive influence and agency and could put images to use in ways that reached beyond interpretations prevailing in institutional contexts.5 (4) The images are of diverse iconographic types.6 In the most common image, identified as a representation of the Fall, Eve and Adam stand to either side of a tree, covering themselves and sometimes reaching for the tree’s fruit as a snake wraps itself around the trunk. Sometimes Eve and Adam look downward and away from each

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other in shame. In another image type, the two appear with symbols of their labors—a staff of wheat for Adam and a sheep for Eve, evocative of practical, social, and theological valences, such as the idealized spheres of men’s and women’s activity in the work of life (farming and woolworking), spousal partnership in the division of labors, and a foreshadowing of the “bread of life” and “lamb of God” that was to come to redeem humanity.7 Sometimes Christ stands between Eve and Adam, appearing kindly rather than threatening, as he hands them the grain and the lamb.8 Creation scenes portray Eve in diminutive form, newly made by Christ-Logos or the Trinity, alone or beside the newly created Adam.9 In one instance, Eve and Adam stand in a pose of marital harmony, joining right hands and looking into each other’s eyes.10 The variety of iconographic types indicates an interest in more than one moment in Eve’s story, more than simply the notion of the Fall and human sin, but rather an extended, multifaceted narrative whose meanings and associations might profitably be evoked by figured objects used in daily life.11 If we can plausibly establish, or even imagine, that early Christian women encountered these images on objects with which they acted and interacted, we may ask, In what ways might these women have related to the images of Eve they saw?12 What did women think about Eve that prompted them to commission, give, or use artifacts decorated with her image? If such questions are ultimately unanswerable, it does not necessarily follow that they are not worth asking and pursuing, even if the most one can offer in response is a range of possibilities. Reconstruction of the past often requires inference and speculation.13 As Laura Salah Nasrallah has persuasively argued, historians may examine archaeological finds in ways that reach beyond the narrow, positivist quest to establish meanings definitively or anchor events with precision; historians may also seek reconstructions of a “provisional nature,” “tumbling down rabbit holes of wondering,” opening ways “to investigate those marginalized in ancient texts”—and, we might add, those overlooked or ignored in ancient texts.14 This seems to me work worth doing, even when it can only nudge us a bit closer to an appreciation of the lived experience, perspectives, and hopes of forgotten people of the past. Such an approach to examining artifacts with images of Eve need not be unanchored—critical reading of relevant textual and visual comparanda provides controls in the task of interpretation and, like oblique lighting, brings significant details of material sources into relief.15 Accordingly, this essay proceeds by surveying texts that suggest a range of perspectives early Christian women held about Eve, then undertakes an examination of four selected artifacts with images of Eve to explore potential interrelations of images, objects, actions, and actors.

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LITERARY COMPARANDA: WOMEN’S OWN NARRATIVES ABOUT EVE In several ancient/late ancient literary sources that women wrote or influenced, perspectives on Eve are more complex, positive, and redemptive than those that prevail in patristic literature. The male authors who produced early Christian commentary on Eve and Adam focused on their roles as the introducers of sin, the parents of humanity, and the counterparts of Mary and Christ in a typology of salvation.16 For these authors, Eve was usually a foil who compared negatively with Adam or Mary. For example, the author of 1 Timothy blamed Eve for the Fall and appealed to the sequence of creation as the basis for upholding a gendered hierarchy that restricted women’s activity in church life: “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor” (1 Tim. 2:11–14 NRSV). In arguing for these restrictions, the pastoral author (like most subsequent commentators on Eve) drew selectively on the second creation story in Genesis—not the hexameron narrative of Genesis 1:1–2:3, in which God created both male and female in the divine image, but the Paradise narrative of Genesis 2:4–3:24, in which Eve, formed from Adam’s rib, ate the forbidden fruit.17 Both his reading of Genesis and his vision of men’s and women’s roles in church life seem to represent a departure from earlier statements of Paul that had problematized basing any gendered hierarchy on the sequence of Adam and Eve’s creation, emphasized essential equality between men and women in Christ, and focused on Adam as the one who had brought sin and death into the world.18 Most patristic authors followed the lead of 1 Timothy, deploying, for purposes of social ordering, a negative portrait of Eve as the derivative, unstable, unfaithful, venal woman who was culpable for the introduction of sin and death.19 A classic example is Tertullian’s early third-century treatise De cultu feminarum (On the Apparel of Women), which universalized Eve’s shame in order to urge female modesty and uprightness. Addressing the Christian women of Carthage, Tertullian tells them that all women derive from Eve “the ignominy . . . of the first sin, and the odium . . . of human perdition.” He says to them: Do you not know that you are (each) an Eve? . . . You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of the punishment you deserved—that is, death—even the Son of God had to die.20

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In contrast, other texts authored or influenced by women indicate that many women did indeed consider themselves to be “an Eve,” not in Tertullian’s overwhelmingly pejorative terms but in positive, affirming ways with their own real implications for the ordering and conceptualizing of life. Along with material artifacts, these literary sources indicate that women in late antiquity actively created and promoted their own, more complex narratives about Eve, or “a range of different Eves,” as Vita Daphna Arbel puts it.21 In these more redemptive narratives, Eve served as a role model for women’s piety in their own life contexts. The Life of Adam and Eve was written perhaps in the first century CE in a no-longer-extant Hebrew version; the surviving Greek text seems to date to 100–300 CE, with translations or alternate versions in Latin, Armenian, Slavic, Georgian, and Coptic emerging later.22 These texts bring together diverse oral traditions that (according to experts on the text such as Johannes Tromp and Vita Daphna Arbel) appear to have originated as instructive stories that mothers and grandmothers told their children and grandchildren.23 Both the Greek and Latin versions “enjoyed wide circulation among Christians,”24 and in their treatment of Eve, both display an interest in matters beyond her culpability for the Fall.25 Here Eve is a complex individual, both a cautionary figure and a positive role model.26 Not only Adam but Eve, too, is called “the image of God.”27 Though portions of the text blame her for the transgression in Eden, other sections exonerate her and portray her as an exemplar of repentance and a recipient of divine redemption.28 She is a teacher who instructs the human family on the ways of God, urging them to be watchful and not to forsake the good.29 She is a devoted spouse who prays for Adam, offers to bear a portion of his pain, and upon his death dutifully sees to the proper funerary rites and prays to be buried alongside him.30 Most arrestingly, Eve is a visionary prophetess who has a revelatory dream about her children31 and later a vision in which she gazes into heaven and sees God, angels, and the redemption of Adam/humanity.32 In the midst of this theophany, Eve calls out to her son Seth, epitomizing the influence of a woman who perceives eternal realities: “Come to me, that you may see things which no eye has ever seen. . . . Look up with your eyes and see the seven heavens opened.”33 Here Eve is indeed a gateway, not for the devil but to the divine. Women telling these tales in late antiquity seem to have found in Eve an archetype who embodied the values, forms of piety, and religious insight to which they aspired and which they sought to instill in children. Another text dealing with Eve, the fourth-century Virgilian cento De laudibus Christi, was authored by the aristocratic Roman Christian Faltonia Betitia Proba. As its translators Elizabeth Clark and Diane Hatch observe, this poem is “the earliest complete and extant work in Christian history that we are sure was written by a woman.”34 In a remarkable display of literary skill,

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Proba extracted lines from Virgil and rearranged them ingeniously to tell the biblical stories of creation, ancient Israel, and the life of Jesus. Taking words written by a man, she repurposed them to craft a work of her own, perhaps as a resource for teaching Christian youths and as a clever show of resistance to the marginalization of Christian teachers and texts under the emperor Julian.35 In her account of the creation of Eve, the first woman is “a wondrous gift” who “shone in brilliant light.”36 Proba describes the “marriage” of Eve and Adam with the image of the dextrarum iunctio, the joined right hands, an element in Roman marriage rituals and symbol of marital harmony and devotion: Adam “took and clasped / Her hand in his, folded his arms around her.”37 Here Eve typifies the familial piety valued by aristocratic Romans such as Proba38 and represents the devoted wife as in the Life of Adam and Eve. Yet as Proba relates the story of the disobedience in Eden, she disapproves of Eve’s behavior, calling her “the impious wife” whose mind was misdirected, who became “the origin and cause” of all the ills of the Fall.39 For Proba, the figure of Eve could be both exemplary and cautionary, a means of warning young minds against impiety while also holding up ideals of the original creation.40 By no means do these texts present an egalitarian wonderland. In places they regard Eve as culpable for the Fall and echo negative stereotypes about women that were enmeshed in the patriarchy of the ancient world.41 One reason for this is found in Ross Shepard Kraemer’s observation: “Many if not most women inculcate the dominant, misogynist values and perspectives of their own cultures into their self-understanding.”42 Another consideration is that female authors may have thought they needed to write within existing frameworks in order to be heard.43 Nevertheless, even as the women behind the Life of Adam and Eve and De laudibus Christi approached Eve within a patriarchal cultural frame, they did so in ways that relativized gender stereotypes and explored affirming ways of thinking about women’s life experiences and religious activities by means of new narratives about the Bible’s first woman. Still other texts went further. One little-studied manuscript known as Irenaeus fragment XIV, dated to ca. 150–250 CE, regards Eve not just favorably but even superior to Adam: Why did the serpent not attack the man, rather than the woman? You say he went after her because she was the weaker of the two. On the contrary. In the transgression of the commandment, she showed herself to be the stronger, truly the man’s “assistance.” . . . For she alone stood up to the serpent. She ate from the tree, but with resistance and dissent, and after being dealt with perfidiously. But Adam partook of the fruit given by the woman, without even beginning to make a fight, without a word of contradiction. . . . The woman, moreover, can

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be excused; she wrestled with a demon and was thrown. . . . The woman, finally, even when she did hear the command from Adam, must have felt she was being made little of; either because she had not been judged worthy to converse with God herself; or because she suspected there was even a chance that Adam had given her the command on his own.44

The paragraph is remarkable for how it contradicts the prevalent interpretation of Eve in patristic writings, which regarded her as inferior to Adam and culpable for the expulsion from Eden.45 Women likely had a role in developing and promoting this countertradition. Though earlier scholars assumed that this fragment, which appears as an addition to a collection of Irenaeus’s writings, is an excerpt from the seventh-century monk Anastasius Sinaita, more recent scholars hold that it likely represents the views of gnostic Christian groups Irenaeus opposed—groups in which women seem to have enjoyed more prominent roles than in proto-orthodox communities and whose literature featured strong female characters.46 Given the hybridity and porous boundaries that characterized socioreligious identity in late antiquity, we cannot assume that such countertraditions about Eve would not have been known or accepted by women in what came to be seen as orthodox Christianity.47 The Life of Adam and Eve, De laudibus Christi, and Irenaeus fragment XIV, texts either authored or influenced by women, give evidence of a social imaginary shared by many early Christian women—one that was not coterminous with the views of men such as Tertullian but overlapped them only partially.48 As Elizabeth Clark has observed, even the sparse evidence we have “makes us question whether the ideological stance of the Fathers entirely won the day,” for “women and other subject populations manage to find small openings for their own projects and expressions of value,” with the result that “the patristic ideology of ‘womanhood’” was “to some degree subverted from within, by the women themselves.”49 Among the “projects and expressions of value” women produced were narratives and interpretations of the first woman that communicated women’s own ideals, perspectives, and life experiences. Their alternate imaginary provides insight into the range of meanings they would have seen in visual images of Eve—further “projects” that decorated objects women commissioned and used. The multiform images of Eve and Adam that emerged in early Christian art correspond to the variety of narratives about Eve that circulated among women. Both literary and iconographic evidence imply interest in a larger story than Eve’s transgression, with a broader range of signification, especially for the female gaze.50 Informed by women’s narrative traditions about Eve, we can take some steps toward recovering that gaze.

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A WOMAN AND HER LAMP: CLARAQUE IN LUCE REFULSIT The most common image of Eve, seen on our fourth-century oil lamp (figure 9.1) and numerous other works of early Christian art, derives from the iconography of Venus pudica—the naked female covering herself, averting her eyes, and turning away. This form, originated by the sculptor Praxiteles in his fourth-century BCE Knidian Aphrodite, was replicated in many subsequent works, such as the first-century BCE sculpture by Menophantos (figure 9.2) and the second-century CE Capitoline Venus.51 Some art historians have called attention to the male gaze implied in this image—the viewer, forced to adopt the perspective of the male sculptor, sees the female subject, who does not want to be seen; she is rendered in a state of permanent vulnerability, invaded and ashamed, subjected to “the controlling male gaze.”52 Interpreted this way, the image is manipulative, voyeuristic, and instantiative of a power imbalance. As a fundamentally misogynistic iconography, it contributes to the subjugation of women and women’s bodies. Such interpretations are debated. Marianne Wardle cautions against projecting modern concerns onto ancient images and argues that ancient viewers, female and male, may have perceived the pudica gesture in terms of idealized modesty rather than shame.53 Shelby Brown, too, poses challenging questions: “Are women passive receptors of or active aggressors against the male viewpoint? Are they intellectually and emotionally torn as they identify with, but cannot fully live, male voyeurism? . . . Is the effect and significance of the oppressive male gaze really so straightforward? What kinds of images of women would actually address the female experience?”54 The literary works discussed previously suggest that early Christian women did not passively receive prevailing views of Woman as conveyed in male-authored commentary on Eve; rather, they practiced selective reception and developed counter-narratives and alternate perspectives. This surely has implications for the female gaze and images of Eve. The literary evidence urges us to watch for similar selectivity and resistance in ways women commissioned, deployed, used, and regarded visual images of Eve (even as we keep in mind the problematic male gaze and intentions men may have held regarding images of Eve). Let us turn, then, to a consideration of how a woman might have regarded the Eve oil lamp (figure 9.1). As with so many lamps from antiquity, we do not know the exact provenance or owner of this piece. Charring at the lamp’s nozzle provides a clue about the lamp’s use: it provided lighting and was not merely an unlit gift or grave good. It may have lit a domestic space, a cemeterial space, or both on different occasions.55 A female owner seems likely, given the literary evidence of women’s interest in Eve and identification with

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Figure 9.2  Aphrodite by Menophantos, First Century BCE. Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome. Source: Public Domain.

her. Furthermore, ancient literary sources associate women with lamps and lamp lighting in domestic rituals (discussed below). The woman who owned this lamp might also have been the one who commissioned or purchased it, though it is possible a man might have purchased it, either for his own use or, more likely, as a gift for a woman (perhaps a wife or daughter), as if to say to her, like Tertullian, “You are an Eve.” We might see an analogy in the famous late fourth-century Projecta Casket, a silver box that was apparently a wedding gift for a Christian woman named Projecta (figure 9.3).

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Figure 9.3  Projecta Casket, Late Fourth Century CE, Rome. British Museum. Source: Photo: ART417971.Photo Credit: © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY.

Beneath a gilded repoussé portrait of Projecta and her husband on the lid, a partially naked Venus holds a mirror as attendant marine creatures bring her a box and a fruit basket, while on the panel directly below, a parallel scene depicts Projecta, clothed and jeweled, with attendants bringing her a mirror and a casket. The toilette imagery displays interest in a bride’s beautification, as if to say to Projecta, “You are a Venus.”56 Another artifact comparable to the Projecta Casket, but more like our Eve lamp, is a late antique redware lamp from Tunisia featuring a female figure almost identical to our Eve (figure 9.4).57 However, the molded lamp gives the woman knee-high laced footwear and replaces her speaking gesture with a round mirror. She looks toward the mirror to see her reflection. Yet she still has the attribute of the fig leaf usually associated with Eve. Is this Eve with accessories? Venus with Eve’s fig leaf? Or maybe a woman with composite attributes of Venus, Eve, and beautiful women of the late Roman world? As with the Projecta Casket, there is interest here in using the female form and a mirror to idealize beauty while also alluding to gendered space that may imply a female owner or recipient of the lamp.58 If this lamp was a gift to a woman, it would seem to illustrate, like the Projecta Casket, how dowries or other gifts could be a means to communicate ideals, expectations, or other messages to women using images

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Figure 9.4  Drawing of Oil Lamp with Nude Female, by Austin Simkins, after Abdelmajid Ennabli. Source: Lampes Chrétiennes de Tunisie (Musées du Bardo et de Carthage), no. 153.

and objects. How women may have understood such images and gifts is another question. The iconography of the Eve oil lamp, in contrast, reflects less interest in Venus-like beauty than in the representation of the biblical Eve. The lamp’s owner would have seen an image that differed in key respects from Venus pudica images she would have observed elsewhere in her visual environment. Eve is not cowering or attempting to cover her breasts; she stands upright, speaking. She does not seem self-conscious; the fig leaf seems to function more as an identifier (conveying “this is Eve”) than as a symbol of shame or even modesty. The image portrays Eve as the assertive speaker, associated with the light of a lamp.

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Maria Parani observes that in the corpus of early Christian artifacts, humble clay lamps were “vehicles for the material expression of a Christian owner’s preoccupations.”59 In what ways might the image of Eve on this lamp signal the preoccupations of its owner? For one, there are intriguing relationships the viewer might have recognized in the figure of Eve on a light-giving object. The poet Proba depicted the newly made Eve radiating light (claraque in luce refulsit, “and she shone in brilliant light”), and the Greek Life of Adam and Eve described Eve as clothed in glory.60 A circle of soft, flickering light would have shone from this lamp with Eve, illuminating the space in which it was used and casting dancing shadows on the raised relief that would have “animated” Eve and made her more visible to the lamp’s user. Another intriguing consideration is that some early Christian lamps are thought to have commemorated the owner’s conversion to Christianity and the spiritual illumination attained by baptism.61 If this lamp marked the occasion of its owner’s baptism, it would have a counterpart in the fresco above the font in the Dura-Europos baptistery, which contained a depiction of Eve and Adam at the tree—to be baptized was to regain the Paradise from which humanity had been expelled.62 The Life of Adam and Eve describes Eve and Adam undergoing a type of baptism as they seek forgiveness by immersing themselves in the Tigris and Jordan rivers.63 A woman who identified as a newly made Christian may well have perceived connections between herself and the image of Eve, newly created and illuminated. Further relationships exist between lamps, Eve, and gender roles in antiquity. In the New Testament, five wise maidens endure the delayed arrival of a wedding procession by carrying extra oil for their lamps (Matt. 25:1–13), and an exemplary woman lights a lamp to find her lost coin (Lk. 15:8). Jewish sources refer to the lighting of the family’s lamps at home as a woman’s duty and a reflection of her importance in the domestic sphere.64 Some sources link this duty to the biblical creation story: “Adam was the light of the world, but because [Eve] caused him to be extinguished, she therefore was assigned the duty of kindling the light.”65 Josephus claims (perhaps with overstatement) that Jewish practices of lamp lighting and reciting prayers in the home spread throughout the Greco-Roman world.66 Christians practiced these domestic rituals. Tertullian, writing in North Africa in the early third century, describes a Christian custom of making the sign of the cross at certain points in the day, including at meals and when lighting lamps, and states that one of the regular times of prayer was at sunset, implying prayers made in connection with lamp lighting.67 In the mid-third century, the North African bishop Cyprian encouraged the practice of private evening prayers and described their meaning with imagery that again evokes practices of lamp lighting: “At the sunsetting and at the decline of day, of necessity we must pray again . . . we pray and ask that light may return to us again.”68 The fourth- or fifth-century Canons

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of Hippolytus explicitly connect private evening prayer with lamp lighting: “Again at the time when the sun sets they are to pray, because it is the end of the day. . . . When one lights the lamps in the evening they are to pray.”69 “The origins of the rituals, whether Jewish or Christian, are less important than their ubiquity,” Kim Bowes observes, “and Christian homes would have sparkled with the ritual lamps of evening alongside their pagan and Jewish neighbors.”70 Domestic rituals of lighting lamps and offering prayers at sundown developed into the public liturgy of lucernarium, a Christian lamplighting ceremony that also may have been supervised by women.71 Considering the association of lamps with prayer and women, it is intriguing to compare the Eve lamp to the portrayal of Eve repeatedly praying in both the Latin and Greek versions of the Life of Adam and Eve. Eve prays for forgiveness as she immerses herself in the Tigris River with the words “O God, be gracious to me.”72 In the pains of childbirth, she prays, “Have mercy on me, Lord, help me!”73 She prays for Adam in his final illness. She falls to the ground and in prayer confesses her sin until an angel comes and lifts her up with the assuring words “Rise, Eve, from your repentance.”74 She prays throughout the week of mourning after Adam’s death. In the hour of her own death, she “implored that she might be buried where Adam, her husband, was, saying, ‘My Master, Lord and God of all excellence, do not separate me from . . . Adam. . . . Just as I was with him in Paradise, and not separated even after the transgression, so also let no one separate us (now).’”75 After her final words of instruction to her children, “she stretched out her hands to heaven, praying, and bent her knees to the ground and worshiped the Lord, giving thanks.”76 And finally, with her last breath, she prays, “God of all, receive my spirit,” echoing Psalm 31:5 and Jesus on the cross (Lk. 23:46).77 One gets the picture of prayer accompanying all the major events of a woman’s life. Though Adam prays, too, both the Greek and Latin versions portray Eve in prayer more often than Adam, in ways that demonstrate development beyond the events in Eden.78 If this lamp was used by an early Christian woman at times of prayer, its image of Eve might have called to its owner’s mind the many occasions when Eve was said to have modeled a life of prayer. In ritual contexts there is often a dynamic interchange between image and ritual; images can model, prompt, and reflect ritual behaviors. If the image of Eve on this lamp and the light shining from it accompanied an early Christian daughter of Eve as she practiced domestic rituals of lamp lighting, they may have guided her as she prayed in the pattern of Eve—for her own soul, for her family—expressing in her actions and words Eve’s longing “O God, be gracious to me.”79 Perhaps some details would seem to discourage seeing the figure of Eve on this lamp in connection with prayer. She does not assume the orant posture (with hands raised) associated with prayer in early Christian art—a gesture

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mentioned explicitly in the Life of Adam and Eve: “She stretched out her hands to heaven, praying.”80 On the other hand, the conventional iconography of Eve holding the fig leaf was so closely followed that it may have discouraged ever portraying her as an orant.81 Ultimately, what is clear about the figure of Eve on this lamp is that Eve speaks—and that in itself may have stood out as the most important detail to the lamp’s owner. In ancient literature and art, speech “is regularly constructed as masculine.”82 Yet in early Christian art, the popularity of depictions of speaking women suggests a valorization of women of faith who voice witness of the Christian message.83 This ideal resonates with passages in the Life of Adam and Eve that portray Eve as a teacher of her family, who says, “Listen to me, my children,” warning them against deceit and drawing their gaze toward heaven.84 It also has strong affinities with Irenaeus fragment XIV, which says of Eve, “She alone stood up to the serpent,” showing “resistance” and “dissent,” in contrast to Adam, who acquiesced “without a word.” The portrayal of Eve speaking dramatically in these texts and on the lamp diverges from stipulations that women were to learn in silence, not to teach. Against such injunctions, we are left with the prospect that somewhere in the North Africa of late antiquity, in the dark of night, an early Christian woman saw, in the Eve on her lamp, a model of vocal conviction and reason that illuminated her world. A WOMAN AND HER GOLD-GLASS DISH: JUXTAPOSITIONS, ASSERTIONS, AND HOPES A unique scene with Eve appears on a fourth-century gold-glass medallion in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford (figure 9.5).85 Like hundreds of similar roundels discovered in the catacombs of Rome and other cemeterial contexts, this medallion was made of excised gold foil sandwiched between two layers of glass. Originally, it formed the decorated base of a shallow glass dish that may have been a gift to the married couple depicted at its center, or commissioned by the couple. Scholars debate whether vessels like this enjoyed primary use in a domestic context (as serving dishes or displays) or were purpose-made for funerary use.86 No gold-glass medallions have been discovered in domestic settings; all have come from cemeteries. It appears that upon the death of one or both owners of vessels such as this, the glass surrounding the medallion would carefully be clipped away (after a funerary meal at the grave?), leaving just the image, which would then be placed in mortar covering a loculus burial slot in the catacombs (or within a burial), where it served as a grave-marker, memorial, tomb decoration, or grave good. The gold and glass of displayed medallions would reflect the light of torches

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Figure 9.5  Gold-Glass Medallion with Spousal Portrait and Radiating Biblical Scenes including Christ-Logos Redeeming Eve and Adam. Fourth Century CE, Rome. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Source: Photo: HIP / Art Resource, NY.

and oil lamps when surviving relatives would visit the grave in the dark, subterranean catacombs.87 At the center of this medallion are portraits of a wife and husband, posed frontally—the vessel’s owners. Around their heads appears the Latinized Greek inscription PIE ZESES (“Drink! May you live!”), a toast and commonplace on gold-glasses. The second-person singular suggests that the glass vessel was intended as a gift or commemoration for one of the two spouses.88 If the vessel was originally a wedding gift, the inscription wishes the recipient a happy life with her or his spouse; in its cemeterial context, as Susan Walker observes, “the inscription addressed to a single individual exhorts the deceased to celebrate his or her future eternal life in heaven.”89 The woman wears braided hair and a richly embroidered stole and holds a rotulus (scroll). More often it is the male who holds a scroll in tondo couple portraits.90 The scroll could allude to the woman’s learning in a kind of visual panegyric.91 It may also reflect a widespread early Christian valorization of learned women and perhaps a situation in which women in early Christianity were sometimes of higher social status than their husbands.92 In any case, the presence of the scroll draws special attention to the woman pictured at

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the center—one detail among several implying that she may have been the primary owner of the vessel. The woman’s learning would seem to include her knowledge of Christian scripture, for five biblical vignettes radiate from the central portrait, clockwise from top: the paralytic with Christ extending his wand-like virga to heal him; Lazarus being raised by Christ with this same staff; Adam and Eve to either side of the tree, taking the fruit and covering themselves, with the figure of Christ to Eve’s left, extending his staff toward her; Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac; and the water miracle of Moses. A unique feature of this medallion is the figure of Christ extending the virga toward Eve and Adam. Though Christ sometimes accompanies the first parents on sarcophagi, to my knowledge this medallion is the only instance in the entire corpus of early Christian art in which Christ extends the miracle-working staff toward Adam and Eve—or more precisely, toward Eve.93 The figure of Christ with the virga appears most often in scenes of raising the dead or certain kinds of wonders (such as the multiplication of loaves and changing water to wine).94 The staff, evocative of the rod of Moses, iconographically depicts Jesus as the new Moses and symbolizes the extension of divine power to work transforming, life-giving miracles.95 Our medallion applies this divine transformation to the first parents, most immediately to Eve. Its collocation of images suggests that as Christ restored wholeness to the paralytic, and life to Lazarus, he also restores Eve and Adam, a redemption foreshadowed by the sacrifice of Isaac and received in the transforming waters of baptism (to which the water miracle alluded).96 The portrayal of Eve and Adam here does not emphasize shame or cast them in a negative light; they are included side by side with other beneficiaries of Christ’s miracles. Eve serves less as a picture of impiety than as a model recipient of salvation, in harmony with the redemptive traditions in the Life of Adam and Eve. The juxtaposition of Eve and Adam with the spousal portrait at the center could have invited viewers to consider an association between the two pairs. Further encouraging this connection is the resemblance between the woman and Eve—as Charles Morey noticed, Eve and the woman wear the same hairstyle.97 Norbert Zimmermann observes that in early Christian funerary art, portraits of the deceased with biblical figures in contemporary hairstyles and clothing “immediately suggested that the deceased was participating in these salvific events.”98 The apparent intention to suggest a connection between Eve and the woman is important in light of the positive, redemptive portrayal of first parents here. That link makes the scene of redemption not just about Eve and Adam or humanity in general but also about the vessel’s owners; salvation is something that comes to this couple, as it did to the first parents. They, too, are located among the recipients of divine favor.

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The medallion’s uniqueness may indicate that it was made according to customer specifications. In light of the attention given to Eve and the woman at center, it seems plausible that the vessel was designed by or for that woman. Either she, or whoever commissioned this image for her, advanced a representation by association. The medallion demonstrates how images, like narratives, could be a means for early Christians to make statements about themselves—to claim divine favor and blessing, to express hopes for salvation, to identify with biblical figures, including Eve. TWO WOMEN AND THEIR GRAVES: EVE AND VISUAL EULOGY The gold-glass medallion’s presumed placement at a burial site (whether that was its original or secondary use) classifies it as one of many funerary artifacts decorated with images of Eve and Adam. We turn to two others that compare to it instructively—a carved stone loculus plaque at Velletri and a marble double-register sarcophagus at Arles. Like the Ashmolean medallion, these artifacts visually express something of women’s lives, identity, and religious commitments via portraits placed amid images of Eve and other biblical motifs. A major purpose of funerary monuments was to preserve the memory of a deceased relative among a family’s living members and to maintain a sense of connection between the living and the dead.99 One can imagine a woman’s children and other relations visiting her grave at the regular occasions of commemoration, holding torches or lamps as they move through dark passageways until they arrive at the burial site, gathering around, gazing upon the portrait of the deceased, taking in the surrounding frames and images, seeing the figure of Eve there among the others. Here certain lines from the Life of Adam and Eve seem to acquire new significance: in portions of the narrative dealing with Eve and Adam’s deaths and burial, Eve urgently says, “Listen to me, my children,”100 “Look up with your eyes and see”101—apt descriptions of how images on funerary monuments likely functioned. Images arouse curiosity; their collocations invite reflection on relationships and meanings; they convey ideas. What would graveside guests have seen in the figure of Eve as she accompanied their departed relative? On the early fourth-century stone loculus plaque or sarcophagus panel at Velletri, a unique image of Eve and Adam appears immediately to the right of a large relief portrait of the woman memorialized at the center of the panel (figures 9.6 and 9.7).102 Eve and Adam stand in the dextrarum iunctio pose, right hands joined, looking into each other’s eyes, while Adam (at left) rests

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Figure 9.6  Eve and Adam Dextrarum Lunctio, Detail, Velletri Plaque, c. 300 CE. Museo Civico Archaeologico, Velletri, Italy. Source: Photo: Mark D. Ellison.

his left arm on Eve’s shoulders. Eve covers herself with her left hand (like Venus pudica), but neither she nor Adam wears a fig leaf nor turns away in shame; rather, they are depicted nude as in scenes of the creation of Eve and Adam—newly made, before the Fall. Yet the scene foreshadows the Fall with a miniature tree and a snake placed to the left, behind Adam. The deliberate alteration of the earlier iconography of the Fall, removing the tree and the snake off to the side, adding the joined right hands, and portraying unashamed nudity, indicates an intention to focus on joyful marital devotion rather than sin or shame.103

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Figure 9.7  Velletri Plaque, c. 300 CE. Museo Civico Archaeologico, Velletri, Italy. Source: Photo: Mark D. Ellison.

The image echoes the portrayal of Eve as a devoted wife in the Life of Adam and Eve and even more strikingly mirrors the poet Proba’s description of the “marriage” of the first parents: Adam “clasped [Eve’s right] hand [dextram] in his, [and] folded his arms around her.”104 This remarkable parallel between text and image raises the possibility that the Velletri image was not one of a kind, and other depictions of the first parents in this particular handclasp pose existed on works of art that are now lost but were known to Proba and her readers.105 Regardless, both Proba and the Velletri image present Eve and Adam as models of marital harmony using the imagery of the dextrarum iunctio that had symbolized domestic concordia in public and private art since the Antonine period.106 Fourth-century Rome is also where we see the earliest unambiguous evidence for the practice of a nuptial blessing pronounced by a priest or bishop upon a bride and groom; sources suggest that the blessing included the words from Genesis 1:28 spoken to Adam and Eve: “Be fruitful and multiply.”107 As David G. Hunter observes, this ritual “initiated the married couple into the world of the biblical text. In other words, by reenacting the biblical blessing of the first human couple, the liturgical blessing extended the original blessing given at creation into the present life of the couple being blessed.”108 Marrying Christians were encouraged to identify with Adam and Eve and see themselves as successors of the biblical first parents and recipients of the same divine blessing.109 For example, in a poem Paulinus of Nola wrote to celebrate the wedding of Julian of Eclanum and his bride Titia, Paulinus pointed to Adam and Eve as “the original model for the holy alliance now being sealed” and exhorted the newlyweds to imitate the first parents.110

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On the Velletri plaque, the image of Eve and Adam appears as one vignette among other biblical and pastoral scenes surrounding the portrait of the commemorated woman (figure 9.7). This large portrait at the center of the plaque depicts the woman as a veiled orant (a figure praying with raised, outstretched hands) who stands and fills the vertical space, dramatically memorializing her as a person of piety.111 The surrounding images contribute to a visual eulogy of the deceased woman and an expression of her values and hopes in this life and the next. Immediately to either side are smaller images: the Adam and Eve scene to the right and at left a seated figure reading from a scroll, with a box of scrolls before him. These vignettes may represent aspects of life important to the deceased—a harmonious marriage in the pattern of the archetypal first couple and the value of learning. The references to the learned sphere and marriage suggest the commemoration of a woman very much like Proba, whose poem blended classical literature, Roman aristocratic values, and Christian faith.112 Further removed from the central orant, yet surrounding her, are vignettes of Noah in the ark and the multiplication miracle (in the right field) and Daniel between the lions and the Jonah cycle (in the left field). Daniel and Noah, hands raised in prayer, create a symmetrical parallel to either side of the deceased, inviting the viewer to see the woman in terms of the prayers and divine deliverance associated with these two biblical heroes. Framing the entire composition at each end are shepherd figures, biblical and bucolic images that in funerary art appear to represent ideas about

Figure 9.8  Arles “Trinity” Sarcophagus, c. 325 CE. Musée départemental Arles Antique. Source: Photo: Mark D. Ellison.

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the afterlife, including the peaceful state of the departed soul, the promise of eternal life, and the future deliverance from death in resurrection.113 While the Velletri plaque commemorates an early Christian woman standing in prayer, it is a double-portrait of a woman and her husband framed within a shell that serves the commemoration of another woman on a sarcophagus in Arles dating to around 325 CE (figure 9.8).114 Jutta DreskenWeiland has documented that sarcophagi of this type were most often made for the burial of a woman, and their images represent a “woman theme.”115 Reliefs on this sarcophagus do seem to give attention to divine favor extended to female biblical figures—Mary holds the Christ child as the magi approach (lower register, left), Christ blesses the Canaanite or hemorrhagic woman (upper register, right), and two scenes depict Eve attended by the preincarnate Christ-Logos. On the lid directly above the couple portrait, Eve (her face now lost through damage to the reliefs) and Adam stand to either side of the tree, covering themselves with fig leaves, looking back toward a male figure who stands behind each, speaking to them as he rests his hand on their shoulder (figure 9.9). The male figures have been interpreted as two representations of Christ, symbolizing the promise of redemption given to Eve and Adam even at the time of the Fall.116 The symbols of labor also appear in the scene: a sheaf of wheat at Adam’s feet and a sheep (damaged) that Christ hands to Eve. The figure of Christ speaking individually with Eve and separately with Adam portrays individualized blessing, instruction, and divinely given

Figure 9.9  Christ-Logos Speaks with Eve and Adam, Detail, Lid of Arles “Trinity” Sarcophagus, c. 325 CE. Musée départemental Arles Antique. Source: Photo: Mark D. Ellison.

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purpose; Eve is not left out of the conversation with the divine but rather receives the promise of salvation herself, standing on equal footing with Adam in this reception of knowledge and purpose.117 The image visually expresses the hypothetical counter-narrative the author of Irenaeus fragment XIV would have preferred—one in which Eve is “judged worthy to converse with God herself” rather than being dependent upon Adam.118 The image also resonates with the Life of Adam and Eve in its portrayal of Eve receiving divine communications.119 To the left of the couple portrait, at the far end of the upper register, a vignette depicts the Trinity creating Eve (her face again broken off) and Adam, as Christ-Logos rests his hand upon Eve’s head in a gesture of blessing and a male figure places his hand on Adam’s shoulder (likely Paul, alluding to Paul’s Adam-Christ typology; figure 9.10). The representation of divine attention and blessing given to Eve, and the emphasis placed not on sin but on creation, instruction, and salvation, have important implications for the self-representation of the woman and her husband commemorated on this tomb. The Eve and Adam vignettes (along with the other biblical images) project their theological valences upon the pair, connecting these fourth-century believers to the biblical past, affirming their place in the larger story of salvation. The viewer is meant to see that the woman buried in this sarcophagus, like the newly made Eve, lived with Christ’s

Figure 9.10  Creation of Eve and Adam by the Trinity, Detail, Arles “Trinity” Sarcophagus, c. 325 CE. Musée départemental Arles Antique. Source: Photo: Mark D. Ellison.

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blessing and carries it with her as she is born into eternity. The alignment of the woman and her husband’s portraits with the figures of Eve and Adam directly above them might have guided viewers to identify connections between the first parents and the commemorated couple and to perceive an assertion of the deceased woman’s own faith, held individually while shared with her husband in concordia. Both the Velletri plaque and the Arles “Trinity” sarcophagus use positive images of Eve as part of eulogizing visual programs. These programs correspond to the more redemptive portrayals of Eve in early Christian oral and literary traditions, which express the values, aspirations, and life events of late ancient women by means of stories about the first woman.120 CONCLUSIONS The modern rethinking of Eve being done in our own time, in new social contexts, with bolder theoretical frameworks, nevertheless has affinities with ways women in antiquity were rethinking Eve and expressing their own views in word and image.121 The art and texts surveyed here represent affirming, redemptive, even subversive narratives about Eve that, as Vita Daphna Arbel notes, “undermine traditions of Eve’s liability and emphasize countertraditions about her positive role. . . . These . . . portrayals ultimately assert an ideological stance concerning the valued standing of Eve in the context of contrasting dominant views.”122 For some women who identified positively and meaningfully with Eve, part of the attraction may have been her relatability. Most women did not pursue an ascetic, monastic life patterned after the Virgin, Thecla, or Agnes; they may have seen in Eve a role model for forms of piety in their own, relatively traditional life activities.123 Those women who did pursue new paths toward a spiritual life—new alternatives to marriage, childbearing, and obligations defined by familial relationships—clearly inspired patristic authors and the broader Christian community.124 But a less-told story is that of resistance to the ascetic ideal and the affirmation of a more moderate piety.125 In a time when influential, vocal men such as Jerome and Ambrose were stridently promoting female virginity, identifying with Eve may have been as subversive, in its own way, as it was for Thecla or Macrina to renounce marriage. Women such as Proba also perceived value in critiques of Eve and brought them alongside more affirming narratives, holding the two in tension. Perhaps they did so in complicity with patriarchy, but it is also possible that they saw within themselves a complexity that Eve, too, seemed to embody—the same need for redemption, coexisting with potential for authentic piety, wise

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teaching, familial devotion, and communion with the divine. Eve might have reminded women (and may still, as Pamela Norris suggests) “of the difficult choices and compromises of adult life, the requirement to balance exploration and individuation with social and family demands” and, perhaps most important, “the need to challenge boundaries, to make the imaginative leap . . . into a new phase of existence.”126 A woman who identified with Eve in all her richness might have simultaneously aspired to emulate aspects of the Virgin or other women in the tradition, embracing all this inheritance in “celebration of the whole female self.”127 Yet in contrast to women like Proba, the women behind Irenaeus fragment XIV and the Arles “Trinity” sarcophagus resisted the maligning of Eve and deployed counter-narrative and new iconography to set forth an insistence that Woman, as much as Man, is worthy of communing with deity and that to deny this of Eve is to marginalize Woman. There was not only one interpretation of Eve among early Christian women, just as there was not only one way to be an early Christian woman. We have inherited a rich, diverse set of perspectives. The women who cultivated and promoted these multifaceted approaches to Eve, in word and image, displayed remarkable assertiveness, agency, and independent thought. Their vision enriches our understanding of biblical reception and women’s piety in late antique Christianity.

NOTES 1. John J. Herrmann, Jr., and Annewies van den Hoek, Light from the Age of Augustine: Late Antique Ceramics from North Africa (Tunisia) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Divinity School, 2002), 28–29, no. 16 “Lamp with Eve.” 2. Herrmann and van den Hoek, Light from the Age of Augustine, 29, fig. B. The erosion/breaking off may be due to the thinness of the relief, its having been poorly applied to the lamp, the quality of the clay used, a low firing temperature resulting in a less durable ceramic, or a combination of these factors. With thanks to Christopher Kanyusik, assistant professor of Art, Ceramics, and Sculpture, Utah State University, for his insights. 3. Henri Leclercq, “Ève,” in Dictionnaire d’archéologie Chrétienne et de Liturgie (DACL), ed. Fernand Cabrol and Henri Leclercq, vol. 5, no. 1 (EncaustiqueFeux), (Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ane, 1922), cols. 923–38; Daniela CalcagniniCarletti, “Adam and Eve. II. Iconography,” in Encyclopedia of the Early Church, ed. Angelo Di Berardino, trans. Adrian Walford (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1992), 1:9–10; Helga Kaiser-Minn, “Adam and Eve,” in The Eerdmans Encyclopedia of Early Christian Art and Archaeology, ed. Paul Corby Finney (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 1.10–12. 4. An image of Adam and Eve also appears in the third-century Dura-Europos baptistery, a rare example of its early use in an ecclesial context.

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5. On artifacts and iconography in domestic/private religious practices, see David Frankfurter, Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 34–68. 6. In addition to the sources listed in note 3, see Sharon Salvadori, “Per Feminam Vita, Per Feminam Mors: Images of Women in the Early Christian Funerary Art of Rome” (PhD diss., New York University, 2002), 92–178. 7. On proposed interpretations of the Allocation of Labors to Adam and Eve, see Manuel Sotomayor, Sarcófagos Romano-Cristianos de España: Estudio Iconográfico (Granada: Facultad de Teología, 1975), 161–62; Mark D. Ellison, “Visualizing Christian Marriage in the Roman World” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2017), 155–72. On the later use of a distaff and spindle rather than a sheep in the depiction of Eve, see Penny Howell Jolly, Made in God’s Image? Eve and Adam in the Genesis Mosaics at San Marco, Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 57, 59–61, 67, 71–72, 87, 115n6; on the significance of this imagery in Marian iconography, see Catherine Gines Taylor, Late Antique Images of the Virgin Annunciate Spinning: Allotting the Scarlet and the Purple (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 8. Robin M. Jensen, “The Fall and Rise of Adam and Eve in Early Christian Art and Literature,” in Interpreting Christian Art: Reflections on Christian Art, ed. Heidi J. Hornik and Mikeal C. Parsons (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2003), 25–52 (esp. 33–38). 9. See Robin M. Jensen, “The Economy of the Trinity at the Creation of Adam and Eve,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 7, no. 4 (1999): 527–46. 10. Jutta Dresken-Weiland, Repertorium der christlich-antiken Sarkophage, zweiter Band: Italien mit einem Nachtrag Rom und Ostia, Dalmatien, Museen der Welt (Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1998), 83–84, no. 242, Taf. 80.2; on later depictions of Christ performing the marriage of Adam and Eve, see Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “On the Golden Marriage Belt and the Marriage Rings of the Dumbarton Oaks Collection,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 14 (1960): 9, fig. 34 (article 1–16). 11. On reductive interpretation of images of Adam and Eve, see Ellison, “Visualizing Christian Marriage,” 140–42; Jensen, “The Fall and Rise of Adam and Eve,” 37–38. Pamela Norris, Eve: A Biography (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 5, suggests that counter-traditions about Eve in visual art did not emerge until after Augustine; to the contrary, as this chapter demonstrates, a substantial variety of images of Eve were popular in early Christian visual culture well before Augustine and were a means of promoting alternative viewpoints to those that predominated in patristic writings. 12. Shelby Brown, “‘Ways of Seeing’ Women in Antiquity: An Introduction to Feminism in Classical Archaeology and Ancient Art History,” in Naked Truths: Women, Sexuality, and Gender in Classical Art and Archaeology, ed. Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow and Claire L. Lyons (London: Routledge, 1997), 12–42; 23–24: “Feminist” archaeology “aims to imagine (at worst) or identify (at best) the nature and contexts of participation by women and ‘others’ in ancient society.” 13. See Kristina Sessa, Daily Life in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 6.

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14. Laura Salah Nasrallah, Archaeology and the Letters of Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 7. Also this simile from page 16: “Reconstructions of the past are like that middle-school math class in which we are taught about the asymptote: the line that never quite touches the curve, although it approaches nearer and nearer. So, too, historians never quite touch what happened, even as many of us joyfully live in historical desire to know and to understand.” 15. On this dialogical methodology that compares text, artifact, ritual action, visual rhetoric, and performativity, see James F. Strange, “Some Implications of Archaeology for New Testament Studies,” in What Has Archaeology to Do with Faith?, ed. James H. Charlesworth and Walter P. Weaver (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992), 23–31; Robin M. Jensen, “Visuality,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Mediterranean Religions, ed. Barbette Stanley Spaeth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 309–43; Janet H. Tulloch, “Women Leaders in Family Funerary Banquets,” in A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity, ed. Carolyn Osiek and Margaret Y. MacDonald, with Janet H. Tulloch (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 176–77 (chapter 164–93, notes 289–96); Sonja K. Foss, “Theory of Visual Rhetoric,” in Handbook of Visual Communication: Theory, Methods, and Media, ed. Kenneth L. Smith, Sandra Moriarty, Keith Kenney, and Gretchen Barbatsis (London: Routledge, 2004), 141–52; David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 16. Peter C. Bouteneff, “Adam and Eve,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation, ed. Paul M. Blowers and Peter W. Martens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 525–34. I have also referred to this in Mark D. Ellison, “A Gold-Glass Medallion’s Participation in Early Christian Discourse on Marriage,” Studia Patristica (forthcoming, 2021). 17. For an interpretation that depatriarchalizes Genesis 2–3, see Phyllis Trible, “Eve and Adam: Genesis 2–3 Reread,” Andover Newton Theological School, 1973, in Kristen E. Kvam, Linda S. Schearing, and Valarie H. Ziegler, Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 430–38. Cf. discussion of male and female as “image of God” in Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), 12–23. For a rebuttal against readings of an initially androgynous/ sexually undifferentiated creation, see Robert S. Kawashima, “A Revisionist Reading Revisited: On the Creation of Adam and Then Eve,” Vetus Testamentum 51.1 (2006): 46–57. 18. 1 Corinthians 11:8–12; Galatians 3:28; Romans 5:12–21; 1 Corinthians 15:21–22, 45–49; see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 205–342. 19. For surveys of views of Eve (and thus women) in early Christian literature, see Kvam, Schearing, and Ziegler, Eve and Adam, 108–55; Elizabeth A. Clark, Women in the Early Church, Message of the Fathers of the Church, vol. 13 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1983), 15–76; Gregory Allen Robbins, ed., Genesis 1–3 in the History of Exegesis: Intrigue in the Garden (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press,

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1988); Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Vintage, 1989); Norris, Eve: A Biography, 136–226. 20. Tert., Cult. fem. 1.1-2, SC 173, 42, 44; [1] id quod de Eua trahit—ignominiam dico primi delicti et inuidiam perditionis humanae . . . et Euam te esse nescis? . . . [2] Tu es diaboli ianua; tu es arboris illius resignatrix; tu es diuinae legis prima desertrix; tu es quae eum suasisti, quem diabolus aggredi non ualuit; tu imaginem Dei, hominem, tam facile elisisti; propter tuum meritum, id est mortem, etiam filius Dei mori habuit. . . . Trans. S. Thelwall, ANF 3:14, with modification (substituting “the punishment you deserved” for “your desert”). One wonders to what degree Tertullian’s presentation was performative. Was his audience truly Christian women, or rather, Christian men who would be pleased by the image of Tertullian lecturing Christian women, if only hypothetically? See Carly Daniel-Hughes, The Salvation of the Flesh in Tertullian of Carthage: Dressing for the Resurrection (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 72–73. Furthermore, as Carolyn Osiek observed in her keynote address at the conference on which this volume is based, Tertullian was married, and one wonders what his wife might have thought of this rhetoric. 21. Vita Daphna Arbel, Forming Femininity in Antiquity: Eve, Gender, and Ideologies in the Greek Life of Adam and Eve (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 113. 22. Michael E. Stone, A History of the Literature of Adam and Eve (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), 6–71; Johannes Tromp, The Life of Adam and Eve in Greek: A Critical Edition (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 28; Arbel, Forming Femininity, 3; M. D. Johnson, “Life of Adam and Eve,” in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 252. For exploration of the possibility that the Greek Life of Adam and Eve may date earlier, perhaps contemporary with Paul, see John R. Levison, “Adam and Eve in Romans 1.18–25 and the Greek Life of Adam and Eve,” New Testament Studies 50, no. 4 (2004): 519–34. 23. Johannes Tromp, “The Story of our Lives: The qz-Text of the Life of Adam and Eve, the Apostle Paul, and the Jewish-Christian Oral Tradition concerning Adam and Eve,” New Testament Studies 50, no. 2 (2004): 218–19; Arbel, Forming Femininity, 72. Like the apocryphal acts, the Life of Adam and Eve appears to contain stories women told, which men eventually compiled and arranged into their current form; see Dennis MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983). A potential indicator of women’s authorship of ancient texts (or women’s influence on texts via oral tradition) is emphasis on incidental details and minutiae of women’s lives, which are arguably present in the Life of Adam and Eve; see Ross S. Kraemer, “Women’s Authorship of Jewish and Christian Literature in the Greco-Roman Period,” in Women Like This: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco-Roman World, ed. Amy-Jill Levine (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), 221–42. 24. Johnson, “Life of Adam and Eve,” 252. In the notes below, Vita refers to the Latin text, while Apoc. refers to the Greek text, often called the Apocalypse of Moses. 25. Arbel, Forming Femininity, 3.

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26. Here I side with Arbel’s assessment, contra Anne W. Stewart, “Eve and Her Interpreters,” in Women’s Bible Commentary, ed. Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), 48. 27. Apoc. 29.277.9; Tromp, Life of Adam and Eve in Greek, 157; Johnson, “Life of Adam and Eve,” 259. 28. Vita 5–7; 50.3; Apoc. 15.1; 32.1–33.5; 42.4–43.1. See John R. Levison, “The Exoneration of Eve in the Apocalypse of Moses 15–30,” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period 20, no. 2 (1989): 135–50. 29. Vita 49–50; Apoc. 15–30. 30. Vita 35.2–3; 40.1–3; 46.1–3; Apoc. 10.9.2–3; 13.1; 42.3–8. On women’s roles in funerary rites, see Tulloch, “Women Leaders”; Nicola Denzey, The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007). 31. Apoc. 5.2. 32. Apoc. 33–37. In this respect, the character of Eve in the Greek Life of Adam and Eve resembles visionary women in other early Jewish texts such as Jubilees, Joseph and Aseneth, and the Testament of Job; see Randall D. Chesnutt, “Revelatory Experiences Attributed to Biblical Women in Early Jewish Literature,” in Women Like This, 197–25. 33. Vita 33–35, trans. Johnson, “Life of Adam and Eve,” 287, 289. 34. Elizabeth A. Clark and Diane F. Hatch, The Golden Bough, the Oaken Cross: The Virgilian Cento of Faltonia Betitia Proba (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981), 6. 35. Clark and Hatch, Golden Bough, 7–8, 97–108. Jerome expressed irritation at the genre of the cento and its ability to give words new meaning not intended by their original authors (Jerome, Ep. 53.7), illustrating that an act of rewriting such as Proba’s could indeed be perceived as a subversive assertion of power, self-determination, and resistance. 36. Proba, De Laudibus Christi, 128–32: harum unam iuueni laterum conpagibus artis / eripuit subitoque oritur mirabile donum— / argumentum ingens—claraque in luce refulsit / insignis facie et pulchro pectore uirgo, / iam matura uiro, iam plenis nubilis annis; trans. Clark and Hatch, Golden Bough, 28–29. 37. Proba, De Laudibus Christi, 135: exceptique manu dextramque amplexus inhaesit; trans. Clark and Hatch, Golden Bough, 28–29. 38. Clark and Hatch, Golden Bough, 109–21 (esp. 111). 39. Proba, De Laudibus Christi, 171 (coniugis infandae), 264 (caput horum et causa malorum); trans. Clark and Hatch, Golden Bough, 32–33, 42–43. In these lines Proba’s negative assessment of Eve resembles that of Empress Aelia Eudocia Augusta (ca. 401–460 CE), who in her own cento took lines Homer had written about Clytemnestra and applied them to Eve: “She unwittingly did a monstrous deed, and, destructive, she wrought many evils for men; she cast many strong souls to Hades’ abode, wrought hardships for all, caused trouble for many”: Eudocia, Cento 84–87, trans. M. D. Usher, Homeric Stitchings: The Homeric Centos of the Empress Eudocia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 13. 40. In this I part company with Amanda W. Benckhuysen, The Gospel According to Eve: A History of Women’s Interpretation (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity

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Press, 2019), 20–21, who sees Proba and Eudocia as uniformly negative in their appraisal of Eve, overlooking the idealizing details in Proba’s creation and wedding scenes; cf. Clark and Hatch, Golden Bough, 109–21. 41. Some passages in the Life of Adam and Eve do portray Eve as weak, guilt-ridden, and dependent on Adam’s prayers in order to secure salvation; others, however, portray her with greater strength, autonomy, agency, and divine favor; cf. Stewart, “Eve and Her Interpreters,” 48. The inconsistent characterization reflects not only Eve’s complexity but also the diverse oral traditions brought together in the text. 42. Kraemer, “Women’s Authorship,” 233. 43. With thanks to Carolyn Osiek for this insight. 44. PG 89.1013–14: Cur autem non potius hominem quam ipsam aggressus est mulierem? Quod si mihi dixeris quod ad eam accesserit ut quae esset imbecillior, contra fortior ac virilior, tanquam adjutrix hominis apparuit in transgressione mandati. Ipsa enim et sola resistit serpenti, et cum quadam objectione et contentione (calliditate superata) comedit ex ligno; Adam autem cum nihil omnino depugnasset aut contradixisset, fructus fuit particeps dati a muliere: quod quidem est apertum indicium perfectae imbecillitatis et mentis ignavae. Nam mulieri quidem est ignoscendum, ut quae fuerit superata a serpente: Adamo autem non est ignoscendum, ut qui fuerit superatus a muliere, cum ipse in propria persona a Deo mandatum acceperit. Nam mulier cum ab Adamo mandatum audisset, ita fuit affecta ut contemneret, vel quod non digna esset habita cum qua Deus loqueretur, vel ut quae forte dubitaret et existimaret Adamum hoc ex se ei mandatum dedisse. Trans. Jean M. Higgins, “Anastasius Sinaita and the Superiority of the Woman,” Journal of Biblical Literature 97, no. 2 (1978): 254 (full article 253–56). 45. Kvam, Schearing, and Ziegler, Eve and Adam, 130. 46. Higgins, “Anastasius Sinaita,” 253–56 (esp. 256); Kvam, Schearing, and Ziegler, Eve and Adam, 130–31; Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, 57–77, esp. 68, 77; Norris, Eve: A Biography, 202–04; Iren. Adv. Haer. 1.13.1–7; 1.25.6; Tert. Praescr. 41; Bapt. 1. 47. See David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 5–18; the North African lamp and the Arles sarcophagus discussed in this chapter have resonances with this counter-narrative. 48. Cf. Norris, Eve: A Biography, 98, re. the Life of Adam and Eve as literary evidence of “a network of ideas” about Eve. 49. Elizabeth A. Clark, “Ideology, History, and the Construction of ‘Woman’ in Late Antique Christianity,” in A Feminist Companion to Patristic Literature, ed. Amy-Jill Levine with Maria Mayo Robbins (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 123. 50. On the broader range of interpretive possibilities, see Jensen, “Fall and Rise of Adam and Eve.” On the theory of the gaze, see Morgan, Sacred Gaze, 2–6. On the female gaze in art and literature, see (in addition to notes 51–54) Susan R. Bowers, “Medusa and the Female Gaze,” NWSA Journal 2, no. 2 (1990): 217–35. 51. Shelby Brown, “Artistic Representation: Survival of the Classical Ideal,” in A Cultural History of Women in Antiquity, ed. Janet H. Tulloch (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 188; Nanette Salomon, “The Venus Pudica: Uncovering Art History’s

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‘Hidden Agendas’ and Pernicious Pedigrees,” in Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock (London: Routledge, 1996), 69–87. 52. Salomon, “Venus Pudica,” 70–77, quotation 74; cf. Brown, “Ways of Seeing,” 14–18. 53. Marianne Wardle, “Naked and Unashamed: A Study of the Aphrodite Anadyomene in the Greco-Roman World” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2010), 5, 26–31. With thanks to Catherine Gines Taylor for bringing this source to my attention. 54. Brown, “Ways of Seeing,” 17. 55. For charring on lamps found in tombs, see Donatella Salvi, “Motivi cristiani ed ebraici nei corredi della necropoli di Pill’e Matta, Quartucciu (CA). Materiali e contesti inediti,” in Isole e terraferma nel primo cristianesimo: Identità locale ed interscambi culturali, religiosi e produttivi, Atti XI Congresso Nazionale di Archeologia Cristiana, ed. Rossana Martorelli, Antonio Piras, and Pier Giorgio Spanu (Cagliari: PFTS University Press, 2015), 587–95 (esp. 594, figs. 4–9). With thanks to peer reviewers for making me aware of this source. 56. British Museum ref. no. 1866,1229.1; Kathleen J. Shelton, The Esquiline Treasure (London: British Museum Press, 1981); Jaś Elsner, “Visualising Women in Late Antique Rome: The Projecta Casket,” in Through a Glass Brightly: Studies in Byzantine and Medieval Art and Archaeology Presented to David Buckton, ed. Chris Entwistle (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2003), 22–36. 57. Abdelmajid Ennabli, Lampes Chrétiennes de Tunisie (Musées du Bardo et de Carthage) (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1976), 65, no. 153, Pl. VII.153; see also 60, no. 120, Pl VI.120, for an additional Venus pudica lamp with a distinctive hairstyle. In-person examination of this lamp (Ennabli no. 153) with oblique lighting is necessary to be certain of the details of the relief; the photo is not sufficiently clear, and its description lacks detail. 58. Elsner, “Visualizing Women,” 30–32; cf. Jean Bussière and Birgitta Lindros Wohl, Ancient Lamps in the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017), no. 306. In addition to idealized female beauty and modesty, another possible theme related to the motif of mirror-gazing could be divination, construction of spells, or other magical functions: Frankfurter, Christianizing Egypt, 51. 59. Maria Parani, “Lamps,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology, ed. David K. Pettegrew, William R. Caraher, Thomas W. Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 313. 60. Proba, De Laudibus Christi 130; Clark and Hatch, Golden Bough, 28; Apoc. 20.1–2; 21.2. For another early Christian witness of the tradition that in Eden Adam and Eve were clothed in glory, see Ephrem, Commentary on Genesis 2.14–15; in Sebastian Brock, ed. and trans., Hymns on Paradise (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998), 206–07, see also 66–72. The image of Eve on the lamp, however, would seem to depict her after the Fall, when she has discovered her nakedness and clothed herself with fig leaves (Gen. 3:7), unless the attribute of the fig leaf merely serves as an identifier without intending to allude to a particular moment in

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Eve’s story. If this lamp’s owner connected its light to traditions of Eve’s created glory, the lamp’s combination of light and fig leaf (pre- and postlapsarian details) would seem to subvert or complicate a simple narrative of Fall and loss of glory. 61. Parani, “Lamps,” 322–23. 62. Lucinda Dirven, “Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained: The Meaning of Adam and Eve in the Baptistery of Dura-Europos,” Eastern Christian Art 5 (2008): 43–57; Michael Peppard, The World’s Oldest Church: Bible, Art, and Ritual at DuraEuropos, Syria (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 202–11; Robin M. Jensen, Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity: Ritual, Visual, and Theological Dimensions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2012), 179–84. 63. Vita 6–9; Apoc. 29.11–14; however, in the Latin version, this “baptism” tragically involves a second deception of Eve by Satan. 64. Tosefta, Ketubot 5.8; Jerusalem Talmud, Shabbat 2.4, 6; Avot de-Rabbi Nathan, version B, 9; cited in Amit Assis, “The Lamp—Its Use and Significance in Jewish Tradition,” in Let There Be Light: Oil-Lamps from the Holy Land, ed. Joan Goodnick Westenholz (Jerusalem: Bible Lands Museum, 2004), 8, 21; cf. Norris, Eve: A Biography, 67–68. 65. Avot de-Rabbi Nathan, version B, 9; Jerusalem Talmud, Shabbat 2.4; cited in Assis, “The Lamp,” 21; Norris, Eve: A Biography, 68. 66. Josephus, Against Apion 2.282; cf. Seneca, Ep. 95.47, LCL 77, 86–89; Assis 2004, 16. 67. Tertullian, De corona 3; De oratione 25. 68. Cyprian, De dominica oratione 35, CSEL 3.1, 293: recedente item sole ac die cessante necessario rursus orandum est. . . . oramus et petimus ut super nos lux denuo ueniat. . . . Trans. ANF 5:457. 69. Canons of Hippolytus 25; René-Georges Coquin, ed. and trans., Les Canons d’Hippolyte, Patrologia Orientalis 31.2 (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1966), 393; translation and commentary in Paul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson, and L. Edward Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 10–11 (background), 199 (translation); cf. Sessa, Daily Life in Late Antiquity, 200–05. 70. Kim Bowes, Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 54 (see 52–56); see also Parani, “Lamps,” 326–28; Laskarina Bouras and Maria G. Parani, Lighting in Early Byzantium (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2008), 19–20. 71. Kim Bowes, “Personal Devotions and Private Chapels,” in Late Ancient Christianity, A People’s History of Christianity, vol. 2, ed. Virginia Burrus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 193–99 (esp. 197–98); “A Spanish council circa 400 seems to associate the lucernarium with ‘learned women’ and ‘widows’ (Toledo, Can. 9).” 72. Apoc. 29.12; Johnson, “Life of Adam and Eve,” 261. 73. Vita 19.1; Johnson, “Life of Adam and Eve,” 264. 74. Apoc. 32.1–4; Johnson, “Life of Adam and Eve,” 287. 75. Apoc. 42.4–7; Johnson, “Life of Adam and Eve,” 295. 76. Vita 50.3; Johnson, “Life of Adam and Eve,” 294. 77. Apoc. 42.8; Johnson, “Life of Adam and Eve,” 295.

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78. Ross Shepard Kraemer, “Gender,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Mediterranean Religions, ed. Barbette Stanley Spaeth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 291, observes, “Numerous ancient narratives in all religious traditions depict women as praying, and often narrate their actual prayers. Yet prayer may be especially appropriate for women precisely because it entails some degree of petition and subordination and constructs the petitioner as female in relation to the gods. To the degree that subordination is inevitably coded as feminine, prayer always has a feminine dimension to it.” Catherine Hezser, review of Jörg Frey and Nicole Rupschus, eds., Frauen im antiken Judentum und frühen Christentum, Review of Biblical Literature (2020) [https​:/​/ww​​w​.sbl​​centr​​al​.or​​g​/API​​/Revi​​ews​/1​​319​8_​​14720​​ .pdf], states, “In the books of Tobit, Greek Esther, and Judith . . . women are often shown in devotion and prayer. . . . Wailing and self-humiliation seem to have been associated with women in particular, as the examples of Judith and Aseneth show.” 79. In describing Eve’s prayers and repentance, the portrait of Eve in Life of Adam and Eve resembles that of Aseneth in Joseph and Aseneth 10–16. Both texts display an interest in defining ideals of female piety in late antiquity by means of new narratives about biblical women. 80. Vita 50.3. 81. To my knowledge, Eve is never depicted as an orant (praying) in early Christian art. The Velletri plaque discussed in this chapter is one of the rare images of Eve in early Christian art not to include the fig leaf, though it does employ the pudica gesture, ruling out the possibility of depicting the upraised hands of the orans gesture. 82. Kraemer, “Gender,” 291. 83. See Christine Schenk, CSJ, Crispina and Her Sisters: Women and Authority in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017), 245–82. 84. Vita 49.2, 50.1; Johnson, “Life of Adam and Eve,” 292; generally, Vita 49–50; Apoc. 15–30. An alternative interpretation of Eve’s speaking gesture (and Adam’s in some works) is that they represent moments in the Genesis 2–3 narrative when Adam and Eve give their responses to God’s questions; see, e.g., Sharon Salvadori, “Sin and Redemption, Sexuality and Gender: Adam and Eve in the Funerary Art of Late Antique Rome,” in ANAΘHMATA EOPTIKA: Studies in Honor of Thomas F. Mathews, ed. Joseph D. Alchermes, with Helen C. Evans and Thelma K. Thomas (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2009), 278. This seems a plausible interpretation of the images Salvadori presents as examples, but the appearance of Eve by herself on this oil lamp, without Adam, the tree, or the serpent, diminishes connections to the Genesis narrative and invites other potential associations. 85. Ashmolean inv. no. AN 2007.13; Charles R. Morey, The Gold-Glass Collection of the Vatican Library with Additional Catalogues of Other Gold-Glass Collections, ed. Guy Ferrari (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1959), 62, Pl. 31, no. 366; Susan Walker, ed., Saints and Salvation: The Wilshere Collection of Gold-Glass, Sarcophagi and Inscriptions from Rome and Southern Italy (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2017), 114, 131–33, cat. no. 3. I have also written about this medallion in “Visualizing Christian Marriage in the Roman World,” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2017), 149–51; and “A Gold-Glass Medallion’s Participation in Early Christian Discourse on Marriage,” Studia Patristica (forthcoming).

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86. Daniel Thomas Howells, A Catalogue of the Late Antique Gold Glass in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 2015), 53–67; Hallie G. Meredith, “Engaging Mourners and Maintaining Unity: Third and Fourth Century Gold-Glass Roundels from Roman Catacombs,” Religion in the Roman Empire 1, no. 2 (2015): 219–41; Walker, Saints and Salvation, 75–78. 87. Susan Walker, “Gold-Glass in Late Antiquity,” in The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Art, ed. Robin M. Jensen and Mark D. Ellison (London: Routledge, 2018), 124; Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai, Fabrizio Bisconti, and Danilo Mazzoleni, The Christian Catacombs of Rome: History, Decoration, Inscriptions (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2009), 81–82; Howells, Gold Glass in the British Museum, 63. 88. One might argue that PIE ZESES was such a commonplace that it did not necessarily imply that the vessel was a gift to only one of the portrayed spouses; on the other hand, the second person plural inscription VIVATIS (“May you [two] live!”) also appears on gold-glasses with couple portraits, so workshops and customers did have an alternative. 89. Walker, Saints and Salvation, 131–32; cf. Susan H. Auth, “Drink May You Live! Roman Motto Glasses in the Context of Roman Life and Death,” in Annales du 13e Congrès de l’Association Internationale pour l’Histoire du Verre, Pays Bas, 28 aout–1 septembre, 1995 (Lochem: Association internationale pour l’histoire du verre, 1996), 103–12. 90. See, for example, Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann, Giuseppe Bovini, and Hugo Brandenburg, Repertorium der christlich-antiken Sarkophage, Bd 1 Rom und Ostia (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1967), nos. 39, 43, 44, 778; Dresken-Weiland, Repertorium II, nos. 20, 102, 103, 150; Brigitte Christern-Briesenick, Repertorium der christlichantiken Sarkophage, dritter Band: Frankreich, Algerien, Tunesien (Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2003), no. 38; exceptions include Rep. II, no. 212; Morey, Gold-Glass, nos. 93, 441; the double-portrait on the lid of the Projecta Casket. 91. For a discussion of the scroll’s symbolic value in the depiction of women in late Roman art, see Janet Huskinson, “Women and Learning: Gender and Identity in Scenes of Intellectual Life on Late Roman Sarcophagi,” in Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity, ed. R. Miles (London: Routledge, 1999), 199. 92. Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986), 308–11; cf. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 1996), 95–128; Osiek and MacDonald, Woman’s Place. 93. Daniel Howells argues for a second instance in the form of two separate roundels on a late fourth-century glass bowl (the “St. Severin bowl”) in the British Museum: Howells, Gold Glass in the British Museum, 90–101, esp. 93–94, no. 16, pl. 57, 62, 63. Howells’s argument is interesting but in my opinion untenable; see Ellison, “Visualizing Christian Marriage,” 150. 94. Robin M. Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art (London: Routledge, 2000), 120–24; Lee M. Jefferson, Christ the Miracle Worker in Early Christian Art (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 13–14, 145–75 (esp. 153–54n26). 95. Jefferson, Christ the Miracle Worker, 145–75; cf. Thomas F. Mathews, The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 54–91.

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96. Cf. Sean V. Leatherbury, “Picturing Prayers: The Iconography of the Wilshere Gold-Glasses,” in Walker, Saints and Salvation, 114. Leatherbury sees the Moses vignette as a type of Christ; I agree but also suspect the water miracle could allude to the couple’s baptism, strengthening the expression of their hope for salvation; see Robin M. Jensen, Living Water: Images, Symbols, and Settings of Early Christian Baptism (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 76–78. Cf. the proximity of portraits of a married couple to the water miracle, the raising of Lazarus, and the Good Shepherd in a fourth-century fresco: Josef Wilpert, Die Malereien der Katakomben Roms (Freiburg: Herder, 1903), Tav. 190, 192; Norbert Zimmermann, “The Healing Christ in Early Christian Funeral Art: The Example of the Frescoes at Domitilla Catacomb/ Rome,” in Miracles Revisited: New Testament Miracle Stories and Their Concepts of Reality, ed. Stefan Alkier and Annette Weissenrieder (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 264–65, fig. 8; and a gold-glass portraying a couple praying next to a rock gushing water, identified as a symbol of baptism, in Walker, Saints and Salvation, 155–57, cat. no. 21. See also my discussion of the redemption of Adam and Eve as it relates to discourse about marriage, in “A Gold-Glass Medallion’s Participation in Early Christian Discourse on Marriage.” 97. Morey, Gold-Glass, no. 62: “coiffure similar to that of [the] wife,” also no. 420. 98. Norbert Zimmermann, “Catacombs and the Beginnings of Christian Tomb Decoration,” in A Companion to Roman Art, ed. Barbara E. Borg (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 461–62. Additionally, the hair on both figures, apparently gathered and styled rather than hanging free, could have symbolized “the socially dignified wife and matron. An Eve with hair gathered is thus the dutifully obedient wife, the kind most likely to gain salvation in life after death. Unbound female hair was associated with unbridled female sexuality”: Salvadori, “Sin and Redemption, Sexuality and Gender,” 277–78n21. 99. On early Christian funerary monuments and rites and women’s roles in those rites, see Tulloch, “Women Leaders”; Robin M. Jensen, “Dining with the Dead: From the Mensa to the Altar in Christian Late Antiquity,” in Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Context. Studies of Roman, Jewish, and Christian Burials, ed. Laurie Brink and Deborah Green (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 107–43; and Denzey, Bone Gatherers. 100. Vita 49.2; 50.1. 101. Apoc. 35.2. 102. Dresken-Weiland, Repertorium II, 83–84, no. 242, Taf. 80.2. I have also written about this plaque and Proba’s cento in “Visualizing Christian Marriage,” 145–49. 103. Brown, “Artistic Representation,” 188: Eve’s nudity here “seems to be a source of happiness and marital symbolism.” The earliest images of Adam and Eve are the “Fall” type and date to the first half of the third century: Luigi Todisco, “Modelli classici per le prime espressioni figurative del peccato originale,” Annali della Facoltà di lettere e filosofia 23 (1980):165–66; Carl Hermann Kraeling and Charles Bradford Welles, The Christian Building: The Excavations at Dura-Europos conducted by Yale University and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters,

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Final Report VIII, Part II (New Haven: Dura Europos Publications, 1967), pl. 17, 31. The image on the Velletri plaque dates much later, to c. 300 CE: Dresken-Weiland, Repertorium II, 83–84. 104. Proba, De Laudibus Christi, 135: exceptique manu dextramque amplexus inhaesit; trans. Clark and Hatch, Golden Bough, 28–29. 105. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 20th anniversary ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), states that Adam and Eve were “frequently” depicted this way; though that may be said of medieval art, the only surviving example in early Christian art is the Velletri plaque. For a correction, see Jensen, “Fall and Rise of Adam and Eve,” 50n47. 106. Ellison, “Visualizing Christian Marriage,” 43–81; Carola Reinsberg, “Concordia: Die Darstellung von Hochzeit und ehelicher Eintracht in Spätantike,” in Spätantike und frühes Christentum. Ausstellung im Liebieghaus, Museum alter Plastik, Frankfurt am Main. 16. Dezember bis 11. März 1984, ed. Herbert Beck and Peter Bol (Frankfurt am Main: Das Liebieghaus, 1983), 312–17; Jensen, “Fall and Rise of Adam and Eve,” 47–52; Louis Reekmans, “La ‘dextrarum iunctio’ dans l’iconographie romaine et paléochrétienne,” Bulletin de l’Institut historique belge de Rome 31 (1958): 23–95; Glenys Davies, “The Significance of the Handshake Motif in Classical Funerary Art,” American Journal of Archaeology 89, no. 4 (1985): 627–40. 107. Ambrosiaster, Quaestiones veteris et novi testamenti 127.2–3; Filastrius, Diversarum haereson liber 120.6–7; Innocent I, Epistula 4.6.9; Korbinian Ritzer, Le mariage dans les églises chrétiennes du Ier au XIe siècles (Paris: Cerf, 1970), 222–66; David G. Hunter, “‘On the Sin of Adam and Eve’: A Little-Known Defense of Marriage and Childbearing by Ambrosiaster,” Harvard Theological Review 82, no. 3 (1989): 283–99 (esp. 284–88); Thomas Fisch and David G. Hunter. “Echoes of the Early Roman Nuptial Blessing: Ambrosiaster, De peccato Adae et Evae.” Ecclesia orans 11 (1994): 225–44; David G. Hunter, “Sexuality, Marriage, and the Family,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity: vol. 2 Constantine to c. 600, ed. Augustine Casiday and Frederick W. Norris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 585–600 (esp. 590–92). 108. David G. Hunter, “Nuptial Metaphor and Nuptial Reality: Early Christian Marriage Liturgy and the Formation of a Scriptural Imagination” (paper presented at the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference, Villanova University, October 17, 2015), 5. 109. See also Theophilus of Antioch, Ad Autolycum 2.28; Sacramentarium Veronese, 1109–10. 110. Paulinus, Carmen 25.27 (cf. 101–05), CSEL 30, 239, nunc igitur, prisca quoniam sub imagine sanctum foedus . . . pignoribus geritur . . . ; trans. Mark Searle and Kenneth W. Stevenson, Documents of the Marriage Liturgy (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992), 32. 111. Dresken-Weiland, Repertorium II, 83, notes distinct features of age on the face and a Scheitelzopf hairstyle that is partially visible despite the damage to the plaque; Erich Dinkler, “Plaque with Biblical Scenes,” in Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century, ed. Kurt Weitzmann

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(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1979), 413, observes that the orant “has the individual features of an elderly woman.” 112. Clark and Hatch, Golden Bough, 111. 113. For Jonah and Daniel as types of the resurrection, see Constitutiones Apostolorum 5.7; Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art, 37–41 (shepherd), 171–76 (Jonah and Daniel). 114. Christern-Briesenick, Repertorium III, no. 38. I have also written about this sarcophagus in “Visualizing Christian Marriage,” 151–53; “A Gold-Glass Medallion’s Participation in Early Christian Discourse on Marriage,” Studia Patristica (forthcoming, 2021); and Matthew J. Grey and Mark D. Ellison, “Imagery in Jewish and Christian Ritual Settings,” in The Oxford Handbook of Roman Imagery and Iconography, ed. Nathan Elkins and Lea Cline (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 115. Jutta Dresken-Weiland, Sarkophagbestattungen des 4.–6. Jahrhunderts im Westen des römischen Reiches (Rome: Herder, 2003), 212. 116. Christern-Briesenick, Rep. III, 24: “zweimal Christus erscheint” (“Christ appears twice”); Sotomayor, Sarcófagos Romano-Cristianos, 161. 117. For discussion of similar symmetry and equality in the more typical “Fall” image, see Salvadori, “Sin and Redemption, Sexuality and Gender.” By means of this image depicting both man and woman covering themselves—a form of representation never used for a man in pre-Christian Roman art—“viewers in Late Antiquity were presented with a construct of male identity that was not only unprecedented, but readable and effective because it ‘quoted’ from a popular female image type. Man is not only shown as sexual but is sexualized as inferior, humiliated, corrupt, in need of self-control and shame, like the Venus pudica, like Eve, like a woman. . . . The deployment of the gesture mitigates woman’s inferiority with regard to man, just as it diminishes man’s ascendancy over woman,” 280, 282. 118. Higgins, “Anastasius Sinaita,” 254. Evidently at least some of the ideas in Irenaeus fragment XIV were not held exclusively by gnostic groups but could be embraced also by “orthodox” believers such as the owner(s) of this sarcophagus. 119. Cf. a patristic affirmation that women’s spiritual and intellectual capacity equals that of men: Clement of Alexandria, Paed. 1.4; Strom. 4.19. 120. Eve, of course, became an Everywoman, and discourse about Eve became discourse about women in general; Norris, Eve: A Biography, 4–5: the “definition of Eve . . . became the blueprint for Woman, an explanation of her character and possibilities. . . . Eve is synonymous with Woman.” 121. For modern approaches to Eve, see the surveys in Newsom, Ringe, and Lapsley, Women’s Bible Commentary, 30–32, 46–50; Norris, Eve: A Biography, 350– 99; Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 13–38; Kvam, Schearing, and Ziegler, Eve and Adam, 340–481 (cf. 130–31); Benckhuysen, Gospel According to Eve, 81–233. 122. Arbel, Forming Femininity, 14. 123. Norris, Eve: A Biography, 226, observes that Mary, the second Eve, “the most persistent role model for Christian women,” presented women with an impossible paradox of motherhood and virginity, “an ideal of behaviour that they could

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never realize, whether they devoted themselves to the hurly burly of domestic family life or the cloistered austerities of virginity.” Images of Eve and Adam, in addition to what they might have symbolized in salvation history, also represented role models relatable to the mass of nonascetic, ordinary Christians; Brown, Body and Society, 401: “Such scenes spoke for the views of a silent majority that believed as firmly as did their Jewish neighbors that God had created humanity for marriage and childbirth.” Nonascetic, married Christians would have seen in the first parents a story that resembled their own lives—shared daily work, marriage, childbirth, seeking reconciliation with God. 124. A classic work on this subject is Brown, Body and Society. 125. Rebecca Krawiec, “Asceticism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 768; Andrew S. Jacobs and Rebecca Krawiec, “Fathers Know Best? Christian Families in the Age of Asceticism,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11, no. 3 (2003): 257–63, esp. 260; Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 92–93; Kate Cooper, The Fall of the Roman Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Kyle Harper, “Marriage and Family,” in The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ed. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 667–714; David G. Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity: The Jovinianist Controversy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 126. Norris, Eve: A Biography, 403–04. 127. Bowers, “Medusa and the Female Gaze,” 235.

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Higgins, Jean M. “Anastasius Sinaita and the Superiority of the Woman.” Journal of Biblical Literature 97, no. 2 (1978): 253–56. Howells, Daniel Thomas. A Catalogue of the Late Antique Gold Glass in the British Museum. London: British Museum, 2015. Hunter, David G. Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity: The Jovinianist Controversy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. “Nuptial Metaphor and Nuptial Reality: Early Christian Marriage Liturgy and the Formation of a Scriptural Imagination.” Paper given at the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference, Villanova University, October 17, 2015. ———. “‘On the Sin of Adam and Eve’: A Little-Known Defense of Marriage and Childbearing by Ambrosiaster.” Harvard Theological Review 82, no. 3 (1989): 283–99. ———. “Sexuality, Marriage, and the Family.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 2, Constantine to c. 600, edited by Augustine Casiday and Frederick W. Norris, 585–600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Huskinson, Janet. “Women and Learning: Gender and Identity in Scenes of Intellectual Life on Late Roman Sarcophagi.” In Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity, edited by R. Miles, 190–213. London: Routledge, 1999. Jacobs, Andrew S., and Rebecca Krawiec. “Fathers Know Best? Christian Families in the Age of Asceticism.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11, no. 3 (2003): 257–63. Jefferson, Lee M. Christ the Miracle Worker in Early Christian Art. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014. Jensen, Robin M. Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity: Ritual, Visual, and Theological Dimensions. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2012. ———. “Dining with the Dead: From the Mensa to the Altar in Christian Late Antiquity.” In Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Context. Studies of Roman, Jewish, and Christian Burials, edited by Laurie Brink and Deborah Green, 107–43. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. ———. “The Economy of the Trinity at the Creation of Adam and Eve.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 7, no. 4 (1999): 527–46. ———. “The Fall and Rise of Adam and Eve in Early Christian Art and Literature.” In Interpreting Christian Art: Reflections on Christian Art, edited by Heidi J. Hornik and Mikeal C. Parsons, 25–52. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2003. ———. Living Water: Images, Symbols, and Settings of Early Christian Baptism. Leiden: Brill, 2011. ———. Understanding Early Christian Art. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. “Visuality.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Mediterranean Religions, edited by Barbette Stanley Spaeth, 309–43. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Johnson, M. D. “Life of Adam and Eve.” In The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2, edited by James H. Charlesworth, 249–95. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985. Jolly, Penny Howell. Made in God’s Image? Eve and Adam in the Genesis Mosaics at San Marco, Venice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

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Kaiser-Minn, Helga. “Adam and Eve.” In The Eerdmans Encyclopedia of Early Christian Art and Archaeology, vol. 1, edited by Paul Corby Finney, 10–12. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. “On the Golden Marriage Belt and the Marriage Rings of the Dumbarton Oaks Collection.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 14 (1960): 1–16. Kawashima, Robert S. “A Revisionist Reading Revisited: On the Creation of Adam and Then Eve.” Vetus Testamentum 51, no. 1 (2006): 46–57. Kraeling, Carl Hermann, and Charles Bradford Welles. The Christian Building: The Excavations at Dura-Europos conducted by Yale University and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters, Final Report VIII, Part II. New Haven: Dura Europos Publications, 1967. Kraemer, Ross Shepard. “Gender.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Mediterranean Religions, edited by Barbette Stanley Spaeth, 281–308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ———. “Women’s Authorship of Jewish and Christian Literature in the GrecoRoman Period.” In Women Like This: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco-Roman World, edited by Amy-Jill Levine, 221–42. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. Krawiec, Rebecca. “Asceticism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, edited by Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter, 764–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Kvam, Kristen E., Linda S. Schearing, and Valarie H. Ziegler. Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Leatherbury, Sean V. “Picturing Prayers: The Iconography of the Wilshere GoldGlasses.” In Saints and Salvation: The Wilshere Collection of Gold-Glass, Sarcophagi and Inscriptions from Rome and Southern Italy, edited by Susan Walker, 113–25. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2017. Leclercq, Henri. “Ève.” In Dictionnaire d’archéologie Chrétienne et de Liturgie (DACL), edited by Fernand Cabrol and Henri Leclercq, vol. 5, no. 1 (EncaustiqueFeux), cols. 923–38. Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ane, 1922. Levine, Amy-Jill, with Maria Mayo Robbins, eds. A Feminist Companion to Patristic Literature. London: T&T Clark, 2008. Levine, Amy-Jill, ed. Women Like This: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco-Roman World. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. Levison, John R. “Adam and Eve in Romans 1.18–25 and the Greek Life of Adam and Eve.” New Testament Studies 50, no. 4 (2004): 519–34. ———. “The Exoneration of Eve in the Apocalypse of Moses 15–30.” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period 20, no. 2 (1989): 135–50. MacDonald, Dennis. The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983. Mathews, Thomas F. The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

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Meredith, Hallie G. “Engaging Mourners and Maintaining Unity: Third and Fourth Century Gold-Glass Roundels from Roman Catacombs.” Religion in the Roman Empire 1, no. 2 (2015): 219–41. Morey, Charles R. The Gold-Glass Collection of the Vatican Library with Additional Catalogues of Other Gold-Glass Collections, edited by Guy Ferrari. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1959. Morgan, David. The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Nasrallah, Laura Salah. Archaeology and the Letters of Paul. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Newsom, Carol A., Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley, eds. Women’s Bible Commentary, revised and updated. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012. Norris, Pamela. Eve: A Biography. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Osiek, Carolyn, and Margaret Y. MacDonald, with Janet H. Tulloch. A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006. Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. New York: Vintage, 1989. Parani, Maria. “Lamps.” In The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology, edited by David K. Pettegrew, William R. Caraher, and Thomas W. Davis, 313–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pardes, Ilana. Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Peppard, Michael. The World’s Oldest Church: Bible, Art, and Ritual at DuraEuropos, Syria. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Pettegrew, David K., William R. Caraher, and Thomas W. Davis, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Reekmans, Louis. “La ‘dextrarum iunctio’ dans l’iconographie romaine et paléochrétienne.” Bulletin de l’Institut historique belge de Rome 31 (1958): 23–95. Reinsberg, Carola. “Concordia: Die Darstellung von Hochzeit und ehelicher Eintracht in Spätantike.” In Spätantike und frühes Christentum. Ausstellung im Liebieghaus, Museum alter Plastik, Frankfurt am Main. 16. Dezember bis 11. März 1984, edited by Herbert Beck and Peter Bol, 312–17. Frankfurt am Main: Das Liebieghaus, 1983. Robbins, Gregory Allen, ed. Genesis 1–3 in the History of Exegesis: Intrigue in the Garden. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988. Salomon, Nanette. “The Venus Pudica: Uncovering Art History’s ‘Hidden Agendas’ and Pernicious Pedigrees.” In Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, edited by Griselda Pollock, 69–87. London: Routledge, 1996. Salvadori, Sharon. “Per Feminam Vita, Per Feminam Mors: Images of Women in the Early Christian Funerary Art of Rome.” PhD diss., New York University, 2002. ———. “Sin and Redemption, Sexuality and Gender: Adam and Eve in the Funerary Art of Late Antique Rome.” In ANAΘHMATA EOPTIKA: Studies in Honor of Thomas F. Mathews, edited by Joseph D. Alchermes, with Helen C. Evans and Thelma K. Thomas, 270–82. Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2009.

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Salvi, Donatella. “Motivi cristiani ed ebraici nei corredi della necropoli di Pill’e Matta, Quartucciu (CA). Materiali e contesti inediti.” In Isole e terraferma nel primo cristianesimo: Identità locale ed interscambi culturali, religiosi e produttivi, Atti XI Congresso Nazionale di Archeologia Cristiana, edited by Rossana Martorelli, Antonio Piras, and Pier Giorgio Spanu, 587–95. Cagliari: PFTS University Press, 2015. Schenk, Christine, CSJ. Crispina and Her Sisters: Women and Authority in Early Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017. Searle, Mark, and Kenneth W. Stevenson. Documents of the Marriage Liturgy. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992. Sessa, Kristina. Daily Life in Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Shelton, Kathleen J. The Esquiline Treasure. London: British Museum Press, 1981. Sotomayor, Manuel. Sarcófagos Romano-Cristianos de España: Estudio Iconográfico. Granada: Facultad de Teología, 1975. Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity. New York: HarperOne, 1996. Stewart, Anne W. “Eve and Her Interpreters.” In Women’s Bible Commentary, edited by Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley, 46–50. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012. Stone, Michael E. A History of the Literature of Adam and Eve. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992. Strange, James F. “Some Implications of Archaeology for New Testament Studies.” In What Has Archaeology to Do with Faith? edited by James H. Charlesworth and Walter P. Weaver, 23–31. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992. Taylor, Catherine Gines. Late Antique Images of the Virgin Annunciate Spinning: Allotting the Scarlet and the Purple. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Todisco, Luigi. “Modelli classici per le prime espressioni figurative del peccato originale.” Annali della Facoltà di lettere e filosofia 23 (1980): 163–86. Trible, Phyllis. “Eve and Adam: Genesis 2–3 Reread.” In Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender, edited by Kristen E. Kvam, Linda S. Schearing, and Valarie H. Ziegler, 430–38. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. ———. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978. Tromp, Johannes. The Life of Adam and Eve in Greek: A Critical Edition. Leiden: Brill, 2005. ———. “The Story of our Lives: The qz-Text of the Life of Adam and Eve, the Apostle Paul, and the Jewish-Christian Oral Tradition concerning Adam and Eve.” New Testament Studies 50, no. 2 (2004): 205–23. Tulloch, Janet H., ed. A Cultural History of Women in Antiquity. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. ———. “Women Leaders in Family Funerary Banquets.” In A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity, edited by Carolyn Osiek and Margaret Y. MacDonald, with Janet H. Tulloch, 164–93, 289–96. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006. Usher, M. D. Homeric Stitchings: The Homeric Centos of the Empress Eudocia. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998.

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Walker, Susan. “Gold-Glass in Late Antiquity.” In The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Art, edited by Robin M. Jensen and Mark D. Ellison, 124–40. London: Routledge, 2018. ———, ed. Saints and Salvation: The Wilshere Collection of Gold-Glass, Sarcophagi and Inscriptions from Rome and Southern Italy. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2017. Wardle, Marianne. “Naked and Unashamed: A Study of the Aphrodite Anadyomene in the Greco-Roman World.” PhD diss., Duke University, 2010. Weitzmann, Kurt, ed. Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1979. Westenholz, Joan Goodnick, ed. Let There Be Light: Oil-Lamps from the Holy Land. Jerusalem: Bible Lands Museum, 2004. Wilpert, Josef. Die Malereien der Katakomben Roms. Freiburg: Herder, 1903. Zimmermann, Norbert. “Catacombs and the Beginnings of Christian Tomb Decoration.” In A Companion to Roman Art, edited by Barbara E. Borg, 452–70. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. ———. “The Healing Christ in Early Christian Funeral Art: The Example of the Frescoes at Domitilla Catacomb/Rome.” In Miracles Revisited: New Testament Miracle Stories and their Concepts of Reality, edited by Stefan Alkier and Annette Weissenrieder, 251–74. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.

Chapter 10

Female Materialities at the Altar* Mary’s Priestly Motherhood and Women’s Eucharistic Experience in Late Antique and Byzantine Churches Maria Evangelatou

The Akathistos hymn, written in the fifth or sixth century and celebrated as one of the most masterful texts of Byzantine literature, greets Mary in the following Eucharistic terms: Hail, vine of unwithering shoot; Hail, farm of undying fruit [5.6–7]. . . . Hail, table that bears a wealth of mercy [5.11]. . . . Hail, food that succeeds the manna; Hail, minister [lit. deacon] of holy abundance; Hail, promised land; Hail, from whom flow milk and honey [11.14–17]. . . . Hail, tree of splendid fruit on which the faithful feed [13.10]. . . . Hail, container of the uncontainable God [15.6]. . . . Hail, receptacle of the Wisdom of God [17.6]. . . . Hail, krater wherein is mixed the wine of fervent joy [21.15]. . . . Hail, life of the mystical banquet [21.17]. . . . We all praise you as a living Temple, O Theotokos [23.2]. . . . Hail, Tabernacle of God and the Logos; Hail, greater than the Holy of Holies [23.6–7].1

These verses celebrate Mary as provider or container of salvific nourishment, vessel and table of the Eucharist, and sacrificial space. From the fifth century onward, Byzantine hymns and homilies were full of a wide range of more or less explicit Eucharistic references to Mary. Christ’s body was equated with the Eucharistic bread and wine, and this basic tenet was I thank the organizers of the conference “Material Culture and Women’s Religious Experience in Antiquity” at Brigham Young University for including me in the program and proceedings. I am especially grateful to Mark Ellison for thoughtfully editing my text, to Carolyn Osiek for her perceptive suggestions, and to Catherine Taylor for her conference invitation and encouraging comments. I thank the Arts Research Institute of the University of California, Santa Cruz, for funding the illustration expenses of this chapter.

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reinforced and made more relatable and understandable to the participants of the Eucharist by presenting Mary as the provider of both bodies of Christ: the historical body sacrificed on the cross and the Eucharistic body continually sacrificed on the altar table. In a recent article, I discuss these literary references and argue that the idea of Mary as the provider of the Eucharist was also visualized through her central depiction in the sanctuary apse, especially in the posticonoclast era.2 The Virgin appeared as the central figure in the east conch of most Byzantine churches from the ninth century onward, presiding over the Eucharist as the one who is about to offer or has just offered her

Figure 10.1  Enthroned Mary and Christ with Bowing Archangels and Co-Celebrating Hierarchs Converging toward the Melismos (Christ on the Altar) below the Window, in front of the Church Altar. Sanctuary apse of the Church of St. George, late twelfth century, Kurbinovo, Republic of North Macedonia. Source: Photo courtesy of David Lewis.

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son to the world, in analogy to the priests celebrating the Eucharist below her (figures 10.1–2 ). I have also argued that the so-called Blachernitissa iconography, which combines Mary with a medallion of Christ in front of her chest and is often seen in Byzantine apses from the twelfth century onward, is prominently Eucharistic. Among other things, it presents the Virgin as the altar holding the paten or as the paten holding the Eucharistic loaf (figure 10.3).3 In this chapter, I expand on these findings by pursuing new objectives: first, I examine material that frames Mary’s Eucharistic role in terms of priestly motherhood (a motherhood that has aspects of priesthood). I draw upon evidence from the second-century Protevangelium of James, which was foundational for the developing cult of Mary in early and medieval Christianity, and I note the elaboration of its Eucharistic references to the Virgin in later Byzantine textual and visual sources. Second, I explore what

Figure 10.2  The Virgin Orans, the Communion of the Apostles, Bust of Hierarchs, and Medallions with Christ’s Ancestors and Prophets (Flanking Medallions with Christ Emanuel and Two Archangels at the Apex of the Arch). Sanctuary apse of the Church of the Virgin Peribleptos (today Church of St. Clement of Ohrid), late thirteenth century, Ochrid, Republic of North Macedonia. Source: Photo by Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 10.3  Mary Blachernitissa, Communion of the Apostles, Co-Celebrating Hierarchs Converging toward the Melismos (Depicted below the Window, behind the Church Altar). Sanctuary apse, Church of St. Panteleimon, second half of the twelfth century (the Blachernitissa dates to sixteenth-century repairs and could be similar to the original painting), Gorno Nerezi, Republic of North Macedonia. Source: Photo courtesy of Ivan Drpić.

Mary’s Eucharistic role might have meant to women who were excluded from priesthood and the sanctuary space. I consider regulations concerning deaconesses (female deacons) and the mosaic decoration of the sanctuary in the sixth-century Euphrasian basilica in Poreč (modern Croatia), in which Mary and other women are given special visual prominence. On the basis of these sources, I offer some considerations about possible female experiences in the context of the Eucharist and explore how the visual setting of the

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Euphrasian basilica might have reflected and promoted female perspectives about the Eucharist, Mary, and women’s role in the Christian community. All of my textual evidence comes from the Greek-speaking world of the Eastern Mediterranean from the second to about the twelfth century, and it attests to a growing recognition of Mary’s Eucharistic ministry at a time when women’s role in the Eucharist was increasingly curtailed. The Byzantine ordination rites for deaconesses are recorded in surviving euchologia (prayer books), the earliest of which is dated to the late eighth century, but they probably reflect earlier practice. The mosaics of the Euphrasian basilica date from the sixth century and have Latin inscriptions but have close artistic connections to Constantinople and the Eastern Mediterranean;4 therefore, these mosaics could echo more or less similar sanctuary decorations, now lost, from churches in the eastern part of the empire,5 and can be read in relation to the broader cultural trends manifested in the Greek texts I will examine. Speculating how women might have perceived Mary’s Eucharistic role within specific visual contexts can help us consider, in more concrete terms, possible female experiences of the time.6 In this brief chapter, my goal is not to systematically trace temporal and geographic developments in the Eucharistic perception of Mary and related female experiences but to offer some general observations that can contribute to a broader conversation about these issues. For convenience, I use the term Byzantine to refer to the cultural production of the Roman Empire from the fourth century onward, when Constantinople was established as the new capital and Christianity gradually became the imperially sponsored religion. In employing the term Byzantine in reference to that time onward, I do not mean to flatten historical differences but to acknowledge that change coexists with continuity in the historical flow between late antique and medieval Christianity and in the unfolding of cultural threads from one period to the next. These include both the developing cult of Mary and the patriarchal values of the Eastern Mediterranean world that were reinforced by the maledominated church establishment once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. MARY’S PRIESTHOOD The Protevangelium of James, which was widely popular and recognized as a venerable source in Byzantium,7 articulates Mary’s Eucharistic role in terms that have priestly undertones. Mary was brought up as a pure vessel and sacred abode made ready to receive God: not only was she raised in a domestic sanctuary (agiasma) at her parents’ house until the age of three, but she was also entrusted to the high priest in the temple of God in Jerusalem and

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installed in the Holy of Holies (thysiasterion, agiasma).8 There, she was raised to serve God and to provide the world with the ultimate sacrifice: her own divine son. Details in Mary’s temple upbringing suggest that she was a priest superior to the high priest himself (a fitting status, since from the Christian perspective she would bring about the replacement of the Old Covenant by the New, through her son). While according to Jewish tradition only the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies—and only once a year9—Mary inhabited that most sacred space all year long.10 While angels rarely appeared to the high priest to announce the will of God,11 an angel visited Mary daily.12 And while only the priests of the temple ate the showbread dedicated to God on the altar of offerings, and only once a week when new loaves were brought in,13 the angel brought Mary heavenly nourishment directly from God every day.14 In addition, the Virgin was said to descend not only from the royal tribe of David but also from the priestly tribe of Aaron, since she was a relative of Elisabeth, wife of the high priest Zachariah.15 Several Byzantine authors also advocated for this double lineage, with the clear intention of assigning both kingly and priestly privileges to Jesus through his mother’s bloodline.16 For example, Byzantine authors suggest that the kiss Zachariah gave to Mary upon her arrival at the temple indicates they were relatives. In fact, this greeting is reminiscent of the kiss of peace clergymen exchange with others of their rank during the Eucharist.17 Therefore, to Byzantine eyes, Zachariah’s kiss to Mary might have suggested that she was of the priesthood as well as his relative.18 Byzantine homilies dedicated to the Eisodia, the Entrance of Mary to the Temple, regularly describe her in Eucharistic terms as the true Temple, Tabernacle, Holy of Holies, altar, jar of manna, and so on. These homilies also point to her privileged access to the Holy of Holies and attribute Eucharistic symbolism to the angelic nourishment the Virgin received.19 Visual narratives include even more striking references to Mary’s Eucharistic role in terms of priesthood. As Henry Maguire has observed, in many representations of the Eisodia, the Holy of Holies into which Mary is received has elements of the sanctuary of Byzantine churches (where only clerics and the Byzantine emperor were allowed): the ciborium, the altar table, the bipartite sanctuary door (“holy gate”), and a parapet that corresponds to the lower part of the templon screen (figure 10.4).20 The scene frequently depicts the miraculous feeding: Mary sits enthroned under a ciborium inside the Holy of Holies while the angel offers her not just unspecified food (as in the Protevangelium) but a round loaf of bread, similar to a Eucharistic loaf (figure 10.4).21 The ciborium traditionally appears in Byzantine images above a Christian altar table holding the Eucharist, including depictions of Christ or a priest handling a circular loaf of bread or distributing the holy gifts (figures 10.2–3 ).22 Therefore, the visual details of Mary’s miraculous feeding could have evoked the idea of her

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Figure 10.4  The Virgin’s Presentation to the Temple (Eisodia); the Virgin Fed by an Angel in the Holy of Holies. Church of the Chora Monastery, Fourteenth Century, Constantinople. Source: Photo courtesy of Rossitza Schroeder.

as the living altar of the church sanctuary or even the first priest of the new religion, receiving the heavenly bread in order to provide it to the faithful. In actual ritual practice, only the clergy could receive the Eucharist inside the sanctuary of Byzantine churches, so by implication Mary appears to be one of them. According to Matthew Milliner, Mary’s priestly role is also emphasized by the fact that the throne on which she usually receives food from the angel is raised on a flight of stairs, recalling the kathedra, the bishop’s throne in the synthronon of early Byzantine church apses.23 This should remind us that although Mary was said to descend from the priestly line of the Levites and inside the Temple she had temple privileges superior to those of the

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high priest, from a Christian perspective, her priesthood was Christian rather than Jewish (and therefore superior to that of the high priest). The surviving evidence indicates that in Byzantine culture Mary’s priesthood was primarily perceived to be not literal and ritual but mystical and spiritual, in service to the theology of the Incarnation and the Eucharist. This is borne out by the fact that, unlike Christ, Mary is not depicted in Byzantine iconography as literally administering the Eucharist or wearing full priestly or episcopal attire.24 As the Theotokos, she is both the Mother of God and the Mother Church, making possible the salvific theology of the Incarnation and the Eucharist by offering her divine son as food of everlasting life to all her children.25 WOMEN’S DIACONATE The institution of the female diaconate provides insights on gender in the context of the Eucharist and in relation to Mary. It also offers a preamble for exploring how women might have experienced the role of the Virgin and their own place in the sacred mystery of their faith. Valerie Karras has drawn attention to the female diaconate as a thriving institution in many parts of the Byzantine empire between the fourth and seventh centuries and still known up to the twelfth century, at least in Constantinople and Jerusalem.26 Two surviving euchologia (prayer books)—the eighth-century Barberini codex graecus 336 produced in a Greek-speaking region of Italy and the eleventhcentury Grottaferrata codex G.b.I. produced in Constantinople—contain identical entries on the ordination of deaconesses. According to Karras, this indicates that “the female diaconate was widespread and standardized, thereby suggesting that so was the order itself.” However, she also notes that the Byzantines had an archaizing tendency when it came to recording rituals, so we cannot take these two euchologia as proof that at the time and place of their production the female diaconate was as widespread as it was in earlier centuries.27 By the late twelfth century, she adds, female deacons were no longer ordained, and the institution of female diaconate had experienced a clear decline, possibly due to increasing concerns regarding female “impurity” during menstruation.28 By the early fourteenth century, Patriarch Athanasius I considered the female diaconate a “custom” rather than a clerical order (since by his time female ordination rites were long out of practice) and asked for its abolition.29 Karras points out that as long as female deacons were ordained, they were part of the clergy, in the same rank with male deacons (the first of the three ranks of major clergy, the other two being priests and bishops).30 Yet we should also acknowledge several significant differences between female and male deacons. Female deacons could not advance to the rank of priest or

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bishop, which was a path open to male deacons. For this reason, male deacons were usually of a younger age (and they were regularly depicted as such in Byzantine visual production).31 In contrast, female deacons were expected to be of an advanced age (at least sixty years old in the fourth century and at least forty thereafter) and were required to live in chastity (sexual abstinence).32 This was not required of male deacons or priests, as they could have a wife if the marriage had taken place before their ordination.33 Punishment for female deacons guilty of sexual misconduct was death, while for male deacons it was defrocking.34 This tight control and regulation of female deacons seem to indicate that the male establishment saw them as potential temptresses (like all daughters of Eve), who simply by their presence could interfere with the duties and proper behavior of clergymen.35 There were also striking differences between male and female deacons in terms of liturgical privileges and duties. Even though female deacons were ordained inside the sanctuary and received communion there (like their male counterparts), they were not allowed to perform the quintessential duties of male deacons, namely, participating in the Great Entrance during which the holy gifts were carried to the altar to be consecrated as the flesh and blood of Christ, reciting petition prayers, and distributing communion to the congregation. Instead, female deacons had to leave the sanctuary after receiving communion, in order to attend to the female congregation in the women’s quarters. Their main duty during the Eucharist was to supervise the women attending the mystery, while male deacons assisted at the distribution of the Eucharist and were not assigned to regulate the behavior of men.36 In addition, female deacons were not given certain liturgical implements and vestments that were provided to male deacons: female deacons did not receive the rhipidion, the fan male deacons held when participating in the Great Entrance or standing next to the altar during the Eucharist.37 Also, they did not wear the sticharion, the liturgical tunic worn by male deacons, as well as priests and bishops. This significant difference highlighted in sartorial and therefore prominently visual terms the fact that female deacons did not have access to and affinity with higher ranks of clergy, which were open only to male deacons. Additionally, female deacons were expected to wear the orarion (the long scarf that was the main insignia of their office) under their maphorion (the veil adult women had to wear over their head and shoulders)—which was also worn by the Virgin in Byzantine iconography. In fact, deaconesses had to wear the orarion in the same manner as subdeacons, wrapped around the shoulders and with both ends brought to the front,38 which would have rendered the band shorter on the chest and less likely to be visible under an ordained woman’s maphorion. The lack of the sticharion and the prescriptions about the way the orarion should be worn limited the visibility of female deacons as such and are noted by Karras as

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possible reasons for the absence of icons of female saints who can be clearly identified as deaconesses.39 In contrast, the orarion was prominently donned by male deacons on top of their sticharion, as is also attested by the many surviving representations of deacon saints, often included in the decoration of Byzantine church sanctuaries.40 One wonders why female deacons were asked to hide the sign of their office under the maphorion rather than be allowed to wear it above their veil, which would ensure that they were more easily recognized as members of the clergy. Perhaps the answer is exactly that: the inclination of the male-dominated church leadership to restrict both the duties and the visibility of those few women who were allowed in the lowest rank of the major clergy.41 The prayers of the ordination rite for female deacons reflect the tensions involved in constructing this clerical order as holy yet subject to limitations exactly because it was held by women. Karras is right to point out that the structure of the ordination rite for male and female deacons was the same,42 but as her main objective is to emphasize the clerical status of female deacons, she does not examine the gendered ideological constructs embedded in the different wording of the two prayers used in each ordination.43 To give a few examples: both female ordination prayers begin with a negative comment about “female nature” that is veiled in a superficially positive statement. The first prayer declares. “God holy and almighty, who through the birth of your only-begotten Son and our God from the Virgin according to the flesh sanctified the female, and not to men alone but also to women gifted the grace and the descent of your holy Spirit; you now, Lord, look upon this your servant.”44 This opening, with its implication that females have a special need to be sanctified, alludes to the taint that Eve’s disobedience was thought to have conferred upon all her daughters, as specified in 1 Timothy 2:11–15. The author of this epistle mentions that women are not allowed “to teach and assume authority over a man” but instead are required to be silent and submissive, because Eve was created after Adam, and she was the one who “was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety/moderation [sophrosyne].”45 The first ordination prayer for deaconesses, with its implication that female nature had to be sanctified through Mary (the second Eve) through her childbirth of God incarnate, closely echoes the declaration of 1 Timothy 2:15 that women will be saved through childbearing. In contrast, the male ordination prayers do not tell deacons that their nature required sanctification from Christ, the second Adam—despite the fact that the first Adam also ate the forbidden fruit. For that very reason, Paul had declared in Romans 5:12–21 that while all were made sinners through the disobedience of the one man (Adam), all will be made righteous through the obedience of the one man (Jesus).46 It seems that the author of

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the Byzantine ordination prayers preferred 1 Timothy 2:14, which declares, “Adam was not the one deceived.” The beginning of the second ordination prayer for deaconesses repeats, in different words, the first prayer’s attempt to mitigate what might be considered the absolute opposition of 1 Timothy 2 to female clerics. The prayer declares, “Lord, Lord, who do not reject women offering themselves and wishing to minister in your holy houses in accordance with what is fitting, but receive them in an order of ministers, gift the grace of your holy Spirit also on this your servant who wishes to dedicate herself to you.” In contrast, the male ordination prayers do not reassure deacons that God accepts their services. Culturally, that was taken for granted. The second part of each ordination prayer entreats God to aid his servants while reminding them how they were to behave in their new roles. The first ordination prayer for deaconesses asks God to guard them “in orthodox faith, in blameless conduct,” while the first ordination prayer for deacons asks God to guard them “to hold the mystery of faith in a clean conscience [1 Tim. 3:9].” The second prayer for deaconesses adds, “Grant to her, O God, to persevere blamelessly in your holy temples, to cultivate appropriate conduct, and especially moderation,” while the second prayer for deacons mentions “faith, and love, and strength [1 Tim. 1:14; 2 Tim. 1:7] and holiness.” The female ordination prayers give disproportionate emphasis to proper and moderate conduct and orthodoxy (emphasizing virtues of obedience rather than the virtues of action invoked for male deacons), as if deaconesses were more prone to immoderate or heretical behavior than deacons.47 Byzantine ordination prayers echoed the dominant cultural discourse of their time about the inferior “nature” of women as prone to sin and excess and squarely embedded it into the ordination ritual.48 Given that the bestowed clerical rank was honorable but the ordination rite suggested that the women accepted in it were not equally as honorable as the male deacons, these prayers might have seemed empowering or disempowering (or both, in varying degrees) to female deacons, or to women generally, depending on their personal beliefs and aspirations. A similar oscillation between feelings of pride or frustration could have occurred when clerical or lay women considered Mary’s Eucharistic role or perceived her in terms of priesthood. For example, they could have felt proud and affirmed because a woman made salvation possible through the Incarnation and the Eucharist, and they could have felt thankful that the Virgin had sanctified female nature and lifted the taint introduced by Eve. Or they could have felt humbled and marginalized because Mary alone of all women could preside over the Eucharistic rite, while they were excluded from priesthood and the space of the sanctuary, as daughters of Eve rather than sisters of Mary.49

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THE DECLINE OF FEMALE CLERGY AND THE RISE OF MARY’S EUCHARISTIC ROLE When considering the liturgical role of women in the Christian church, it is imperative to examine major changes that occurred through the centuries.50 Surviving textual evidence indicates that, in the first centuries of Christianity, many communities around the Mediterranean accepted women in leadership positions as apostles, preachers, and ministers, and were criticized by other communities where such female roles were considered inappropriate. In fact, the preserved records of such criticism are the main sources of evidence for the practice of female leadership, which, in later centuries, was gradually eradicated.51 It is essential to consider when such eradication might have prevailed and where—at least in the most prominent communities of the empire, in important urban centers that were under the control of bishops aligned with the central imperial and ecclesiastical administration. This will inform an assessment of the religious experience of women who had a clerical, liturgical role and women who saw (or did not see) others of their sex perform such roles and thus were instructed in what women could or could not do. Written records suggest that male criticism of female leadership steadily gained momentum from the second century onward but was especially reinforced from the fourth century onward, when Christianity gradually became the official religion of the empire—a development that conferred a public role upon the new religion and gradually elevated the profile of its clergy, especially its bishops, to positions of civic authority. This must have intensified efforts to limit the authority of women in the church, since women were traditionally not allowed in the public administration of the empire.52 The first Epistle to Timothy, which directs women to be silent in the church, is usually dated to the late first or second century, and by the second half of the fourth century it was considered canonical by the Council of Laodicea that took place in Asia Minor. The same council forbade the ordination of female priests and the access of women to the altar.53 As previously mentioned, deaconesses were ordained at the altar but did not stand there during the Eucharist, unlike male deacons and priests. In the West, the ordination of deaconesses continued at least until the eleventh century,54 but official legislation forbade women from serving at the altar. Indeed, ecclesiastical authorities periodically complained about women in provincial regions disrespecting this rule, which indicates that although the practice was condemned by the church establishment, it was not uniformly eradicated.55 In addition, as Ally Kateusz points out, the number of named Christian women in historical texts dropped dramatically from the fourth to the fifth century, contributing to the gradual silencing of women.56 By the end of the seventh century, this silencing was approved of and reinforced by the Council in Trullo, which was

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convened in Constantinople in 692, was attended by representatives of the Roman see, and was considered ecumenical both in the East and the West. According to canon 70, women “shall not be allowed to speak during the holy mass,” which effectively could also mean that during the Eucharist they were no longer allowed to sing certain prayers and responses with the rest of the congregation. In Judith Herrin’s words, women were “thus reduced to mere spectators and hearers.”57 The biblical authority referenced in the canon to support this prescription of women’s silencing was 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, which was quoted almost in its entirety: “[Women] should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; [for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.]”58 In this context of increased censorship of female voices, it should also be noted that the gender bias against deaconesses seen in the Byzantine ordination rite could have been in place earlier than its first surviving textual record in the late eighth-century Barberini codex, considering the liturgical conservatism of Byzantine euchologia.59 On the basis of the previous observations, I contend that Mary’s Eucharistic role in Byzantine texts and images from at least the sixth century onward should not be considered a straightforward indication that contemporary women had access to leadership positions and could celebrate the Eucharist in the way male clergy did. In fact, Mary’s prominence in Byzantine culture seems to have increased concurrently with a decrease in women’s prominence in the church, and included roles that Christian women could never claim for themselves. For example, Mary’s role as victorious general leading the Byzantine army and as protectress of the Byzantine people in times of war became prominent after the Avar siege of 626, when Constantinople’s deliverance was credited to the Virgin’s miraculous intervention. Yet, no woman was ever allowed to fight in, let alone lead, the Byzantine army.60 In fact, as Mary was becoming more powerful, the Byzantine church took steps to curtail women’s agency by distancing them from the Theotokos. So, the same Council in Trullo that silenced women during the Eucharist also forbade the popular celebration of Mary on the Sunday after Christmas through the consumption of the same edible offering that was commonly distributed in domestic settings among relatives and friends after a woman had given birth.61 According to the presiding bishops, such a celebration dishonored the “Virgin-Mother” (parthenometor) by making common and ordinary her extraordinary, painless, and seedless childbirth. In other words, it was decreed that Mary was unlike any other woman. Eager to discourage any parallels between the Mother of God and ordinary women, the bishops stipulated that the punishment for failing to comply with this canon was defrocking for clerics and excommunication for the laity.62 This institutional interest

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in distancing Mary from Byzantine women could be one of the reasons that depictions of the Virgin breastfeeding her child seem to have been rather rare in Byzantine visual production after the end of Iconoclasm. Representing Mary performing the familiar maternal practice of nursing would have placed her too close to ordinary Byzantine mothers. In the spirit of the Trullan council and the dominant patriarchal ideology of the time, such proximity would dishonor the Theotokos and inappropriately honor and empower women. Therefore, this imagery was avoided in the visual production of the time, even though it could have vividly evoked the dogma of the Incarnation and of Mary’s role as intercessor of humankind.63 While Mary’s Eucharistic prominence did not correspond to actual female liturgical leadership from at least the sixth century onward (if not earlier), it is possible that women found other ways to relate to Mary as provider of the Eucharist, through roles that they were not only allowed but also encouraged and expected to fulfill. Women might have developed a nuanced relationship to Mary’s Eucharistic role by perceiving it through the lens of three quintessential female duties: (1) the laborious production of textiles, which was expected of women of all ages regardless of social status; (2) the painful and potentially life-threatening production of children, expected of all married women; and (3) the onerous production of food, expected of all women who were not wealthy enough to delegate that task to servants.64 These duties might have been a source of pride or a source of frustration for women, since they limited acceptable female roles to the domestic sphere and imposed heavy labor upon women as obedient caretakers of their families. According to the poetic language of Byzantine theology, Mary embodies all three of these female activities in her prominent role in human salvation. In terms of textile production, she is the weaver of Christ’s body, since she produced the mantle of human flesh that God wore in order to walk and suffer among his people. The purple thread that, according to the Protevangelium, Mary was spinning during her Annunciation was a powerful symbol of the Incarnation as a creative process accomplished by the Mother of God. As part of the Byzantine Annunciation iconography, Mary’s spinning of this purple thread was traditionally included in the decoration of Byzantine sanctuaries, framing the space where the Eucharist was performed (figure 10.5).65 In terms of birth and food production, the Virgin bore and then fed Christ’s historical body with her own milk and also provided his Eucharistic body, reborn on the altar table and distributed as salvific food among his people.66 In the last part of this chapter, I examine how the visual context of a specific church could emphasize these female materialities in the space of the altar and potentially encourage women to perceive great dignity in their

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Figure 10.5  East Part of the Church of St. George, Late Twelfth Century, Kurbinovo, Republic of North Macedonia. The original templon screen has been replaced with a new one of similar dimensions. The altar table with Mary above it, in the sanctuary apse, is visible through the templon door. The Annunciation flanks the apse and the Ascension of Christ is above it. Source: Photo by Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

own female responsibilities through reference to Mary’s Eucharistic role. By female materialities, I mean the bodily experiences and the physical and material labor involved in the quintessentially female production of food, textiles, and babies.

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WOMEN IN THE EUPHRASIAN BASILICA The sixth-century sanctuary mosaics of the basilica of bishop Euphrasius in Poreč (Latin Parentium), Croatia, now partly obscured by a thirteenthcentury ciborium, give uncommon emphasis to the female materialities of textile, child, and food production (figure 10.6).67 Mary’s Annunciation on

Figure 10.6  Mosaics of the Central Apse and Triumphal Arch of the Sanctuary of the Basilica of Bishop Euphrasius, Sixth Century, and Upper Part of Thirteenth-Century Ciborium, Poreč, Croatia. From top to bottom: Christ enthroned on a globe, flanked by the twelve apostles (triumphal arch). The Lamb of God surrounded by twelve female saints in medallions (soffit of the apse). Mary enthroned holding Christ and flanked by two angels, three anonymous saints on the right and St. Maurus, Bishop Euphrasius, and Archdeacon Claudius with his son Euphrasius on the left. Dedicatory inscription. Band with shells and mother of pearl roundels. Annunciation (left), angel (middle), Visitation (right). The figures of Zachariah and John the Baptist on the piers left and right of the angel are obscured by the ciborium. Source: Photo courtesy of Renco Kosinožić, Henry Maguire, and Ann Terry Poreč Archive, 1990s–2000s, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC.

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the left part of the apse (figure 10.7) ingeniously references all three female activities as signs of Mary’s Eucharistic role, through her chalice-like wool basket, comparable in shape to actual sixth-century chalice cups.68 The wool of imperial purple cradled in this basket and destined for the temple veil represents textile production as the weaving of Christ’s historical body in Mary’s womb and the reweaving of his Eucharistic body on the altar table. The dark, almost fleshy mass of wool in the chalice-like basket alludes to the fleece of the sacrificial Lamb dyed in his own blood. The bundle of wool Mary pulls out of the basket and toward herself represents childbirth by appearing as an umbilical cord that unites her womb with the womb-like basket, in which the purple wool stands for Christ’s body. The chalice-like shape of the basket

Figure 10.7  Annunciation Mosaic (With Part of the Decorative Band of Shells and Mother of Pearl Roundels above), Sanctuary of the Basilica of Bishop Euphrasius, Sixth Century, Poreč, Croatia. Source: Photo courtesy of Renco Kosinožić, Henry Maguire, and Ann Terry Poreč Archive, 1990s–2000s, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC.

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references food production by presenting Christ’s salvific body as the nourishment Mary prepares for the Eucharistic banquet. Mary herself is dressed in purple, suggesting that her body is the provider of the material through which Christ’s flesh will be woven. She is depicted again in the center of the apse conch, dressed in the same purple robes and now holding Christ himself rather than the purple wool. To the right of the altar, in the Visitation scene opposite the Annunciation, a visibly pregnant Elisabeth greets an almost equally pregnant Mary as the mother of the savior (figure 10.8). The Virgin’s round belly identifies her as the container of the same life-giving body that is sacrificed on the altar table. All of these visual details emphasize the reality of the Incarnation, which is celebrated through the Eucharist.69 The visualization of this fundamental theological concept through quintessential female duties

Figure 10.8  Visitation Mosaic (With Part of the Decorative Band of Shells and Mother of Pearl Roundels above), Sanctuary of the Basilica of Bishop Euphrasius, Sixth Century, Poreč, Croatia. Source: Photo courtesy of Renco Kosinožić, Henry Maguire, and Ann Terry Poreč Archive, 1990s–2000s, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC.

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renders the mystery of salvation more understandable and relatable to the laity and reinforces traditional female roles, conferring upon them a dignity that could have influenced the self-perception of women. The band of white textile with a cross near its fringe that appears under Mary’s and Elisabeth’s maphorion, close to the bottom hem of their tunics, warrants special attention, as it could represent in sartorial terms a significant aspect of female identity. This band is reminiscent of the way deaconesses were expected to wear their orarion under their maphorion. However, in the Byzantine tradition, female deacons had to wrap the orarion around their shoulders and hang both ends to the front (thus shortening the free-falling parts of the band). Therefore, the orarion may not have been visible below a long maphorion, or if it was, both ends might have peeked under the superimposed veil and would have been visible at some distance from each other like two ends of a long scarf. But what we see in the Euphrasian mosaics appears as a single long band. The Archdeacon Claudius depicted at the far left of the apse conch (flanking the enthroned Mary donning a similar white band; figure 10.9) does not wear an orarion, which might have been expected if the mosaics were meant to represent Mary and Elisabeth wearing such a vestment as well.70 The white band donned by Mary and Elisabeth cannot be identified as the diaconal orarion with certainty. The assumption that this band is the episcopal pallium (Latin) or omophorion (Greek) encounters similar problems: the Bishop Euphrasius depicted in front of the archdeacon at the left side of the apse conch does not wear such a sign of office (figure 10.9).71 An episcopal pallium in the shape of a similar-looking, long white band with a cross close to its fringe appears in contemporary images of bishops in Ravenna but is worn differently: the band is wound around the shoulders and across the torso, with one end (not visible) hanging on the back and another, short end falling to the front, on the left side of the upper body.72 In contrast, the white band on Mary and Elisabeth is much longer and hangs along the middle of the lower body, between the legs, more like a sash-belt. The mosaicist might have intended to depict the two women wearing such a sash-belt, a common accessory of female attire at the time. Still, for argument’s sake, let us assume for a minute that the commissioner of the mosaic (Bishop Euphrasius) and at least some of his contemporaries would have seen the white band as a reference to the episcopal pallium. This should not be considered straightforward evidence that actual women had access to the same office when the mosaics were created in the mid-sixth century,73 by which time the male-dominated establishment of the church seems to have limited female clerical leadership to the diaconate in the East and not even to that in some communities in the West.74 Holy women depicted in leadership positions or with insignia of authority could have been inspirational visual symbols in the eyes of female Christians (e.g., as models of faith, fortitude,

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Figure 10.9  Mosaics of the Central Apse Conch and Triumphal Arch of the Sanctuary of the Basilica of Bishop Euphrasius, Sixth Century, Poreč, Croatia. From top to bottom: Christ enthroned on a globe, flanked by the twelve apostles (triumphal arch). The Lamb of God surrounded by twelve female saints in medallions (soffit of the apse). Mary enthroned holding Christ and flanked by two angels, three anonymous saints on the right and St. Maurus, Bishop Euphrasius, and Archdeacon Claudius with his son Euphrasius on the left. Source: Photo Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, NY.

and service), but we need more than such visual evidence to argue that women still had access to high offices in the church—as they seem to have had in some Christian communities in earlier centuries.75 It is possible that the male establishment would have permitted depictions of Mary with elements of episcopal attire precisely because women were no longer admitted in that office: Mary’s depiction as a high priest (with episcopal insignia) was now a symbolic embodiment of the institution of the church and presented the Virgin as the patron of male bishops rather than as a literal model of leadership for women.76 The inverse relationship between Mary’s increasing power and women’s diminishing agency could have been internalized in a range of ways by female Christians, both empowering and disempowering depending on their personal experiences and views and the manner in which Mary’s role was presented in specific contexts. So, it is useful to return to the sanctuary of

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the Euphrasian basilica and consider details of the mosaics that might have had special significance for women. Concerning the white band on Mary and Elisabeth, it is worth noting that, according to the Protevangelium and the Gospel of Luke, both women belonged to the priestly lineage, and although they did not exercise a literal priestly role directly, they served the people of God through their sons: Christ was the high priest of the new religion and a model for all clerics—deacons by his service and humility, priests and bishops by his leadership and sacrificial authority—while as his Baptist, John the Forerunner was also a model for bishops.77 If the white band worn by Mary and Elisabeth in the Euphrasian mosaics was indeed meant as a diaconal orarion or an episcopal pallium, it could have been intended as a symbolic reference to the priesthood of their sons, as scholars have argued in the past.78 In addition, the orarion or pallium could have indicated the spiritual and physical contributions these two holy women made to the Christian faith as mothers, fulfilling a mystical rather than literal liturgical role: Mary was the vessel and Elisabeth the witness of the Incarnation, the path to human salvation that was also reenacted and celebrated in the Eucharist performed on the church altar in front of these two women. This hypothesis that the two women appear performing a mystical rather than literal liturgical role, as mothers of Christ and the Forerunner, respectively, is reinforced by comparison to the depiction of Zachariah and John the Baptist in two Euphrasian mosaic panels between the Annunciation and the Visitation: while the two women appear as demure figures in narrative scenes that center on traditional female roles (spinning and pregnancy), the two men are shown frontally, in full-figure portraits, as models of liturgical authority and clerical leadership (compare figures 10.7–10.8 with   figures 10.10–10.11). Zachariah is dressed as high priest and holds a censer and incense box while John the Baptist wears a golden tunic with clavi under his animal skin, holds a cross staff, and performs the speaking (“blessing”) gesture with his right hand. This is a gesture that, otherwise, only Christ is depicted performing in the Euphrasian mosaics, as the divine child seated on Mary’s lap in the center of the apse and as the Pantokrator seated on a globe in the center of the triumphal arch. Thus, Zachariah and John the Baptist embody models of clerical authority that would have been especially relevant to Bishop Euphrasius—himself a “high priest” and baptizer—but could also have been relevant to the Archdeacon Claudius depicted next to Euphrasius in the apse conch, since his responsibilities would have included incensing during the Eucharist and assisting the bishop during baptism.79 Thus, even if the white band on Mary and Elisabeth was intended as a diaconal orarion or episcopal pallium, the overall visual details and narrative context of their depiction does not confer to them literal liturgical roles, nor can it prove that women would have held clerical offices in the see of Parentium (even though

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Figure 10.10  Mosaic of Zachariah, North Pier (To the Right of the Annunciation Scene), Central Apse in the Sanctuary of the Basilica of Bishop Euphrasius, Sixth Century. Source: Photo courtesy of Renco Kosinožić, Henry Maguire, and Ann Terry Poreč Archive, 1990s–2000s, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC.

the ordination of deaconesses might have been practiced there as in other communities).80 Regardless of what the commissioner and makers of the Euphrasian mosaics might have intended to say about the liturgical role of Mary and Elisabeth through the depiction of the white band, female viewers could have developed their own interpretations in connection to their personal lived experiences and interests. In particular, deaconesses who donned an orarion (a similar white band, albeit worn differently) could have seen Mary and Elisabeth as venerable models who served God both physically and spiritually, in a manner that

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Figure 10.11  Mosaic of John the Baptist, South Pier (To the Left of the Visitation Scene), Central Apse in the Sanctuary of the Basilica of Bishop Euphrasius, Sixth Century. Source: Photo courtesy of Renco Kosinožić, Henry Maguire, and Ann Terry Poreč Archive, 1990s–2000s, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC.

evoked the service female deacons were expected to offer. This role-model approach could have been active even though real-life regulations about deaconesses would not have allowed women to be pregnant while holding this office.81 In the same way that Mary and Elisabeth were presented as fulfilling a symbolic rather than literal liturgical role, they could also function as symbolic rather than literal models for deaconesses (models by analogy rather than by direct correspondence). In fact, the two holy women could have functioned as models for deaconesses even if the white band they donned in the

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Euphrasian mosaics was not perceived as a reference to the diaconal orarion. Just the prominent presence of Mary and Elisabeth in the space of the sanctuary and their depiction as holy mothers dedicating themselves to the service of God and therefore to human salvation could have inspired deaconesses, whose role was ultimately the same as that of the holy mothers: to serve God for the salvation of his people. I believe that the most plausible and meaningful interpretation of the white band on Mary and Elisabeth is that it was meant to depict a common accessory of female secular attire, namely a sash-belt that would have been tied under the breasts, with its two long ends overlapping and appearing as one band along the middle of the lower body. Such a sash-belt appears in several depictions of late antique women, including sixth-century examples, as a long white band peeking under a veil, similar to the white band discussed here.82 The depiction of such a sartorial lay accessory could have held particular significance for female viewers, so it deserves further attention. Some clues might emerge regarding the meaning of this band in the context of these mosaics if we consider that the Virgin’s attire undergoes a striking change from the Annunciation to the Visitation, that is, from before to after she becomes pregnant with the Logos incarnate. In the Annunciation (figure 10.7), Mary wears a belt that is probably of the buckled type (without the free-hanging, long ends of a sash) just under her breasts. This belt is visible through a diaphanous veil that covers her upper body and part of her head. According to Henry Maguire, these details, unusual in the surviving depictions of the Virgin, could refer to the relics of Mary’s belt and veil venerated in Constantinople as proof of the Incarnation and considered sanctified through contact with the bodies of the Theotokos and the baby Christ.83 It is important to note that in the Euphrasian Annunciation, Mary is still dressed as a virgin with her head only partly covered by a diaphanous veil, in a manner similar to the virgin martyrs also depicted in the Euphrasian sanctuary and in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna.84 In contrast, in the Euphrasian Visitation mosaic (figure 10.8), both Mary and Elisabeth are tightly wrapped in a maphorion, which highlights their faces, full breasts, and pregnant bellies and allows only the lower edge of a cross-inscribed white band to be visible close to the hem of their tunics. Mary wears the same maphorion and white, cross-inscribed band in the center of the apse where she holds the Christ Child (figure 10.9). The thick, long veil gives Mary a more matronly and mature look, similar to the married Elisabeth (and the Virgin, as “the church,” is the “bride” spiritually married to Christ the bridegroom).85 Perhaps the white band visible under the maphorion of the two women was either a sash appended from their belt or a long band used as a sash-belt,86 depicted in order to make it clear that both women were girdled under the folds of their maphorion. In this way, Mary is presented donning both a veil and belt before

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and after she becomes pregnant. While the different visual details in the Virgin’s three depictions present her as a virginal maiden in the Annunciation and as a mature matron in the Visitation and in the apse conch, in all three images Mary wears the two items that were venerated as powerful relics in Constantinople: a veil and belt sanctified through touch with the holy body that held the Logos Incarnate. It is significant that in the Euphrasian mosaics both Mary and Elisabeth don the white band/sash-belt tied under their breasts and above their belly. Besides being an accessory common in female attire of the time, this sash-belt could have drawn attention to the miracle of both pregnancies: viewers may have perceived the white, cross-marked band as a textile sanctified through contact with the hallowed ground of these two holy women’s wombs, highlighting the sanctity of those bodily spaces and the sons nurtured in them.87 In the Christian culture of the time, due to their binding function, belts could symbolize a range of related qualities such as fortitude, preparedness, moral integrity, control, ascetism, or chastity in the case of either men or women.88 In addition, women’s belts retained associations with female modesty, controlled sexuality, married status, and childbirth that they had in earlier GrecoRoman tradition.89 Thus, making Mary’s and Elisabeth’s cross-inscribed sash-belt visible under their maphorion reinforced the message that their pregnancies and motherhood were pure, sent by God, absent of any lust, and destined to elevate humankind from its fallen state.90 Of course, different viewers could interpret the white band in different ways, but women might have been inclined to relate it to elements of their own attire and to the sanctified motherhood of the two holy women.91 For laywomen, Mary and Elisabeth could have been models that conferred a particular dignity to childbearing and childrearing, reminding viewers that women were the ones who brought into the world, nurtured, and educated Christian leaders and laypeople alike.92 In light of these details, in the Euphrasian sanctuary Mary’s priesthood seems entirely linked to her motherhood: she wears what some might see as an episcopal pallium when she is visibly pregnant (like Elisabeth in the Visitation; figure 10.8) and when she holds her child in her lap (in the apse conch; figure 10.9), and she uses a chalice-like wool basket when she is told she is about to become the mother of God (in the Annunciation; figure 10.7). Far from being images that advocate for Mary’s independent leadership or liturgical role as a model for actual female clerics, these depictions emphasize Mary’s role in human salvation as the Theotokos: literally the “God-birther” who serves Christ and his church through her motherhood. In the middle register of the Euphrasian apse, the unusual decorative band of shells and pearls—the latter made out of mother-of-pearl roundels— could also reference Mary’s motherhood and present the Theotokos as the bearer of Christ’s historical and Eucharistic body (figure 10.12). Byzantine

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Figure 10.12  Mosaic of Shells and Mother of Pearl Roundels, Part of the Decorative Band on the Left Side of the Central Apse (Above the Annunciation Scene), Sanctuary of the Basilica of Bishop Euphrasius, Sixth Century. Source: Photo courtesy of Renco Kosinožić, Henry Maguire, and Ann Terry Poreč Archive, 1990s–2000s, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC.

literature hails Mary as the shell that gives birth to Christ, the divine pearl.93 In the shell-and-pearl band, the arched shells echo the shape of the apse, which during the Eucharist “gives birth” to the divine pearl in the form of the Eucharistic loaf, itself round and white like the mother-of-pearl roundels.94 Indeed, the Greek word margarites (pearl) was used in Byzantium to describe both Christ and the Eucharistic bread or its particles, emphasizing the identification of the Eucharist with the body of Jesus, born out of Mary, the shell.95 The Greek word konche or konchos (from which we get the English conch) referred to a shell or an apse conch and also applied to Mary as bearer of Christ the pearl.96 In later centuries, one of the Eucharistic references of the Byzantine Blachernitissa iconography could be to Mary as provider of the pearl-like body of Christ, the heavenly bread.97 The shape of the Euphrasian shells evokes both the form of the apse and the images of a womb, a chalice, and even a tent, which could relate to the idea of Mary as the living Tabernacle (a holy tent) birthing the true heavenly bread, Christ, who is the pearl, prefigured in the Old Testament manna.98 Through this ingenious decorative band that alludes to the shell/Mary/conch giving birth to the pearl/Christ/Eucharistic bread, the sanctuary mosaics of the Euphrasiana reference the three quintessential female activities through which women could have approached Mary’s Eucharistic role: textile production (tents), childbearing (womb/shell), and food offering (“pearly” Eucharistic loaf). In Byzantium, textile production, food preparation, and childbearing were emblematic of female identity in terms of industriousness, obedience, service, and self-sacrifice, all of which could be the subject of praise and garner respect but could also be considered submissive qualities, according

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to the gender expectations of the time. Yet these three activities could also suggest that femininity, and motherhood in particular, demand tremendous commitment and resilience and therefore require but also confer agency and power. This is seen, for example, in the indefatigable and even fierce drive of dedicated mothers to provide for and protect their children, which can bestow upon them honor and recognition for their maternal role. After all, self-sacrifice like that of mothers or of Christian martyrs is a sign of exceptional strength and commitment, not weakness. Note that in the Euphrasian Annunciation and Visitation scenes, Mary appears as a meek and secluded Virgin and humble mother-to-be. In contrast, the Theotokos is enthroned and holding her divine child on her lap in the center of the apse, staring confidently and proudly at the viewer and fully embodying the power required for but also stemming from motherhood. In this sense, she is not only the Mother of God and the Mother Church willing to hear and address the pleas of all her children, but she is also a reminder of the exceptional and far-reaching role of mothers in human societies, in terms that surpass the specificities of the essential tasks of childbirth, textile making, and food production. In the context of the Eucharist, visual references to these three activities could be eloquent symbols of Mary’s role in the mystery of divine Incarnation and human salvation and could make her particularly relatable to women. At the same time, regal images of Mary holding her son embody the broader implications of motherhood as the inimitable power to provide and protect life. In the context of the life-giving ritual of the Eucharist, where Mary offers the salvific body of her son, her motherly presence as Theotokos could be particularly empowering for women. In such images of Mary in Byzantine sanctuaries, it is the reference to the traditional role of motherhood—rather than any sartorial detail, such as a diaconal orarion or an episcopal pallium— that renders the Theotokos a powerful positive model for women. This is especially so since, by the sixth century, the church would admit only a few women to the rank of deaconesses, but the whole society would expect most women to become mothers. One further model of female identity in the Euphrasian basilica appears on the soffit of the triumphal arch right in front of the apse, embodied in the portraits of twelve female saints—a number reminiscent of the twelve apostles depicted on the triumphal arch above (figure 10.9). Interestingly, most of these saints bear a name with an auspicious and empowering meaning in either Greek or Latin.99 In addition, they all look rather similar to one another and to the figure of the Virgin in the Annunciation scene, as pure maidens who do not wear the matronly maphorion but a virginal veil.100 Thus, the twelve saints seem to project a somewhat monolithic perception of female sanctity that no longer reflects the leadership roles and diverse identities these women might have held in earlier Christian communities but instead focuses

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on virginity as a marker of female sanctity.101 Still, the prominence of virginal maidens as well as young and more mature mothers in the Euphrasian mosaics (in the figures of Mary and Elisabeth) could have made these holy figures relatable to women of the congregation in various stages of their lives. On the whole, this sanctuary program gives an unusual and dignifying emphasis to female sanctity and female materialities, so much so that one may wonder if female patrons from the community contributed to this project. All of the figures surrounding Mary, Christ, and the two angels in the center of the apse, above the dedicatory inscription, are male: three anonymous saints to the right and four eponymous figures to the left, namely St. Maurus, the Bishop Euphrasius, the Archdeacon Claudius, and his son Euphrasius.102 If women were involved in planning and paying for this program, they were not honored with direct representation, but perhaps they saw themselves represented through the sacramental and sacred models of Mary, Elisabeth, and the twelve female saints. CONCLUSION Mary’s Eucharistic role can be inspiring and motivational for all participants in the holiest ritual of the Christian church, in the same way that her motherhood can be familiar and comforting to all believers. As the Mother Church and the ultimate model of complete devotion to and union with God, Mary may remind all worshippers that, like her, they can become a temple of God and give birth to Christ spiritually through a life of Christian faith and service. This universality of Mary’s relevance can be the foundation on which different devotees may develop a more personal relationship with the Virgin by introducing unique nuances in their connection to her, dependent on their own identities and life circumstances. In the Byzantine empire, adult women in particular may have developed a relationship with the Theotokos hinging on their shared womanhood and therefore differing from the ways men or children would have approached her. In past patriarchal cultures that constructed female identity as inferior to male, Christian women could have drawn particular pride from knowing that their socially required roles (producing textiles, food, and, above all, male children) became the path that in Mary led to the salvation of the world and made her, a woman, the paramount model of human union with the divine, not only during her life but also during the most sacred and transformative Christian ritual. Mary could be empowering to women even through roles that they could not literally perform themselves (such as priest or general) by modeling positive qualities they could cultivate in their own lives, such as devotion or fortitude.

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At the same time, perhaps empowerment was not always the result of women’s contemplation of the Virgin. Rather, women might have felt a sense of disempowerment and frustration when they considered aspects of Mary’s identity that were unavailable to them or that urged female seclusion, submissiveness, and industriousness through traditional female roles. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that the cult of Mary flourished within the church establishment not only because it served the dominant patriarchy but also because it served women, who after all made up half the body of the devotees. Looking up to the Theotokos offered women a sense of dignity and pride. Women could contemplate not just the extraordinary but also (and perhaps more significantly and frequently) the ordinary, traditional aspects of womanhood that Mary had elevated to the conduit for human salvation. Women could find dignity and empowerment not despite but because of the traditional roles expected of them and embodied by Mary. This could be particularly true in the context of the Eucharist, when the Virgin’s quintessential female activities of textile production, childbearing, and food preparation were celebrated as the bridge that united heaven and earth through the birth and sacrifice of her son. It is impossible to recreate the endless possibilities of experiences that different Byzantine women could have had throughout their lives when engaging with Eucharistic images of Mary, since a wide range of variables would have influenced their reactions: their own personal and changing interests and life stories; their social and economic status; their age, education, or profession; the history of their local or broader communities; new cultural developments of their time period; and their specific visual and ritual contexts. Even so, we should venture into such speculative explorations fully aware of their speculative nature but also appreciative of their potential to offer us insights into the religious and visual culture and human experiences of that time.

NOTES 1. Greek text and English translation (slightly adjusted here for greater faithfulness to the original Greek) in Leena Mari Peltomaa, The Image of the Virgin Mary in the Akathistos Hymn (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 2–19. The Akathistos Hymn can be justly regarded as the most famous work of Byzantine hymnography that has exerted a strong influence upon later Marian textual and visual production. 2. Maria Evangelatou, “Krater of Nectar and Altar of the Bread of Life: The Theotokos as Provider of the Eucharist in Byzantine Culture,” in The Reception of the Virgin in Byzantium: Marian Narratives in Texts and Images, ed. Thomas Arentzen and Mary Cunningham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 77–119. 3. Evangelatou, “Krater of Nectar,” 106–14.

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4. Ann Terry and Henry Maguire, Dynamic Splendor: The Wall Mosaics in the Cathedral of Eufrasius at Poreč, vol. 1 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2007), 59–60, 68–69, 151–2; Thomas E. Schweigert, “San Mauro at Parentium, Saint Sergius at Gaza, Hagia Sophia in Kiev, and the Protevangelium of James,” Hortus Artium Medievalium 24 (2018): 181–90. 5. See especially Schweigert, “San Mauro,” for similarities between the Euphrasiana and east Mediterranean churches, in terms of plan and decoration. 6. Given the brevity of this chapter and my own Byzantine specialty, I do not venture into the study of ordination prayers for deaconesses that survive from the Latin West (see the sources mentioned by Gary Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], 35–39, 68–80.) Occasionally I will make reference to possible female experiences among the Latin-speaking congregation of Parentium (modern Poreč) and not only among Greek-speaking congregations in now-lost Byzantine churches that could have had a decoration similar to that of the Euphrasian basilica, but since I have not studied the Western sources, such observations will be very generic. 7. Lily Vuong, Gender and Purity in the Protevangelium of James (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 6–13 (overview of textual tradition and various editions). Critical edition of the Greek text and French translation: Émile de Strycker, La forme la pluse ancienne du Protévangile de Jacques (Bruxelles: Société des Bollandinistes, 1961). Introduction, Greek text, and English translation: Bart D. Ehrman and Slatko Pleše, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 31–71. 8. Protevangelium 6–8; ed. Strycker, Protévangile, 90–102; Ehrman and Pleše, Apocryphal Gospels, 48–51. 9. Leviticus 16:1–34; Hebrews 9:7. 10. This is highlighted in homilies on Mary’s Entrance to the Temple by Byzantine authors: Germanus (eighth c.), PG 98, 309C, 312C; Tarasius (eighth–ninth c.), PG 98, 1481B; Theophylact of Ochrid (11th–12th c.), PG 126, 136D. 11. For example, to Zachariah, once in Luke 1:11–20, and once in the Protevangelium 8, where Zachariah is not just a priest but the high priest (Strycker, Protévangile, 102–04; Ehrman and Pleše, Apocryphal Gospels, 48–50). 12. Pointed out in homilies on Mary’s Entrance to the Temple by George of Nicomedia (ninth c.), PG 100, 1432A–B; repeated by Iakobos of Kokkinobaphos (twelfth c.), PG 127, 616D–617A. 13. Leviticus 24:5–9; Matthew 12:3–4; Luke 6:3–4. 14. In the eyes of Byzantine authors, she consumed that miraculous nourishment so that later she could give birth to the real heavenly bread, Christ. See the sources mentioned in Evangelatou, “Krater of Nectar,” 90–91. 15. Protevangelium 10, 12, Strycker, Protévangile, 110, 118; Ehrman and Pleše, Apocryphal Gospels, 50–53. Compare Luke 1:5–36. 16. M. J. Milliner, “The Virgin of the Passion: Development, Dissemination, and Afterlife of a Byzantine Icon Type” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2011), 124–06 (references by John of Damascus and Andrew of Crete of the seventh–eighth centuries and Theodore Studite of the eight–ninth century). See also the homilies

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on Mary’s Entrance to the Temple by Germanus, PG 98, 313A; Tarasius, PG 98, 1488D; and Iakobos of Kokkkinobaphos, PG 127, 616A; and the interpretation on the Gospel of Luke by Theophylact of Ochrid, PG 123, 705C–708A; and Euthymius Zigabenus (twelfth c.), PG 129, 869C–D. Relevant sources are also mentioned by Mary B. Cunningham, “The Life of the Theotokos by Epiphanios of Kallistratos: A Monastic Approach to an Apocryphal Story,” in The Reception of the Virgin in Byzantium: Marian Narratives in Texts and Images, ed. Thomas Arentzen and Mary B. Cunningham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 314n1; and by Paul A. Underwood, The Kariye Djami (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1966), 53–56, in his discussion of the royal and priestly ancestors of Christ depicted on the northern dome of the inner narthex in the Chora Monastery (fourteenth century), Constantinople. Mary’s royal and priestly double lineage is also implied through two popular Old Testament prefigurations of the Theotokos, which have obvious formal similarities and are often mentioned together: the Davidic flourishing root of Jesse and the Levitic blooming rod of Aaron, both of which evoke the concept of genealogy through the image of a growing tree or branch. See S. Eustratiades, Ἡ Θεοτόκος ἐν τῇ ὑμνογραφίᾳ (Paris: Librairie ancienne Honoré Champion, 1930), 68–69 (rabdos, riza). Also discussed by Underwood, Kariye Djami, 56. 17. Hugh Wybrew, The Orthodox Liturgy (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 40, 52, 84, 117–18. 18. In their homilies on the Eisodia, Tarasius (PG 98, 1488D), and Iakobos of Kokkkinobaphos (PG 127, 616A) mention the kiss as proof that Mary was Zachariah’s relative and of priestly lineage. 19. See Evangelatou, “Krater of Nectar,” 91n77. 20. Henry Maguire, “Abaton and Oikonomia: St. Neophytos and the Iconography of the Presentation of the Virgin,” in Medieval Cyprus, ed. Nancy Patterson Sevcenko and Christopher Moss (Princeton: PUP, 1999), 100–01. According to the 69th canon of the Council in Trullo of 692 (on which see more information later), no layperson should ever be allowed in the sanctuary, with the exception of the emperor “whenever he desires to offer the gifts to the creator, in accordance with a most ancient tradition.” Greek text and English translation in George Nedungatt and Michael Featherstone, eds., The Council in Trullo Revisited (Pontificio Istituto Orientale: Rome, 1995), 151. 21. Also mentioned by Milliner, “Virgin of the Passion,” 119. 22. See images in Sharon Gerstel, Beholding the Sacred Mysteries: Programs of the Byzantine Sanctuary (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), figs. 3, 13–14, 41–42, 55, 72–74, 86. 23. Milliner, “Virgin of the Passion,” 118. 24. For elements of priestly or episcopal attire in images of Mary, see reference to Mary’s handkerchief in Alexei Lidov, Hierotopy: Spatial Icons and ImagesParadigms in Byzantine Culture (Moscow: Theoria, 2009), 223–56 (the text is written in Russian; I could read only the English summary on pp. 332–33). For the reference to three stripes on Mary’s robe, see M. Tomić Djurić, “To Picture and to Perform: The  Image of the Eucharistic Liturgy at Markov Manastir,” Zograf 38 (2014): 137–38. For the reference to the veil on Mary’s head in the Kykkotissa iconography, see Helena Papastavrou, Recherche iconographique dans l’art byzantine

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et occidental du XIe au XVe siècle: L’Annonciation (Venice: Greek Institute, 2007), 352–55. For Christ in full episcopal attire in Late Byzantine iconography, see Titos Papamastorakis, “Η μορφή του Χριστού-Μεγάλου Αρχιερέα,” Δελτίον της Χριστιανικής Αρχαιολογικής Εταιρείας 17 (1993–94): 67–78. doi:h​ttp:/​/dx.d​oi.or​g/10.​ 12681​/dcha​e.109​2. 25. On Mary as the Church/Bride of Christ, see the literature mentioned in Evangelatou, “Krater of Nectar,” 95n91. 26. Valerie A. Karras, “Female Deacons in the Byzantine Church,” Church History 73, no. 2 (June 2004): 272–316. 27. For the quoted reference and the other observations, see Karras, “Female Deacons,” 299 and n130. See n129 for other surviving euchologia. 28. Karras, “Female Deacons,” 309–14. 29. Karras, “Female Deacons,” 276. 30. See Karras, “Female Deacons,” 296–98 for the observation that although a distinction between minor and major clerical orders is anachronistic as terminology (i.e., it was not used in the Byzantine church), it nevertheless reflects clear difference in status, as indicated by the relevant ordination rites. 31. A characteristic case is the iconography of St. Stephen, who is represented as a beardless young deacon. See an eleventh-century example (mosaic from the cathedral of St. Michael of the Golden Domes in Kiev) in Robin Cormack and Maria Vassilaki, eds., Byzantium 330–1453 (exhibition catalog) (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008), 317, 449. 32. Karras, “Female Deacons,” 273–75, 294. 33. Karras, “Female Deacons,” 294. If a woman was already married, she had to divorce her husband in order to become a deaconess (a rule that for male clergy applied only to the rank of bishops). Basically, a woman could become a deacon only if she was unmarried, widowed, or divorced and abstained from any sexual activity. 34. Karras, “Female Deacons,” 295–96. Justinian promulgated the death penalty for female deacons who broke their vow of chastity by marrying or indulging in fornication, while male deacons guilty of sexual misconduct were only expelled from the clergy. Karras notes that, in practice, defrocking seems to have been a more common punishment for female deacons as well. Later laws also promulgated the confiscation of property as their punishment (which for male deacons was imposed only if they had raped a woman). 35. Karras, “Female Deacons,” 293–96. 36. Karras, “Female Deacons,” 285–86. Karras notes that supervising the female congregation was already prescribed as one of female deacons’ duties from the early Byzantine period and seems to have remained their main task up until the twelfth century, when they were no longer ordained and therefore would not receive communion in the sanctuary. 37. Karras, “Female Deacons,” 301–02, 305–07. 38. Karras, “Female Deacons,” 306. 39. Karras, “Female Deacons,” 307–08. 40. For example, see depictions of St. Stephen, mentioned in n32. Karras, “Female Deacons,” 306, specifies that male deacons wore the orarion hanging

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over one shoulder (with one end to the front and one to the back), and archdeacons wrapped it diagonally around the body with the two ends crossing and one hanging to the front and the other to the back over one shoulder. 41. Given the previously mentioned restrictions, one may ask why female deacons were even admitted to the clergy. Scholars have pointed out the need for deaconesses at the celebration of adult baptism that involved female initiates. From the fifth century onward, infant baptism gradually became the standard, but deaconesses were still needed to perform other duties related to the female congregation, such as taking the Eucharistic gifts to women who were confined at home because of sickness or childbirth. Deaconesses would also serve in nunneries. In the middle Byzantine period, one of the duties of female deacons in the cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (and likely also in the church of St. Demetrius in Thessalonike) was to sing during matins and at funerals. Finally, from the late seventh century onward, the wives of priests who were promoted to the rank of bishop were expected by ecclesiastical law to become nuns, and “if they were deemed worthy,” they could be ordained deacons. In the middle period, it is not always clear if such women were ordained, and by the late period the ordination of deaconesses was no longer practiced in general. See Karras, “Female Deacons,” 281–84. 42. Karras, “Female Deacons,” 299. 43. Karras notes that “the prayers are different” and that in terms of rubrics (which describe how the ordination is handled for male versus female deacons), there are “only a few differences” (“Female Deacons,” 301). 44. The full text is included in Stefano Parenti and Elena Vekovska, L’eucologio Barberini gr. 336 (Rome: Edizioni Liturgiche, 1995), 185–88 (see 181–85 for the ordination of male deacons). The translation of female prayers is based on Karras, “Female Deacons,” 300–01, while the translation of male prayers is mine. Emphasis in italics is also mine. 45. 1 Timothy 2:11–15 NIV. Most scholars agree that the epistles known as 1–2 Timothy and Titus (the so-called pastoral epistles) were not written by Paul but by an author using his name in the late first century or the first half of the second century. However, by the fourth century these epistles were considered canonical (written by Paul). See Raymond F. Collins, 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus: A Commentary (London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 72–78, for discussion of how attitudes to women in these texts are consonant with ancient Greco-Roman culture and its expectations of female domesticity and motherhood. 46. Compare 1 Corinthians 15:22 and 15:45 for another cross-reference between Adam and Christ. For the subject of Mary as the second Eve, reversing the damage done by the first Eve, see Evangelatou, “Krater of Nectar,” 89n66. 47. The reference of the second ordination prayer to female moderation is through the Greek word sophrosyne, which is also used in 1 Timothy 2:15 to specify that women can be saved through childbearing only if “they continue in faith, love and holiness with moderation.” It is worth noting that the male ordination prayers integrate several short passages from 1–2 Timothy but omit the admonition of 2 Timothy 1:7 addressed to Timothy himself for moderation/self-discipline, sophronismo in Greek. In addition, they mention the apostles and St. Stephen (highly venerated

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figures) as models of the deacons. On the contrary, female ordination prayers do not have obvious biblical quotations (except maybe the admonition to sophrosyne from 1 Timothy 2:15) and mention only the deaconess Phoebe (Rom. 16:1–2), who in the Byzantine tradition was not comparable in stature to the apostles and St. Stephen. For the tendency of Byzantine ecclesiastical authorities to consider women prone to heresy or impropriety, see Judith Herrin, Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium (Princeton University Press, 2013), 115, 127. 48. On the cultural concept of femininity as inherently inferior to masculinity and the cultural imperative of female subordination in the Christian world of late antiquity, see Gillian Clark, Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Lifestyles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), esp. 119–41. See also Herrin, Unrivalled Influence, esp. 2, 12–31, 115–28, 133–140, 144. It is worthy of notice that the ordination prayers for deacons and deaconesses in the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions (8.17–21) reflect a gender bias similar to the one embedded in the previously mentioned Byzantine prayers (see especially my emphasis in italics as follows). For example, the prayer for deacons highlights male power: it opens with acclamations of God almighty; asks for the deacon to be filled with the Holy Spirit and with power, like Stephen the protomartyr; and wishes for the ordained man to attain a higher degree through his blameless and steady conduct. In contrast, the prayer for deaconesses focuses on service and brings up the need for female purification: the opening of the prayer mentions several biblical examples of women who served God (as if to prove that women are acceptable in the clergy) and notes that God did not disdain for his only Son to be born of a woman (the choice of a negative verb is rather striking). Then the prayer asks for the Holy Spirit to be given to the ordained woman and for her to be cleansed “from all filthiness of flesh and spirit” (2 Cor. 7:1) so that she may worthily serve the glory of God. I thank Carolyn Osiek for bringing this text to my attention. The 1905 Greek edition and Latin translation by F. X. Funk is available online at https​:/​/ar​​chive​​.org/​​detai​​ls​/cu​​31924​​029​33​​5167. English online translation available at https​:/​/ww​​w​.new​​adven​​t​.org​​/fath​​ers​/0​​​7158.​​htm (both retrieved on 10/31/2020). 49. For a more developed discussion on Mary and female identity in Byzantium, considering the potential of both empowering and disempowering experiences for women contemplating the Virgin’s prominence in their culture, see Maria Evangelatou, “Threads of Power: Clothing Symbolism, Human Salvation, and Female Identity in the Illustrated Homilies by Iakobos of Kokkinobaphos,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 69 (2014): 294–98. 50. I define liturgical role as the duties and responsibilities of women who would have belonged to the clergy, as opposed to the participation of laywomen in church rituals in which they would have been baptized, received communion, and attended the services, prayed, and sung with other members of the laity. This is not to dispute that the laity has an important role in these liturgical functions but to clarify that I am focusing here on the question of access to clerical orders. In this sense, I define the access of the Byzantine emperor to the sanctuary not as a liturgical role but as an exclusive privilege that did not confer a literal clerical authority (on this matter, see Gilbert Dagron, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium [Cambridge:

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Cambridge University Press, 2003], esp. 94–95, 99–103, 110–13, 279–81, regarding occasions in which the emperor either entered the sanctuary or received communion standing just outside the sanctuary). The same nonclerical status applies to Augusta Pulcheria (fifth c.), who, as far as I know, is the only female imperial figure ever attested in surviving sources to receive the Eucharist inside the sanctuary, a practice that caused a bitter dispute between her and the patriarch of Constantinople Nestorius. Her privilege does not make her a priestess, nor can it be taken as indication of the access of nonimperial women to the sanctuary, let alone the priesthood (both practices were banned by the fourth-century Council of Laodicea, mentioned below). For a different view, see Ally Kateusz, Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 162–64. 51. For a discussion of relevant sources, see Kevin Madigan and Carolyn Osiek, eds., Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). See also Kateusz, Mary and Early Christian Women, 8, 26, 52–54, 62–65, 151–52. 52. Clark, Women in Late Antiquity, 139, notes in regards to late antique literary sources, “We continue to be told, as at any time since the 5th century BC, that women are domestic, and that what they actually do with their time is not very interesting. Public status is inappropriate for them unless they are members of the imperial house, and even then, they are expected to manifest the traditional virtues of modesty, chastity, and piety towards gods and family.” See also Herrin, Unrivalled Influence, 133– 40. See also Karen J. Torjesen, When Women Were Priests: Women’s Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of Their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1995), 155–78. A chilling example of the tendency of ecclesiastical authorities to increasingly censor and silence women from the fourth century onward is the following admonition on how catechumens should behave before exorcism, according to Procatechesis xiv (PG 33:356) by Patriarch Cyril of Jerusalem (around 315–386): While men should read out loud to each other or pray and say something of benefit, the assembly of virgins “should be gathered together, quietly reciting psalms or reading, so that their lips move, but the ears of others do not hear—‘For I do not permit that a woman speak in the Church’ [1 Cor. 14:34]. And the married woman should do likewise: she should pray and move her lips, while not allowing her voice to be heard.” English translation in James McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 75–76. See below for a similar use of 1 Corinthians to advocate for total female silence in the church in the canons of the seventh-century Council in Trullo. 53. Canons 11 (ordination ban), 44 (altar access), 60 (1 Tim. included in the Biblical canon). The canons of the Council of Laodicea, with extensive commentary, can be accessed at http:​/​/www​​.newa​​dvent​​.org/​​fathe​​rs​/38​​​06​.ht​​m. The past scholarship referenced on this webpage does not accept that canon 11 forbids the ordination of female priests (πρεσβύτιδες) and possibly also bishops (προκαθήμεναι) because such an interpretation would indicate that in the past these positions were available to women (instead the scholars cited the canon as a reference to head deaconesses). However, more recent scholarship has proven that women did hold positions of priestly authority in at least some communities of the early Christian movement (see

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Kateusz, Mary and Early Christian Women, with references to previous literature but no mention of the Council of Laodicea). Judith Herrin, Unrivalled Influence, 136, interprets canon 11 of Laodicea as forbidding the ordination of female priests. 54. At http:​/​/www​​.newa​​dvent​​.org/​​fathe​​rs​/38​​​06​.ht​​m, the commentary on Laodicea, canon 11 reads “It is certainly true that several later synods distinctly forbade the old practice of conferring a sort of ordination upon deaconesses, as, for instance, the first Synod of Orange (Arausicanum I. of 441, Can. xxvj.) in the words—diaconæ omnimodis non ordinandæ; also the Synod at Epaon in 517 (Can. xxj.), and the second Synod at Orleans in 533 (Can. xviij.)” However, there is plenty of evidence that the ordination of deaconesses was widely practiced in the West, as is evident by the sources mentioned by Macy, which date up to the eleventh century (see n6). See also Madigan and Osiek, Ordained Women in the Early Church; and Ute E. Eisen, Women Officeholders in Early Christianity: Epigraphical and Literary Studies (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000). 55. Macy, Hidden History, 61–65, 79; Kateusz, Mary and Early Christian Women, 152. 56. Kateusz, Mary and Early Christian Women, 27–29. See also 142–43 for another cultural development indicative of the marginalization of women in the church establishment, in this case in Syria, which has been studied by Susan Ashbrook Harvey: around the end of the fourth century, Syrian scribes begun to change the gender of “Holy Spirit” from the grammatically correct feminine to masculine. This is also mentioned by Herrin, Unrivalled Influence, as proof that “female symbols and models of feminine power were gradually corrupted and adapted to conform to male ideas.” 57. Herrin, Unrivalled Influence, 120 (and 116 for Roman representation in the Council). For the Greek text and English translation of the Trullan canon as well as a discussion of its ecumenicity in Orthodox and Catholic tradition, see Nedungatt and Featherstone, Council in Trullo Revisited, 152, 229–62. 58. Parts in brackets are not included in the canon’s quotation. The English translation offered in Nedungatt and Featherstone, Council in Trullo Revisited, 152, does not fully reflect the subtle choice of words employed in the original Greek text (emphasis is mine in the following). The translation reads “but in accordance with the words of Paul the Apostle.” The Greek text actually says “but according to the voice of Paul the apostle, [women] should be silent.” In other words, the canon literally introduces the male voice that silences the female. Paul has a voice that should be heard and followed, while women should “not speak” and “be silent.” 59. As noted previously, one example of the liturgical conservatism of the Barberini euchologion is the inclusion of prayers to accompany the sacrifice of animals, a polytheistic and Jewish devotional practice that had often been criticized by Christian authors but seems to have survived in Christianity in what is often termed “popular religion.” See Ekaterina Kovaltchuk, “The Encaenia of St. Sophia: Animal Sacrifice in a Christian context,” Scrinium IV (2008): 161–203 (184–85 for the Barberini euchologion). It is not clear if the mention of animal sacrifices in this manuscript reflects only earlier practice or was still performed when the euchologion was written in the late eighth century.

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60. For Mary in the context of Byzantine war, including the Avar siege, see Bissera V. Pentcheva, Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006), 37–103. On p. 61 Pentcheva notes the two attributes that make Mary prominent in the context of war: virginal motherhood symbolic of invincibility and motherly sacrifice, which involves deep suffering. Byzantine women could embody only the latter. 61. Canon 79, discussed by Herrin, Unrivalled Influence, 127. 62. Nedungatt and Featherstone, Council in Trullo Revisited, 159–60. Defrocking and excommunication are standard punishments in the Trullan canons. 63. My research on this topic will appear in the proceedings of the Oxford 2022 conference “The Virgin beyond Borders,” with the tentative title “Mary and the Cultural Construction of Motherhood in Byzantium: A Gendered Reading of the Rare Galaktotrophousa Iconography.” 64. Alicia Walker, “Home: A Space Rich in Blessings,” in Byzantine Women and Their World, ed. Ioli Kalavrezou (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 161–66, especially 162: “As Chrysostom notes, the woman’s role centered on processing the raw materials provided by men: food was turned to meals, wool into thread and cloth, children into virtuous and productive adults.” See also Phaidon Koukoules, Byzantinon Bios kai Politismos, vol. 2.2 of 6 vols. (Athens: Ekdoseis Papazese, 1952), 201–04. Specifically on spinning and weaving as quintessential female activities, see the literature mentioned in Evangelatou, “Threads of Power,” 286n121; and Catherine Gines Taylor, Late Antique Images of the Virgin Annunciate Spinning: Allotting the Scarlet and the Purple (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 65. For relevant literature on the earlier, see Evangelatou, “Threads of Power,” 266n5, especially Nicolas Constas, Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity: Homilies 1–5, Texts and Translations, supplement to Vigiliae Christianae 66 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), chap. 6, 315–58; and Maria Evangelatou, “The Purple Thread of the Flesh: The Theological Connotations of a Narrative Iconographic Element in Byzantine Images of the Annunciation,” in Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium: Studies Presented to Robin Cormack, ed. Anthony Eastmond and Liz James (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 261–79. 66. Evangelatou, “Krater of Nectar.” 67. The most important publication of the mosaics to date is Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor. It includes a meticulous documentation of the original parts of the mosaics, which has allowed me to verify that the iconographic details I discuss below are of the sixth century. The date of the ciborium is mentioned in vol. 1, 3–4. 68. This is a rather uncommon shape for a wool basket, an object usually depicted in the form of a bucket with linear sides, as seen in the fifth-century Annunciation mosaic on the triumphal arch of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. The chalice reference of the Euphrasian wool basket becomes apparent if we compare it to the shape of actual sixth-century chalices, such as the ones from the Syrian Attarouthi Treasure exhibited at the Met in New York (https​:/​/ww​​w​.met​​museu​​m​.org​​/art/​​colle​​ction​​/sear​​​ch​/47​​4390). Although the Euphrasian basket has a lower foot, it has the same three components as the Attarouthi chalices: conical base, spherical “knot,” and semispherical cup.

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69. For the importance of visualizing the dogma of the Incarnation in the Euphrasian mosaics, see Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, vol. 1,134–40. 70. For a discussion of the archdeacon’s portrait, see Terry and Maguire, vol. 1, 111–12. 71. For a discussion of the bishop’s portrait, see Terry and Maguire, vol. 1, 109–11. Since the literature discussing this white band as episcopal uses the term pallium, I will also prefer it to omophorion here. 72. Terry and Maguire, vol. 1, 103–104. The bishops are Maximian and Ecclesius in San Vitale, and Saint Apollinaris in the church of Sant’Apollinare in Classe (Terry and Maguire, vol. 2, fig. 259). 73. As argued by Kateusz, Mary and Early Christian Women, 81–85. 74. See n54 about deaconesses in the West. See also Macy, Hidden History, 35–40, for Western manuscripts with Latin ordination prayers that mention only deaconesses in a list of other clerical offices, all male (Macy dates the prayers from the seventh to the eleventh century). On pp. 40–41 he also mentions a prayer of blessing for presbyterae and deaconesses but adds that “ordination was not reserved to those ministries that served at the altar” (which is the service I discuss here in connection to Mary’s Eucharistic role). For a discussion of the titles presbytera and episcopa in the Latin church, see Macy, Hidden History, 53–66. Macy concludes that these women were often wives of priests and bishops and could hold responsibilities in the church that did not necessarily involve serving at the altar, but when such service occurred, it was criticized by the church authorities (such as councils or the pope; Macy, Hidden History, 61–62). 75. Consider, for example, the depiction of Mary with an aspect of episcopal attire in the fourteenth-century Byzantine examples mentioned by Lidov and Tomić Djurić in n24. By that time, not even deaconesses were ordained in Byzantium, let alone female priests or bishops. 76. For example, this could be the message of the apse mosaic in the chapel of Saint Venantius in the Lateran Baptistery in Rome. In this case, Mary, with a white band similar to the one seen in the Euphrasian mosaics, is praying in the middle of the apse, surrounded by several male saints, including bishops donning the episcopal pallium (a similar white band that is worn differently—across the torso and falling along the left side of the body, as is also the case with bishops depicted in Ravenna, mentioned in n72). On the contrary, Kateusz, Mary and Early Christian Women, 85–86, fig. 4.11, considers Mary in the Saint Venantius mosaic as evidence of female liturgical authority at the time of the mosaic’s creation. 77. For the Levitic lineage of Mary and Elisabeth, see n16. This lineage is reinforced in the Euphrasian mosaics by the depiction of Zachariah, Elisabeth’s husband and also a high priest, on the north pier of the apse, to the right of the Annunciation (close to Mary). John the Baptist is depicted on the south pier of the apse, to the left of the Visitation, also close to Mary. See Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, vol. 1, 136–37, vol. 2, figs. 107, 122. 78. Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, 103n22. 79. Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, vol. 1, 104–05, 108–09, for a discussion of the original iconography that is maintained in the restored mosaics: John’s

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tunic was originally yellow, probably meant to indicate “gold,” as is also the case with Elisabeth’s maphorion in the Visitation—a chromatic resonance that links mother and son. Actual gold tesserae were used in the restoration of John’s tunic. In Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, 136–37, Zachariah and John are discussed as witnesses of the Incarnation. 80. Of course, we cannot exclude that the wives of priests and bishops could have held the titles of presbytera and episcopa, respectively, but as Macy discusses (see n74), the titles did not necessarily mean those women were allowed to serve at the altar, and when they did, their communities were severely criticized by church authorities. It is interesting to note here that according to Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, vol. 1, 129–31, Bishop Euphrasius was probably the bishop with the same name condemned by Pope Pelagius I as heretic, due to his involvement in the dispute over the Three Chapters. In a letter dated March 559, the pope accused a bishop named Euphrasius of fratricide, adultery, and incest. Although communities that practiced female clerical leadership were also attacked with similarly hyperbolic accusations of sexual misconduct intended to criticize the perceived impropriety of their clerical practice (Kateusz, Mary and Early Christian Women, 52–54), the pope did not specify that the bishop he was accusing was guilty of allowing women to serve at the altar, which one might have expected to be mentioned if that was indeed one of the “offenses” of that bishop. Compare Macy, Hidden History, 61–62, for criticism against female service at the altar dating from the late fifth century onward. 81. As mentioned, at least in the East, deaconesses were required to be chaste and without a husband, so they could not be pregnant. 82. Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, vol. 1, 103–4, vol. 2, figs. 258, 269– 70, conclude in favor of this being a belt as part of secular female attire and mention various examples, including Sarah in the Hospitality of Abraham and two aristocratic women in the entourage of Theodora, all in the San Vitale mosaics in Ravenna. More examples that are not mentioned in the analysis of the white band but are included in the images of this publication (vol. 2) are a watercolor of a now-lost mosaic from St. Demetrius in Thessalonike, with Mary wearing what seems like a white sash-belt (fig. 291), and a sixth-century wall painting at the Catacomb of Commodilla of the widow Turtura with a white sash-belt (fig. 293). It is worth mentioning that in her epitaph dedicated by her son, Turtura is praised for being a loving mother and chaste widow, faithful to her husband’s memory and dedicated to her marriage for the thirty-six years of her widowhood. These references indicate that she did not hold any ecclesiastical position, rather, she was a paragon of female, married, and widowed modesty (therefore her sash-belt is part of her modest female attire). For a translation of the epitaph, see Dennis Trout, “Saints, Identity, and the City,” in Late Ancient Christianity, ed. Virginia Burrus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 185. It should be noted here that the cross seen close to the fringe of the sash-belt in the Euphrasian mosaics appears in the same position on episcopal pallia (e.g., in the Ravenna mosaics previously mentioned), but that in itself is no proof that the Euphrasian white band is a liturgical textile. The most venerable Christian symbol, the cross was often used on late antique secular attire as a protective decorative motif (see Faith Pennick Morgan, Dress and Personal Appearance in Late Antiquity: The Clothing of the Middle and

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Lower Classes [Brill: Leiden, 2018], 11, with references to previous scholarship; and Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, vol. 1, 104; vol. 2, fig. 270). 83. Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, vol. 1, 133–36. On the veneration of Mary’s belt in Constantinople, see also Dirk Krausmuller, “Making the Most of Mary: The Cult of the Virgin in the Chalkoprateia from Late Antiquity to the Tenth Century,” in The Cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium: Texts and Images, ed. Mary Cunningham and Leslie Brubaker (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 219–46. Most recently, the sanctity of Mary’s belt has been discussed by Thomas Arentzen, “Conversing with Clothes: Germanos and Mary’s Belt,” in The Garb of Being: Embodiment and Other Pursuits of Holiness in Late Ancient Christianity, ed. Georgia Frank, Susan R. Holman, and Andrew S. Jacobs (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 57–76. 84. Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, vol. 2; compare figs. 70–92 to 97 and 253. 85. See n26. 86. Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, 104. 87. As mentioned (sources in n83), it was common to hail Mary’s belt as sanctified through contact with her body and that of baby Christ, so by analogy, Elisabeth’s belt could be considered in similar terms. 88. Compare relevant biblical passages such as Proverbs 31:17, Jeremiah 1:17–19, Luke 12:35, 1 Peter 1:13, and especially Ephesians 6:14 with reference to the belt of truth and the breastplate of righteousness. On the symbolic significance of the girdle in monastic wear, as mentioned, for example, by the fifth-century monk John Cassian, see Guillemette Bolens and Sarah Brazil, “The Body,” in A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Medieval Age, ed. Sarah-Grace Heller (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 61–62. 89. See Glenys Davies and Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, “The Body,” and “Gender and Sexuality,” in A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in Antiquity, ed. Mary Harlow (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 67–68, 100–01. Also Arentzen, “Conversing with Clothes,” 60. Compare references to Mary’s belt in Byzantine homilies discussed in Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, vol. 1, 135. 90. In light of John Chrysostom’s claim that even consecrated virgins could use a tight belt to highlight their breasts and make themselves alluring (Arentzen, “Conversing with Clothes,” 60–61), it is possible that in the Euphrasian mosaics the Virgin’s belt was covered under a veil both in the Annunciation and the Visitation in order to emphasize her modesty. 91. It is interesting to note that according to later Byzantine sources, belts that in some way were connected to Mary could assist in childbirth. In the tenth-century Life of Saint Theophano (first wife of Emperor Leo VI), a belt that was tied on a column of a Marian church in Constantinople (probably to be blessed in order to assist in another childbirth) was tied around the loins of Theophano’s mother, Anna, in order to assist her in the difficult birth of her daughter. Other sources report that the fourth wife of Leo VI, Zoe Karbounopsina, became pregnant with Constantine VII Porphyrogenetos after a cord that had been drawn around the edges of an icon of Mary at the church at Pege was tied around her waist. Both incidents are mentioned in Kalavrezou,

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Byzantine Women, 40, 279. See also the relation of belts to childbirth mentioned by Clark, Women in Late Antiquity, 81–82. According to the Life of Melania 61, Melania the Younger (fourth–fifth c.) untied her own belt that once belonged to a saint and handed it to a woman in labor so that she could give birth to her dead child and be saved from death herself. According to Clark, Melania Christianized the ancient belief that a woman could not give birth as long as things around her (like her belt or hair) remained tied up. For the dedication of female belts and other fastening devices (like brooches and keys) to ancient kourotrophic sanctuaries where women prayed for successful childbirth and childrearing, see Angela Taraskiewicz, “Motherhood as Teleia: Rituals of Incorporation at the Kourotrophic Shrine,” in Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome, ed. Lauren Hackworth Petersen and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell (Austin: University of Texas, 2012), 43–69, esp. 47–49. 92. For the role of mothers in the education of their children, see Alexander P. Kazhdan, “Women at Home,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 52 (1998): 11–12. For the role of mothers in the education of daughters in particular, see Judith Herrin, “Mothers and Daughters in the Medieval Greek World,” in her Unrivalled Influence, 80–114. 93. Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, vol. 1, 139–40, connect the shell-andpearl motif to Mary but without reference to the Eucharist. For Mary as pearl-bearer, see also Evangelatou, “Purple Thread,” 269n64; Constas, Proclus, 290–93. 94. For the round shape and whiteness of Eucharistic loafs (usually made of the best wheat flour), see George Galavaris, Bread and the Liturgy: The Symbolism of Early Christian and Byzantine Bread Stamps (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 43–44, 66; Koukoules, Byzantinon Bios kai Politismos, vol. 5, 16. 95. G. W. H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012), 827, μαργαρίτης. 96. Lampe, 759, κόγχη. The lemma includes a passage from the description of Hagia Sophia of Constantinople by Paul Silentarius, who states that the term κόγχη applied to apses derives from the use of shell motifs to decorate them—which is attested by numerous visual sources. Compare the many examples in Elizabeth S. Bolman, The Red Monastery Church: Beauty and Asceticism in Upper Egypt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), for example, on pp. XXXIII, 86–7, 104–05, 108–09. It is worth noting that a shell is depicted on the surviving floor mosaic in the south apse of the Euphrasian basilica, and the marble altar of Euphrasius is also decorated with shells. See Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, vol. 2, figs. 203, 205. 97. For other Eucharistic references of the Blahcernitissa, see Evangelatou, “Krater of Nectar,” 106–14. 98. For the Eucharistic Marian symbolism of the Tabernacle tent and the jar of manna, see Evangelatou, “Krater or Nectar,” 83. 99. For images of the saints, see Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, vol. 2, figs. 70–92. I am not suggesting that these saints were chosen simply as personifications of virtues but that their auspicious names might have had some role in their selection among a larger pool of female saints (all of whom were probably regarded as historical figures by the Christian community of Parentium). Their names can be translated as follows (in alphabetical order): Agathe (Greek), good; Agnes (Latin, from Greek Agne),

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chaste, pure; Basilissa (Greek), queen; Eufymia (Greek), good reputation; Eugenia (Greek), well-born; Filicitas (Latin), happiness; Iustina (Latin), just; Perpetua (Latin), lasting, permanent; Tecla (Greek Thekla, from Theokleia), God’s glory; Valeria (Latin), strong, brave. The two remaining saints are Cicilia (Latin Caecilius, from caecus [blind], the only nonauspicious name in this group of saints) and Susanna (Hebrew), namesake of the virtuous woman falsely accused by two elders in Daniel 13. Susanna was often used in late antiquity as a personification of the chaste church under persecution, and her depiction on the casket held by Zachariah in the Euphrasian mosaics might carry a similar meaning (see Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, vol. 1, 131–33). 100. This similarity is not due to later restorations but is original to the sixth century. See Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, vol. 1, 166–68. Mary’s veil in the Annunciation scene appears to be more transparent and worn differently from that of the twelve female saints, and her tunic is less ornate, but the way the veil is depicted fastened at the crown of her head, her hairdo, and her physiognomy are all similar to the twelve saints. In the eyes of sixth-century Christians, this similarity could have indicated that the twelve holy women successfully embodied chastity following in the footsteps of the Virgin Mary. In other words, their spiritual sisterhood is reflected in their physiognomic similarities that cast them as members of the same virtuous family. 101. I am referring here in particular to the visually homogeneous way all twelve saints are depicted as virginal maidens, including Perpetua and Felicitas, who at the time of their martyrdom were a new mother (breastfeeding her son in prison) and her pregnant slave, respectively. Since in the Euphrasian mosaics all twelve saints are depicted as virginal brides of Christ, visually they do not reflect the diverse female identities that at least some of them might have embodied in their lives. For an excellent discussion of the particularly restrictive and controlling ways in which male Christian authors constructed female virginal identity in late antiquity, especially through references to clothing, see Kristi Upson-Saia, Early Christian Dress: Gender, Virtue, and Authority (New York: Routledge, 2011), esp. 51–58. Upson-Saia notes that even when male authors praise female virgins as examples of superior morality that set Christian communities apart from non-Christian ones, they still tend to criticize them, echoing in their comments the deeply seated cultural conviction of the Greco-Roman world about the intrinsic inferiority and moral weakness of women. 102. Discussed in Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, 1:109–16, 140–46.

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Parenti, Stefano, and Elena Vekovska. L’Eucologio Barberini Gr. 336. Rome: Edizioni Liturgiche, 1995. Peltomaa, Leena Mari. The Image of the Virgin Mary in the Akathistos Hymn. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Pentcheva, Bissera V. Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. Schweigert, Thomas E. “San Mauro at Parentium, Saint Sergius at Gaza, Hagia Sophia in Kiev, and the Protevangelium of James.” Hortus Artium Medievalium 24 (2018): 181–90. https://doi​.org​/10​.1484​/j​.ham​.5​.115947. Strycker, Émile de. La Forme La plus Ancienne Du Protévangile De Jacques: Recherches Sur Le Papyrus Bodmer 5. Bruxelles: Société des Bollandistes, 1961. Taraskiewicz, Angela. “Motherhood as Teleia: Rituals of Incorporation at the Kourotrophic Shrine.” In Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome, edited by Lauren Hackworth Petersen and Patricia B. Salzman-Mitchell, 43–69. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. Taylor, Catherine Gines. Late Antique Images of the Virgin Annunciate Spinning: Allotting the Scarlet and the Purple. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Terry, Ann, and Henry Maguire. Dynamic Splendor: The Wall Mosaics in the Cathedral of Eufrasius at Poreč. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Tomic-Djuric, Marka. “To Picture and to Perform: The Image of the Eucharistic Liturgy at Markov Manastir (I).” Zograf 38 (2014): 123–41. https://doi​.org​/10​ .2298​/zog1438123t. Torjesen, Karen J. When Women Were Priests: Women’s Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of Their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1995. Trout, Dennis. “Saints, Identity, and the City.” In Late Ancient Christianity, edited by Virginia Burrus, 165–187. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. Underwood, Paul A. The Kariye Djami. New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1966. Upson-Saia, Kristi. Early Christian Dress: Gender, Virtue, and Authority. New York: Routledge, 2011. Vuong, Lily C. Gender and Purity in the Protevangelium of James. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. Walker, Alicia. “Home: A Space Rich in Blessings.” In Byzantine Women and Their World, edited by Ioli Kalavrezou, 161–66. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Wybrew, Hugh. The Orthodox Liturgy. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996.

Chapter 11

Rings on Her Fingers Merovingian Rings and Religion in Late Antiquity Isabel Moreira

Finger rings were as popular in antiquity as they are today, and they survive in some abundance for the Merovingian period (mid-fifth to mid-eighth centuries).1 They came in many sorts and sizes and were fashioned from a variety of materials, but mostly metals, which in theory marked status: gold, silver, electrum (a natural alloy of gold and silver), copper, and bronze being most common, although lead was also used.2 Some rings were mass-produced; others were commissioned as unique pieces. As items that were chosen, gifted, and worn on a daily basis, rings were personal objects that can inform us about an array of issues relating to visual culture, literacy, social habits, economy, fashion, and burial practices in late antiquity. Can they also tell us something about women and religion? This chapter explores the ways in which women’s monogram rings may have served as a canvas upon which they could inscribe and display religious devotion. Of the various types of rings bearing inscriptions or images, the use by some women of a specific category of ring, the personal monogram ring, is one of the most intriguing.3 These rings are characterized by an image of interlocking and overlapping Latin letters that spell a word or name that, because of its cryptic presentation, cannot be readily deciphered (figure 11.1). Some of these rings were used, or had the potential for use, as seal matrices, but as worn objects, they were also vehicles for self-identification and were used by men as well as by women in daily life. Monogram rings were special items. Whereas an inscribed cross could be mass-produced, a personal monogram required engagement in the manufacturing process and thus a closer identification with its meaning. Rings with religious motifs and messages were popular in late antiquity, suggesting that rings of various types 303

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Figure 11.1  Gold Monogram Ring. British Museum’s Suggested Reading: “Reginae [?].” British Museum Object AF.488, Asset Number 84482001. Source: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Reproduced with permission.

could be a site for religious expression and introspection for women whose range of activity within religion was more limited than it was for men. Any ring might hold religious significance to the wearer, or giver; however, the monogram ring’s very purpose was to forge a connection between the ring’s design and the person it identified. Personal monogram rings were used across the Mediterranean world in late antiquity. The rings examined here are largely from the Merovingian kingdoms of Neustria and Austrasia in areas of Frankish settlement between the Seine and the east bank of the Rhine. In this region (eastern Neustria and western Austrasia), monogram rings were prized objects and were placed in burials from the late fifth to seventh centuries.4 The concentration of rings in this area reflects the practice of some elite Christians of burying the dead with grave goods, and consequently rings, often alongside other items such as jewelry, weapons, and clothing. As a result, a sizable number of rings have survived from the Merovingian period. This was also an era of cultural integration in which both Germanic and Latin names might be used by members of the same family or group, and this pattern may also be reflected in the names on the rings examined here. While objects might be placed in graves by family members or others, many of the rings found in women’s graves show signs of use, sometimes still on or near the finger on which they would have worn them in life, the soft metal of the ring band molding to the

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shape of the finger, indicating that these items were worn objects prior to burial, although whether they were worn by the deceased or were heirlooms is unclear. While rings had overlapping uses—as symbols of betrothal, rank, or office, or as a seal for securing and authenticating property—I suggest that in drawing on a religious aesthetic that connected them to a world of Mediterranean Christianity, women who wore monogram rings in life could also use them to express religious identity and eschatological hope. Such connections would have been made still more intimate when rings were placed in the grave. The emphasis of the present essay, then, is not on script, literacy, or connections with coinage, manuscripts, or epigraphy; it is on rings as items of religious ornament, identity, and use by women. Women had a long history of wearing seal rings. Whereas betrothal rings are always considered to have some connection to women, it should be noted that alongside its use by men, the seal ring was equally viewed as a woman’s ring in ancient society. Indeed, in some cases a seal ring may have served a double purpose as a betrothal ring. What interests me here is understanding the appeal of these monogram rings to Merovingian women. Why are these rings so clearly associated with women in burial contexts, and what can we make of their sheer number?5 Why did some women favor the specific monogram ring type when other types of rings with more overt Christian images and scripts were available to them? And what can we say about the decline in the popularity of monogram rings used by women after the seventh century? This essay examines four contexts of women’s ring use to consider these questions: (1) the monogram ring as a woman’s identifier with respect to property, marital status, and pious giving; (2) the ring as a site of religious identification; (3) the ring as a naming object and the vexed issue of rings attributed to queens; (4) and the ring as soteriological object in burial contexts. However, before considering these questions, it is important to note how a long tradition of scholarship on rings has shaped the modern discussion of these items away from a consideration of rings in the context of women and religion. RINGS AS MATERIAL EVIDENCE Rings from the Merovingian period have survived in some abundance. Even conservative estimates of surviving items are impressively large. Reine Hadjadj’s recent catalog (2007) of Merovingian rings from northern France lists over six hundred items, but they are known from the rest of Merovingiancontrolled Gaul also. Most are preserved in European museum collections, but some are also found in museums in the United States.6 Additional items are in private and institutional collections. Maximin Deloche’s catalog of

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rings published in 1900 lists 315 rings, many of them from central and southern Gaul, Germany, the Swiss Jura, and Spain; some of these are now lost.7 Only rings that were engraved or considered otherwise important were published by Deloche, and he relied on correspondents and archaeological notices to assemble his materials. Rings continue to be found in archaeological excavations, in chance finds, and through the work of metal detectorists. An artifact-type that survives in over one thousand examples must be considered important, and since those that have survived in durable materials must represent only a fraction of those produced, worn, and gifted in this period, we can reasonably suppose that a significant percentage of the population could wear a ring of some sort. Of the rings that have survived in northern France and been published, approximately eighty are of the monogram type that will be examined here. These monograms, in which an icon is formed of multiple intertwined and overlapping letters, present a variety of subtypes. For example, an “S,” “SI,” “SV,” or “SO” may form part of the composition, indicating that in addition to the name given, the seal provided a signature, the letters abbreviating signum, signavi, or subscripsi.8 However, this was by no means consistent, and, indeed, most of the examples examined in this chapter do not include this addition. The decision to include or exclude an overt reference to a ring’s use for document authentication may have been a personal preference in some cases, but it is also a reminder that while able to be used in this way, monogram rings were not necessarily used for sealing. What we can say about the monogram ring is that it was an elite, aspirational item. The fabrication of this type of ring would have been labor intensive, as the cipher would have to be drawn and figured out by the commissioner and the master craftsman who made it. There could be some duplication of a commonly used name or cipher, and poorer examples of monogram rings made of baser metals do exist, with letters not properly centered and wonky images, underscoring both how specialized a craft this was and how desirable the rings were. It is important to note that as a category of material evidence, rings can pose a significant challenge to interpretation. Many rings known to us through nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century publications lack clear provenance. The challenge in establishing provenance is a particularly fundamental problem for many of the rings in museum collections.9 Some of the more impressive rings in museums saw light of day in the nineteenth century, recovered from the soil as a result of the implementation of modern agricultural methods and the expansion of the railways in France.10 Prized as attractive objects, rings were acquired by collectors; some were sized, worn, and given as gifts. Some items can be hard to date even in an era of technological advances because of material reuse and the enduring popularity of Roman designs. Consequently, many of the highest-quality items have been removed

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from any valuable archaeological context. An example of the problem can be seen in published catalogs. For example, in 1905 the collector Claudius Côte published a description of fifty-three Roman and Merovingian rings in his private collection, yet he provided no information about how he acquired them.11 This is a typical problem. Even more problematically, as Merovingian objects were de rigueur in the nineteenth century, there appears to have been a market for modern copies, which can be hard to distinguish from originals. Distinguishing women’s rings from those of men can also be difficult. In some works of scholarship, rings are gendered based on the ring’s internal diameter, but this is problematic and by no means consistent.12 Some monogram rings, like the Arnegundis ring and the Pretoria ring examined in the following paragraphs, were worn on the thumb and were thus larger.13 Gendering of rings based on size created additional problems because the supposed gender of the wearer helped guide the decipherment of the monographic lettering in some cases. Even in graves where the sex of the occupant is known, rings could have been added to the grave by family members or others in the community; some rings in burials are found at a distance from the hands. Scholarship on Merovingian rings has been a sustained but specialized field since the pioneering work of Maximin Deloche (1817–1900) in the 1890s and in the publication in 1900 of his important work Étude historique et archéologique sur les anneaux sigillaires et autres des premiers siècles du moyen age. Description de 315 anneaux, avec dessins dans le texte.14 Deloche did not intend his work to be comprehensive, explaining that he focused on some of the finer examples of the source type, drawing on his earlier work on inscriptions and Roman rings. Private publications and auction catalogs have added to the number of known rings, and most recently Reine Hadjadj has published a fine illustrated corpus of rings from northern Gaul.15 However, much has yet to be done to fully discover the cultural context for these artifacts. Genevra Kornbluth’s study of the figural seal rings of Visigothic king Alaric II and of the Carolingian empress Richildis, and Patrick Périn’s work on the grave of Arnegundis, including her monogram ring, stand out as examples of ways in which this artifact type can be integrated into a wider narrative of political and social power.16 Studies of text and image in the Middle Ages by Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak, Jeffrey Hamburger, and Carolyn Bynum, for later medieval artifacts, are helpful in signaling the visual context for these items.17 General publications on rings rarely give much attention to the Merovingian corpus, preferring to focus on rings from the ancient world (Greek, Egyptian, and Roman mostly) and the central Middle Ages onward, for example, Diana Scarisbrick’s publications on rings and Wendy Doniger’s lively new book The Ring of Truth.18 At the other end of the spectrum, specialized archaeological studies take note of rings and help

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us understand distribution patterns.19 A resurgent interest in graphicacy has done much to situate engraved rings in their ideological context by surveying graphic signs across the Mediterranean world.20 In 1981 Michel Pastoureau’s Les Sceaux attempted to classify seals and seal matrices as a source type for the Typologie des Sources series, but there are few agreed-upon typologies.21 Of all this work, perhaps surprisingly, it is Maximin Deloche the Younger (1859–1936) who came closest to the question in hand in this chapter about the connection of rings with women and religion. In a booklet entitled La bague en France à travers l’histoire, Deloche the Younger reflected on the “abnormal” findings of his namesake’s magnus opus of 1900—that there were more women’s name rings than men’s—as evidence that women in particular may have attained a new “dignity” having been “rehabilitated” through the Christian religion!22 Leaving the dignity and rehabilitation of women aside, it is nevertheless striking that the connection of women and religion to finger rings has been so little discussed in the Merovingian context. The purpose of this chapter, then, is to foreground how rings might connect with women and female religious expression. While rings must have had multiple meanings to those who wore them and were buried with them, male and female, it is also worth pondering how rings provided an opportunity for women to express religious ideas and affiliations that might be similar to, or different from, those of men in Merovingian society, acknowledging that such consideration of religion can both overlie and disrupt traditional typological categories.23 PROPERTY AND MARITAL STATUS Why did Merovingian women wear seal rings? At the broadest level, those who wore seal rings were simply continuing a Roman practice. Roman women of any status with property used seal rings to secure personal and family possessions. This practice was so integral to Roman society and notions of property protection that it is not surprising to find that early Christian commentators—who were often critical of women’s personal adornment as a potential focus for vanity—reassured them that seal rings were permitted to Christian women. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215 CE) confidently advised women that “Christ permits women the use of rings made of gold, not as ornaments, but as signet rings to seal their valuables at home worth guarding, in the management of their homes.” Admittedly, Clement viewed this as a concession to human nature, for he continues, “If all were under the influence of Christ, nothing would need to be sealed, both for master and servant would be honest. But, since a lack of [religious] education exposes men to strong inclination to dishonesty, we always stand in need of these seals.” The distinction made here between adornment and necessity is

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very clear. Wives need to wear seal rings because they are helpmates to their husbands, and a man’s need to travel or attend to other business required that his wife be able to tend to household matters. “He [Christ] allows us a signet ring for this purpose. But we should not wear any other rings, because, according to the scriptures, it is only learning that is ‘an ornament of gold to the prudent.’”24 However much, or little, attention Christian women gave to these dainty distinctions, they could wear a signet ring with confidence. It is interesting that no mention is made in this passage about betrothal rings, but, as we will see, signet rings may have sometimes served that function also. In the seventh century, in a view that was hardly new, Isidore of Seville (560–636 CE) laments that whereas women used to wear only a single gold ring given to them by their affianced, and at a maximum of two gold rings, women in his day left no part of their body “unencumbered” by gold.25 Isidore seems to suggest that two gold rings—a betrothal ring and a seal ring—would be considered normal for women. The reason for this was that women needed to be able to conduct business, sometimes in their husbands’ absence, and moreover, seal rings had a daily use as a means of securing and identifying property. Women, like men, wore them to assert their identity within the familia and in other contexts. But they were used for other things, too. For example, one late antique attraction curse required a seal depicting two crocodiles to be made with a personal name ring. The use of rings in late Roman magic indicates clearly how close the identity of the bearer was tied to his or her ring, and invocations using rings and other material objects continued into the medieval period.26 The same held true for the Merovingian period. A woman could own and manage property in her own right, a circumstance that could make a seal ring useful. Upon her marriage, a woman of means would be given a gift (morgengabe) and a settlement (dos) by her husband—a conveyance of property that might include a house, land, slaves, livestock, and movable possessions. The conditions of the gift sometimes specified that some goods and possessions could be disposed of by the woman at her own discretion. For those of means, this practice is widely attested in narrative sources and in legal texts, providing a context within which to view the popularity of rings identifying the wearer. The Formulary of Angers documents how a gift of this kind could be registered in the municipal archive.27 In this document, a newly married woman gives her husband the right to act on her behalf in court. The deed of settlement is an attempt by her husband to protect her ownership of the property after his death against any man who might try to make a claim on it—presumably male heirs who could contest the widow’s portion. This specific document is one of the longer pieces included in the Angers collection, and it includes specific details about the property and its appurtenances. It is a document that emphasizes ritual public speech and actions, placed in the

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collection as an example that others could follow, and thus informative for female property rights. Interestingly, among the items a husband gave his wife, along with lands and livestock, was a ring. It is not specified what kind of ring this was, but since the couple was already married, this was unlikely to be a betrothal ring. It could have been any kind of ring. But it would make sense if, being made a woman of property by the legal action described, the woman was given a ring that identified her in some way. This might simply be a recognizable ring, but it might include an image (animals were popular), or her name, or a monogram. The formulary’s role as a resource for others, and the emphasis on a ritual dialogue between the married couple, the officials, and the witnesses, indicates a proper way of doing things. And the gift of a ring provided at the time of property conveyance and its registration in the municipal archive makes for a nice fit. This document is not proof, of course, that a woman such as this would necessarily use a seal ring to sign written documents; seals were used for a variety of purposes, not all of them for authentication, and not all of them in the context of the written word. Importantly, however, the woman envisaged in the Angers Formulary was not a queen: she was a woman of property to be sure, but she was not remarkable in any other way. She was part of a privileged but possibly broad group of women. The rings of queens, or attributed to queens, have generally excited much interest, but in its formulaic sentences, the Angers Formulary recognized the existence of a nonroyal woman who was presented with a ring by her husband, presumably in addition to a betrothal ring, and who may have used it to identify herself and/or her connection to her husband’s family, and who may have had business to transact. This “everywoman” example in the Formulary results in the woman having two rings, which resonates with the comments of Clement of Alexandria and Isidore of Seville, who felt that two rings were sufficient; anything more was frippery. One example of a woman’s ring that has a strong association with an identifiable woman connected to property conveyance and the church is a ring from Saint-Èvre, Toul (dép. Meurthe-et-Moselle) bearing the feminine name Pretoria (figures 11.2–11.4)   . It is shown alongside the ring of a man named Endulus. Both rings were discovered in the 1970s, when excavations were carried out at the site of a cemetery associated with the abbey of Saint-Èvre.28 Unusually, in this case the monograms could be made to match with the names of people known in the historical record. Endulus (grave 1) was the thirteenth Bishop of Toul, and Pretoria (grave 2), his early-seventh-century contemporary, is known to have been a benefactor of the church, gifting four entire villages and the tithes of another. Both Endulus and Pretoria were individuals who had use of such a ring.29 A ring could be added at any point to a grave and might belong to someone other than the deceased. In this case, however, the likelihood that

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Figure 11.2  “Pretoria” Ring. Source: © Musée d'Art et d'Histoire Michel-Hachet, Toul, inv. CELT_974.24.49. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 11.3  Monograms from Rings in Graves 1 and 2. Source: A. Liéger, R. Marguet, J. Guillaume, “Sépultures mérovingiennes de l’abbaye de Saint-Èvre à Toul (Meurthe-etMoselle)” Revue archéologique de l’Est et du Centre-Est. vol. 35 (1984) 301–17, image on p. 315. Reproduced with permission.

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Figure 11.4  Possible readings of the “Pretoria” monogram. Source: A. Liéger, R. Marguet, J. Guillaume, “Sépultures mérovingiennes de l’abbaye de Saint-Èvre à Toul (Meurthe-et-Moselle)” Revue archéologique de l’Est et du Centre-Est. vol. 35 (1984) 301–17, image on p. 316. Reproduced with permission.

the ring belonged to Pretoria seems high, and indeed, the excavators noted that the ring band had become molded to the shape of a thumb, indicating its use in life. Pretoria and Endulus were buried in graves that were remarkably similar in the richness of their contents, close to each other and to the church wall, and close to the relics of the saints whose protection they sought through service, devotion, and donation. Both men and women used the monogram ring type, and Pretoria’s incredibly generous donation to the abbey accounts for her burial close to that of the bishop and close to the abbey’s wall. Furthermore, if Pretoria used her monogram ring to seal her property donation to the church, and thus to God, the connection between her seal ring and her hopes for eternal life may have been a very conscious, symbolic act.

RELIGIOUS IDENTIFICATION Property transactions and pious donations can account for the popularity of monogram rings with both men and woman, but in reality we do not know whether the rings were always used for this purpose. Rings were worn and

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looked at far more than they would be used. I would suggest that in addition to the practical reasons a woman might wear a monogram ring, a ring might also signal her connection with a religious subgroup—in this case, given the time and place, an elite within the Christian community. A monogram ring with an enigmatic image could be meaningful to the wearer because it signaled identity within a religious context. That rings could communicate religious ideas is not difficult to show—religious inscriptions on rings were not rare (invocations such as vivas in deo are well-attested), and crosses often appear on rings. Furthermore, it has been shown that other items of personal adornment around 600, such as plate buckles, could carry religious meaning for the wearer.30 However, the association of a personal monogram ring with Christian religious identity may not be immediately apparent since this type of ring was used for centuries as a practical item without being necessarily connected to religion and is found in Jewish and Muslim graves also.31 However, this does not mean that monogram rings were not also viewed as distinctively Christian within the Merovingian region where these objects are concentrated. Time and place provide context here. In Merovingian Neustria, monogram rings had a three-fold connection to the Christian religion. The first was in the use of a monogram itself, the second was in the environment evoked by the personal monogram in churches, and the third was in the use of a hidden name. While monograms were used throughout the ancient world, monograms were extremely popular in late antiquity and, from the fourth century onward, were impressed on a wide variety of media. The Chi-Rho, Tau, and other Christian monogram devices were visible in public spaces, especially in churches, but also on more mundane surfaces such as lead weights used in commerce, lead water tanks, and late Roman sarcophagi. Christian symbols such as crosses and doves were impressed on Merovingian rings (figure 11.5). Although Deloche noted that none of the rings he had seen bore the Constantinian Chi-Rho with overlapping X and P, newer finds indicate that this symbol was, in fact, used on rings, although not in conjunction with a personal name.32 Rings that displayed personal names in monogram form were an outcrop of this monographic fashion. Some monogram rings included a cross, or incorporated a cross or other Christian symbols within the design, but this was by no means consistently done, suggesting that in some Merovingian contexts the monogram itself may have become a sufficient indicator of the wearer’s religious identity. The connections of monogram rings with the Christian religion become most apparent when these rings are set alongside late antique examples from across the Mediterranean world. We know that some items with monograms were gifts made to imperial officeholders and the military by the Byzantine emperor. Yet in the West,

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Figure 11.5  Balance Weight with Monogram. Copper Alloy, Silver Inlay. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Acc. No. 2002.213.1. Open Access.

monogram rings were widely used by women as well as men, and by queens and bishops with no direct connection with imperial civil or military service. Even if we cannot be sure that bishops’ seals were part of official episcopal insignia before the seventh century (Isidore of Seville is the first to attest to this), seal rings were certainly worn and used by bishops in the course of their duties. The cases of Avitus, bishop of Vienne, who described his preference for a ring with both name and monogram inscribed, and Augustine, bishop of Hippo, who gave his seal to a deputy to use because he wanted to distance himself from property, indicate that bishops wore such rings because they were part of the necessary authentication instruments of the day.33 What is no longer evident from Merovingian architectural remains, but can still be seen in late antique churches in other territories of the era, is that in some church interiors, bishops used their personal monograms to lay claim to their connection with its sacred space: as founder, as bishop, and as donor. Examples of this practice can still be seen in floor mosaics at the cathedral of Grado, the column capitals of San Vitale in Ravenna, and in the apse of the ninth-century church of Santa Prassede in Rome.34 Bishop Maximian of Ravenna had his personal monogram incorporated into his ivory cathedra, or bishop’s throne. The use of personal monograms in these spaces seems to be a Western phenomenon, in contrast to the more exclusive imperial monograms in Byzantine churches (figure 11.6).35

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Figure 11.6  Floor Mosaic, Grado Cathedral. Source: Photograph by Sailko. Wiki Creative Commons.

It would make sense that these mosaics and painted and engraved monograms represented the precise image used by that bishop for his seal ring. Since these monogram devices were positioned on floors, and lower walls, and arches, their survival is sporadic, but they would have been visible to the congregation. Merovingian church interiors have not survived intact, but the rings have, and one can imagine that monograms like those at Grado and Rome may have ornamented Merovingian churches, too.36 Christograms such as the Chi-Rho were also displayed in images and on tapestries and textiles, both of which were used in Merovingian churches. We know that silks were imported into Merovingian Gaul, and some silks were dispatched from Byzantine workshops to foreign powers as political gifts, with monogram silks known from seventh- and eighth-century Byzantine examples.37 Clerical vestments may have included such signs, but unfortunately early examples of such monogrammed vestments have not survived. Did Merovingian bishops

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have their monograms inscribed on church furnishings, like Maximian on his throne? There is no reason to doubt that if donors, especially episcopal donors and founders, wanted to create a permanent record of their connection to a church, they may have echoed the monograms and Christograms around them and created personal monogram images to be displayed on floors and walls. Indeed, personal monogram rings may possibly reflect a now-lost connection between personal seals and the interiors of Gallo-Roman and Merovingian churches. And since women were church donors, one of the many reasons a woman might want to wear a ring of this type could have been that monogram rings asserted a connection with the public emblems of Christian culture that ornamented local as well as distant churches. We can suppose that the Merovingian elite prized such monographic representation, then, not only because such devices were used by bishops, and by elites elsewhere, but because they saw them also in churches and other religious environments. The use of cryptic, enigmatic monograms could signal a sacred form of writing known to insiders of the religion. Familiarity with, or decipherment of the monogram, was not the whole point of wearing them; the monogram concealed a name, but it also revealed the association of the wearer with her cultural aspirations within her religion. It is a further question as to whether the monogram may have signaled that the owner was inducted into a yet more exclusive relationship with the church. Did abbesses, abbots, and priests wear them, either as a symbolic item or as a practical authentication mechanism? Our information on this is scant. Monasteries and nunneries certainly had legal and economic interests that would be facilitated by an official seal, or by an official with a seal. Such a seal did not need to be in the form of a ring, but security was improved if it was. Although bishops came, over time, to identify a ring as a spiritual, mystical sign of their induction into high religious office, the earliest symbolism of the seal related to holy mysteries and to the Holy Spirit rather than mystical marriage: Isidore called the bishop’s ring a “seal of secrets.”38 Indeed, there is no evidence that Merovingian monastics of either sex wore rings as a symbol of spiritual marriage to the church; Deloche was able to cite only much later twelfth-century testimony.39 Given the possibility that Merovingian Christians were exposed to such images in churches and on the fingers of the secular and religious elite, it seems likely that monogram rings had cachet in the sixth and seventh centuries because they distinctively identified their owners as members of that elite—both at a local level and more broadly as they referenced Mediterranean, imperial, and papal styles. In addition to wearing such a ring because she was the owner of substantial property, a woman like Pretoria may have gravitated to this kind of emblem because of its associations with the church and the liturgy. The fact that she was buried close to the bishop,

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Endulus, who also wore his monogram ring in death, seems to place her among the privileged few. In Pretoria’s case, her association with the bishop and the church may have encouraged the decision she made, or the decision made by those who buried her, to include it in her grave. BERTEILDIS AND ARNEGUNDIS: “QUEENS” AND THE USE OF TWO NAMES One of the more curious forms of the Merovingian monogram ring was the use of a central monogram in conjunction with a personal name clearly inscribed around it. We know from Avitus of Vienne’s letter that the monogram could be accompanied by the same name written out in order to clarify the monogram, and rings of this type are extant.40 However, in some important pieces, the central cipher appears not to replicate the name on the ring and must therefore represent another name or word. The best-known examples of these double-word types are rings traditionally, but problematically, associated with queens. Indeed, it is precisely the difference between the inscribed name and the monogram that has encouraged this attribution since the central image has been interpreted as the royal title “regina.” The Berteildis and Arnegundis rings make this point quite nicely, and they are often examined together. The Berteildis ring from Laon (dép. Aisne) is now lost, but drawings and a photograph exist (figure 11.7).41 The ring face has a cross and the name Bertildis or Berteildis written around the rim (which may be a genitive form of Bertild) in a reverse script, thus enabling its use as a seal matrix. In the center is a monogram that Deloche (and Longpérier before him) read as “Regine,” for “reginae,” meaning “of queen Bertildis” or “with [the seal] of queen [Bertildis],” and this led to the ring being ascribed to Berchildis, one of Dagobert I’s wives, and thus to the first half of the seventh century. Edmond Le Blant, however, doubted this rendition of the monogram, noting that the letter E at the bottom rim was likely part of the name, hence Berteildis rather than Bertildis, thus nullifying the central monogram’s interpretation as a royal title.42 It is useful to examine this ring alongside another ring attributed to a queen, the Arnegundis ring.43 Like the Berteildis ring, the Arnegundis ring displays two scripted features: a name and a cipher in the center (figure 11.8). However, the name Arnegundis is not reversed, and so the name would not be immediately legible as a wax or clay impression. It is thus a name ring with a central monogram. This monogram does not fully represent the inscribed name since it clearly lacks the letter S. This ring has been known since 1959, when it was discovered in a richly furnished female grave in the

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Figure 11.7  Berteildis Ring. Source: Illustration by Reilly Jensen drawn from Deloche (1900), Seymour de Ricci (1912 # 1029, and 1937 lot 498, p.106, pl. XVII). Copyright of the author.

Figure 11.8  Arnegundis Ring. Source: Louvre, M.A.N. Art Resource. Reproduced with permission.

course of excavations led by Michel Fleury beneath the basilica of St. Denis outside Paris (grave 49; dép. Seine). Since that time, the contents of this elite furnished grave have been thoroughly analyzed and are the subject of numerous publications. The presence of the ring with the name Arnegundis

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in combination with the richness of the other finds immediately suggested the possibility that this was a royal grave, that of Aregund, wife of Chlothar I, who is mentioned in Gregory of Tours’s History of the Franks. Based on the initial analysis of the deceased’s bones, which suggested a woman of forty-five years of age, the grave was dated to sometime between 565 and 570. It was further proposed that the central monogram could be read as “Regine,” an attribution encouraged by the conviction that this was, indeed, from the grave of a queen.44 Over the years the attribution of the grave to Queen Aregund has been challenged on a number of grounds. D. M. Wilson doubted that the ring was worn by Aregund since he thought it “unlikely that any person would wear a ring inscribed with their own name on the bezel” and argued that it may have been given out as a gift by Aregund to a family member or retainer.45 This was not the strongest of arguments in view of the strong association of a person with his or her name and the many examples of rings with names. Wilson’s larger point about the problem of using the ring to date the grave was more significant. The attribution of the grave and ring to Chlothar’s queen has been challenged on archaeological grounds since the grave included items of a later date than Aregund’s supposed date of death between 565 and 570 at the approximate age of forty-five (based on dental analysis in the 1960s). In order to align the later date of the grave finds with the historical figure of the queen, Périn suggested the queen could have died at age sixty. Arnegundis’s remains disappeared for thirty years, making this suggestion unverifiable until the remains were found again in 2003, and a newer analysis revealed an age of death of sixty-one, plus or minus three years, thus making the date of the grave c. 580, which better accorded with the date of the grave furnishings.46 However, the problem still remains that the attribution of the grave to Aregundis was heavily based on the monogram ring, and while Arnegundis and Aregundis are similar names, they are not identical.47 The attribution of the ring to the queen persists in some publications alongside attempts to synchronize the date of the grave with the lifetime of the sixth-century queen. However the strengths of these competing interpretations are viewed, the fact that the central cipher can be interpreted alternatively as a name or a royal title illustrates the difficulty in resting much weight on the decipherment of the central monogram. It is salutary to remember that the so-called “Radegund” monogram was revised to read “Gregoria.”48 How strong is the argument that the central monogram of the Arnegundis ring represents the word “Regine” and thus is the queen’s title? While it is true that the word “Regine” can be extracted from the monogram, new problems surely arise. What purpose could be served by keeping the owner’s name legible but obscuring the owner’s rank, especially in the case of a woman whose status and authority were so closely tied to that of her royal

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husband? It can also be noted that if this is a recognized cipher for “Regine,” it is strange that it is not consistent among rings. In addition to the Berteildis ring, there is another Merovingian ring in the British Museum with a monogram tentatively interpreted as “Reginae,” although in this case, without a personal name, it is a reading that seems more hopeful than realistic. Yet on neither of these three rings is the supposed title rendering “Regine” the same. And none of these are like rings associated with kings, such as that of Childeric I (d. 481), on which his name and title “Childirici Regis” is clearly indicated, or the ring tentatively ascribed to Clovis II (d. 657).49 Two points can be made here: first, the use of a central cipher to obscure a royal title does not make much sense, and, second, it is not necessary to look to queens to supply the female owners of these rings. It is important to point out that the sheer number of these monogram and name rings in a variety of metals suggests that these rings were not confined to Gallo-Roman aristocrats, nor to bishops, kings, and queens. Rather, they point to an era in which women of a broader social status could signal status, wealth, and identity, and perhaps an affiliation with religion. The use of name and monogram together on some Merovingian rings still leaves us with a two-name riddle to be solved. Rather than representing the name of the bearer, or an obscured reference to a title, a monogram might signal a family group with which the owner was associated, or specifically, in the case of a woman’s rings, her husband’s clan or name. However, the central monogram on Arnegund’s ring does not resolve into the name of her husband, Chlothar, nor does Berteildis’s ring resolve to the name of Queen Berteildis’s husband, Dagobert. Franks used names that combined name elements from family members.50 They did not use the cognomina, which some Gallo-Romans still remembered as identifiers in the sixth century. It is known, however, that some potentates of this era used alternative names that might have been used as a nickname, for example, Bishop Audoin of Rouen was known as Dado, and his brothers Ado and Rado may equally have had more formal names by which they were known.51 Likewise, women might have another name: Ethelberga, daughter of King Ethelbert of Kent and his Frankish wife Bertha, was known as Tata.52 In some cases dual names arose from the process of integrating Germanic and Roman populations, such as has been shown for Burgundy.53 In others, it was clearly a question of taking a name that was viewed as more normative in Christian circles, such as when the missionary Wynfrith was given the name of Boniface by Pope Gregory II when he was consecrated as Bishop in 719. Women may also have gone by a familiar name, a name used prior to marriage, a name linking her to her paternal or maternal kin, or a name taken in religion. In short, there are alternative explanations for monograms that do not replicate the name of the bearer without the need to resort to a royal title.

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USE IN BURIAL AND THOUGHTS OF THE AFTERLIFE The current preservation of approximately eighty monogram rings from northern France, Belgium, and Germany arises from the Merovingian practice of placing items of personal adornment in burials. As already noted, a finger ring, especially one that bore a personal name, was closely associated with the person who bore it. In the case of a monogram ring, that association was even closer than for other types of rings that might have been more easily transferred to heirs. Frankish naming patterns show that families did not give a child the name of a living relative so there was no one to inherit a name ring in the next generation.54 By including a name ring in the grave, those who buried the dead provided a connection between the dead person and an item that clearly identified him or her, even in the case when a ring was deposited as a gift from a loved one. A ring could be viewed as a double or substitute for the person associated with the dead person. Having served its purpose in life as an authenticator of identity, and possibly religion, what function did the deposition of the ring perform in death? Monogram rings may have acquired additional meaning when buried with the dead. Indeed, in a way that is not always easy to explain for other items placed in graves, a ring may have had an apotropaic function while at the same time communicating positive hopes for the afterlife. Obscure to common human view, an encoded name was “readable” by God. As described in the Book of Revelation (5:9–10), Christ broke the seal of death. Likewise, names were important to notions of salvation in the New Testament: Jesus called his sheep by name, and Christians were promised that the saved would be given a “new name.”55 Some Christians of this era are known to have adopted a new name at their confirmation or when they entered a religious institution. Indeed, confirmation was termed a “seal” in some texts. The religious code embedded in church interiors and used by clerics, and the idea of a special name referenced in scripture, may suggest that those who wore such a ring in life, women as well as men, claimed a special status that continued after death. Does this mean that these rings were used exclusively by those in the religious life? Evidently not. We have seen that Pretoria, a woman donor to the church who was given a privileged burial close to the saints, wore her ring in the grave. She was not a nun or abbess, and she was buried with jewelry. She was buried on the outside of the church, next to the bishop, in a richly furnished burial. Bishops wore rings, but there was no female equivalent of a bishop, so there is no reason to suppose that Pretoria held any status other than that of benefactor. A ring was viewed as a finger adornment far more often than it was viewed as an impression in wax or clay. Its tactile quality and placement on the finger suited it to be a site of introspection and contemplation. The surface

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of its face, with its centered and interlocking letters, pulled the viewer in, operating as a symbolic object and a vehicle for memory. The way the monogram ring is designed to concentrate the letter-image in the center of the circle is reminiscent of acrostic art, which was popular among Merovingians and Carolingians. Acrostics appeared on epitaphs and in manuscripts.56 As Lynda Coon has argued, an acrostic functioned as a mandala, providing the viewer with a focal point for spiritual meditation, a spiritual journey into the labyrinth.57 This insight may be useful for thinking about these rings and the value they held for their wearer. As early as the fourth century Ambrose of Milan had viewed the priest’s ring as representing the seal of the Holy Spirit inscribed on the faithful.58 It is also clear from Isidore of Seville and from Bede that the impression made by seal rings on wax provided a useful analogy to explain how things worked in nature.59 As individuals lived with these objects, monogram rings and other seal-ring types may have acquired additional levels of religious meaning over time. A ring served as a marker of status and identity that could gather religious and eschatological meaning by its use in the grave. DECLINE OF USE? By the first third of the seventh century, richly furnished burials became less frequent for all but a few special individuals: kings, queens, bishops, saints. While modest items might still be buried with a corpse, the trend was for very simple burials.60 With the decrease in furnished burials come fewer opportunities for archaeologists to recover such items. This leaves us with a question as to whether the use of seal rings by ordinary people waned before the end of the Merovingian period. However, scholars have suggested that there is a discernable hiatus in the common use of seal rings between the seventh and eleventh centuries in the West, especially by women.61 Using the evidence of seal impressions (rather than rings), Michel Pastoureau noted that by the seventh century and into the Carolingian era, seals were largely reserved for royalty and high-ranking ecclesiastics, and that it was not until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that the use of seal rings expanded so that artisans, merchants, and women began to use them again. In short, one has to wait until the thirteenth century to see evidence of the kind of widespread use of seal images for asserting identity, authenticating possessions, and conducting business on a scale that had once been common in late antiquity. The reasons for a likely decline in use are complex and cannot be given full consideration here, although a move from the use of seals to written monograms on royal and ecclesiastical charters provides one possible explanation. For example, of the five genuine and original papyrus charters granted by Clovis II (d.

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657), only the earliest charter, the one drawn up in 642 in conjunction with his regent mother, Nantechilde, shows evidence that a seal was once affixed to it.62 There was also a move from papyrus to parchment in royal chanceries.63 But as already noted, rings meant more than simple authentication, and their use extended more widely than for authenticating legal documents and securing possessions. Challenges posed by the availability of raw materials, or the artisanal network that enabled their production, and changes in burial practices are possible contributors to a decline in use.64 But it was perhaps an evolving connection between rings and religious offices that eventually swept aside other uses of such rings by commoners. The appeal of special rings to popes, bishops, and monastic leaders may have grown at the expense of more common associations of rings with personal identity and religion. Ultimately, the most compelling explanation for the decline in these specialized objects may be that there was a change in the way some Christians thought about communicating with God. As Ildar Garipzanov has noted, the use of monograms in public space declined in the Byzantine world from the seventh century onward.65 The iconographic connections between the Far East and Far West of the Mediterranean world are increasingly well known, and not solely through textiles but in manuscript illustration also.66 Monogram rings in the West seem to have held their appeal a little longer than in the East, but as most of these rings date from the fifth through the early seventh centuries, there is a mirror effect going on. The rings seem to belong to a phase of early Merovingian cultural and religious aesthetics in which they were linked with contemporaneous Mediterranean expressions of Christian culture. This phase might also be characterized as an era in which esoteric traditions of Christian expression were prized, valuing what was hidden and secret, gesturing to divine mysteries yet to be revealed. Yet they were fashioned and worn within a broader context of ring-wearing that was fairly widespread, and, as evidenced in their use by women, Merovingian monogram rings, whether used for sealing or not, were a vehicle for personal expression available to the laity as well as to the clergy, used by both men and women: an elite parity of a kind. Over time, however, ecclesiastics moved toward reserving enigmatic graphic signs for activities in the religious and royal spheres. The connection of rings with episcopal induction and office was tightened, from the early seventh century onward.67 Concerns were raised about the use of images in a variety of contexts in the Carolingian era. Maximin Deloche cited a ninth-century Milanese council in which bishops’ rings were to be large, pure gold, and with a gem, but with the proviso that the gem not be inscribed “in qua nihil sculpti esse debet.”68 Although targeted at the clergy, in and of itself, injunctions to leave inscribed items behind in favor of pure gems and gold would greatly reduce the number of men and women who would have access to them.

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So new trends, elevated costs, and expectations of conformity to conciliar regulations may have diminished the appeal of earlier forms, especially of rings containing images or graphics. The fashion, and thus also the utility of engraved monogram rings in everyday contexts, may have declined as a result. As church councils began to regulate the kind of rings worn by the clergy, and clerical vestments and adornments were increasingly invested with mystical and spiritual meaning, a new phase of ring-wearing must have begun. Writing about the central Middle Ages, when seal rings slowly began to make their way back into common use, Brigitte Bedos-Rezak has queried whether the delay in women’s use of seals in 1100 was a “denial of female personality.”69 Do the Merovingian rings, and the possible decline in their use over the early medieval centuries, testify to an era of women’s activity that had been successively dimmed, then lost? The Merovingian monogram ring, and other rings inscribed with religious symbols and scripts, had represented a limited kind of gender parity in that both men and women could use symbols of identity and religious affiliation in the public sphere. These rings represented a time when women could appropriate late antique Mediterranean symbols for items to which they had daily access. They hark back to an era of activity and mobility in which women were active on their husband’s behalf. But they were also items that allowed women to embrace an imaginative world of letters in which play, graphic puzzles, secret knowledge, religious joy, and personal signs communicated their immersion in a visual environment that they understood and valued. We should not shy away from thinking about religion and religious expression in the use of these rings. As the personal monogram ring, so distinctive of late antique culture, gave way to new habits of personal adornment among women and especially among the higher clergy, and as changes in burial practice weakened the oncestrong connection of Christians with personal objects and possessions in the grave, we can see Neustria’s connection to the ancient Mediterranean world of women, religion, and material culture receding slowly into the distance.

NOTES 1. I would like to thank the organizers and participants of the conference “Material Culture and Women’s Religious Experience in Antiquity” held at BYU in February 2019. Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the Fordham Medieval Center conference “Inside Out: Dress and Identity in the Middle Ages” in March 2018 and at the Leeds IMC, UK, July 2019. I would also like to thank Melanie Holcomb at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, for discussing the collection with me, and Bonnie Effros and Genevra Kornbluth for comments on

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the chapter at an earlier stage. I would also like to thank Mark Ellison, Catherine Taylor, Carolyn Osiek, and the anonymous reviewer for their useful suggestions and insights. All errors are my own. 2. Rules about how metal followed rank evolved over the Roman period. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 19.31.4, noted that rings were originally given out by the Roman treasury and that metal type aligned with class: gold for free men, silver for freedmen, and iron for slaves. Such distinctions eroded over time; see Maximin Deloche (d. 1900), Le port des anneaux dans l’antiquité romaine dans les premiers siècles du moyen âge (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1896). 3. A note on terminology for rings with inscribed letters. A personal monogram, as discussed in this chapter, is a personal name represented by overlapping letters. (A Christogram is also a monogram, but it is a Christian symbol rather than a personal name.) A name ring has a personal name. Some rings bear a combination of name and monogram, usually with the monogram in the center and the name written around the rim. A seal ring can be used to create a wax image. Images such as birds and mythological scenes engraved on gemstones, or on metal, were also used as seal matrices. Monogram rings and name rings could be used as seal rings also, but in the case of the latter, a personal name written out in legible form on the ring would not normally be a seal ring because a mirror image is needed to create a readable name in the wax impression. The Berteildis ring, to be discussed (figure 11.7), is an example of a name ring with monogram that could be used as a seal matrix because the name would be readily legible in a wax impression. Whether a name legible on the ring, accompanied by a central monogram, was always a seal ring is debatable. 4. Archaeological find-maps, and a discussion of some of the issues discussed here, can be found in Volker Hilberg, “Monogrammverwendung und Schriftlichkeit im merowingischen Frankenreich,” in Arbeiten aus dem Marburger hilfswissenschaftlichen Institut, ed. E. Eisenlohr and P. Worm (Marburg: Universitätsbibliothek Marburg, 2000), 94 (see map). It should be cautioned that in the past many rings were recovered without archaeological context preserved. 5. Maximin Deloche (d. 1900), Étude historique et archéologique sur les anneaux sigillaires et autres des premiers siècles du moyen age. Description de 315 anneaux, avec dessins dans le texte (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1900), liv, noted that in the corpus of material used in his study there were more name rings owned by women than by men (forty-two men, thirty-one women), and of the monogram type, twenty male and thirty-six female. Sensibly, he cautioned against viewing these numbers as representing a true ratio of female-to-male seal-ring usage. Gender attribution would be harder to conclude today, but it is still notable that so many specialized name rings bore a female name. 6. Reine Hadjadj, Bagues Mérovingiennes: Gaule du Nord (Paris: Éditions les Chevau-légers, 2007); Katherine Reynolds Brown, Dafydd Kidd, and Charles T. Little, eds., From Attila to Charlemagne: Arts of the Early Medieval Period in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2000). 7. Maximin Deloche, Le port des anneaux; Deloche, Étude historique, xlv–liv (on monograms and rules for decipherment). While recognizing that not all monograms

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would yield information to the modern decipherer, Deloche provided what he viewed as a “rational” and “scientific” (p. xlix) approach. 8. Deloche, Étude historique, xlv. 9. Bonnie Effros, “Art of the ‘Dark Ages’: Showing Merovingian Artefacts in North American Public and Private Collections,” Journal of the History of Collections 17, no. 1 (2005): 85–113. 10. Bonnie Effros, Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology and the Making of the Early Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Bonnie Effros, Uncovering the Germanic Past: Merovingian Archaeology in France, 1830–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 11. Claudius Côte, “Bagues Romaines et Mérovingiennes,” Revue Archéologique, series 4, vol. 5 (Janvier–Juin 1905): 190–200. Important catalogs for Merovingian rings include those by Seymour de Ricci, for example, his Catalogue of a Collection of Merovingian Antiquities Belonging to J. Pierpont Morgan (Paris: Imprimerie de l’Art, 1910), his Catalogue of a Collection of Ancient Rings Formed by the Late E. Guilhou (Paris: Imprimerie de l’Art, 1912), and his Catalogue of the Superb Collection of Rings Formed by the Late Monsieur E. Guilhou of Paris, 9–12 November 1937 (London: Sotheby, 1937). On collectors and collections of Merovingian artifacts, see Bonnie Effros, Uncovering the Germanic Past, chapter 7. 12. Deloche, Étude historique, 16, saw 18 mm as evidence for use by a woman; Hadjadj, Bagues, 28, gives a range of 17 mm to 20 mm for a woman’s ring, whereas a modern study of Roman rings suggests an average female size was 17.5 mm, with sizes over 20 mm exclusively associated with male graves: Ellen Swift, Roman Artefacts and Society: Design, Behavior, and Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 150–90. But, see next note. 13. Both the Arnegundis ring (as reported in archaeological notices in the 1960s) and the Pretoria ring were found on the thumb of the left hand: Arnegundis, 22 mm internal diameter; Pretoria, 23 mm. Data from graves and sculptural reliefs show that in the Roman era rings were worn mostly on the third finger (ring finger) of the left hand, with additional rings on the second or fourth finger (Swift, Roman Artefacts); those from the Merovingian period generally follow this pattern, but also the thumb in two of the cases described here. 14. Maximin Deloche, Étude historique. 15. Hadjadj, Bagues. 16. Genevra Kornbluth, “The Seal of Alaric, rex Gothorum,” Early Medieval Europe 16, no. 3 (2008): 299–332; and Genevra Kornbluth, “Richildis and Her Seal: Carolingian Self-Reference and the Imagery of Power,” in Saints, Sinners, and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Jane L. Carroll and Allison G. Stewart (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 161–81, arguing the seal ring (an engraved gem with the image of Omphale and the name Richilde inscribed in reverse) may have belonged to the empress Richildis, wife of Emperor Charles the Bald (d. 877). Patrick Périn, “Portrait posthume d’une reine Mérovingienne, Arégonde († c. 580), épouse de Clotaire Ier († 561) et mère de Chilperic Ier († 584),” Le corti nell’alto medioevo, Spoleto, 24–29, aprile 2014, Settimane di Studio 62 (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 2015), 1001–48.

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17. Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak, “Medieval Identity: A Sign and a Concept,” American Historical Review 105, no. 5 (December 2000): 1489–1533; Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “The Iconicity of Script,” Word & Image 27, no. 3 (July–September 2011): 249–61; Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Sacrality of Things: An Inquiry into Divine Materiality in the Christian Middle Ages,” Irish Theological Review 78, no. 1 (2012): 3–18. 18. Diana Scarisbrick, Rings: Symbols of Wealth, Power, and Affection (New York: Abrams, 1993); Diana Scarisbrick, Towards an Art History of Medieval Rings: A Private Collection (London: Paul Holberton, 2016); Wendy Doniger, The Ring of Truth and Other Myths of Sex and Jewelry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 19. Hilberg, “Monogrammverwendung.” 20. Especially on the evolution of Christograms, see Ildar Garipzanov, Graphic Signs of Authority in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, 300–900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Ildar Garipzanov, “The Rise of Graphicacy in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages,” Viator 46, no. 2 (2015): 1–22. See also essays in Michelle P. Brown, Ildar H. Garipzanov, and Benjamin C. Tilghman. eds., Graphic Devices and the Early Decorated Book (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017). 21. Michel Pastoureau, Les Sceaux (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1981), usefully provides a broad historical overview and some definitions of terms and notes the challenge of making any distinction between references to seals, matrices, and manually inked marks in Latin sources because the Latin terms for these things were often poorly differentiated. On typologies, see n22. 22. Maximin Deloche, La bague en France à travers l’histoire (Paris: Libr. Firmin-Didot et Cie, 1929), 7: “Son caractère, dit sigillaire, par une généralization peut-être excessive, ne répond-il pas à une idée sociale d’un ordre différent? Si la personalité s’affirme ainsi davantage, par ce bijou, dans cette société nouvelle, n’est-ce pas dû au souci du guerrier vainqueur et conquérant de se distinguer, tout au moins à l’origine, de la population conquise? Cette préoccupation gagne celle-ci, qui l’adopte comme une mode nouvelle: elle s’étend à la femme plus qu’à l’homme. Les anneaux sigillaires féminins sont relativement plus nombreux que ceux des hommes. En l’état des connaissances en 1900, on compte soixante-sept vocables féminins contre soixante-deux masculins. Cette particularité anormale n’a-t-elle pas une cause autre que celle de la race? Ne faut-il pas y-ajouter l’éclosion d’un sentiment nouveau de dignité, dû à l’idée religieuse? Cette sorte de réhabilitation de la femme par le christianisme s’accorderait déjà sur le sol gaulois avec la vieille tradition celtique. N’a-telle pas reçu un nouveau et décisive essor par les moeurs des nouveaux conquérants qui apportent officiellement les mêmes croyances religieuses?” 23. Competing typologies abound. For example, S. Ristow and H. Roth, “Fingerring, ” in Reallexicon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, vol. 9 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), 56–65, identified four broad types of Merovingian ring, of which the monogram ring is group IV. Hadjadj’s Bagues, 51–84, identifies ten ringtypes for all rings. But, for example, a distinction between rings used for practical (seal rings) versus nonpractical (symbolic) purposes as described by William FilmerSankey, “On the Function and Status of Prestige Finger-Rings in the Early Medieval

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Germanic World, c. 450–700” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1990), does not work well for the argument I am making here. 24. Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus 3.11: Men should wear their signet ring on their little finger, and it should have a pacific engraving, like a dove or a fish. 25. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 19.31.4. Some baser metal rings have survived, but corrosion often renders them into unintelligible lumps of metal froth. Rings were also fashioned from nonmetal substances. 26. Curse 209, Daniel Ogden, ed., Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). An attraction curse sought to instill sexual desire or sleeplessness in the subject of the spell. The use of spells is well attested in ancient writings. The use of protective magic in the form of amulets continued into the Christian era, as did coercive (black) magic and curses. An eighth-century manuscript of a “homily,” Homilia de sacrilegiis, wrongly attributed to Augustine of Hippo, sought to identify as pagan practices that must have been folk practices. For example, a gold ring might be used to circle a wound or to circle an eye for a cure (VI, 21), which is still done today in some families. Iron was thought to dispel demons, so an iron ring and iron arm-ring were among the tools of a lay exorcist (VI, 22), Eine Augustin fälschlich beilegte Homilia de Sacrilegiis, edited by C. P. Caspari, 11–12. See also William Klingshirn, “Magic and Divination in the Merovingian World,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Merovingian World, ed. Bonnie Effros and Isabel Moreira (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 968–87. 27. Formulary of Angers #1, in Alice Rio, ed. and trans., The Formularies of Angers and Marculf (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 47–50. 28. A. Liéger, R. Marguet, and J. Guillaume, “Sépultures mérovingiennes de l’abbaye de Saint-Èvre à Toul (Meurthe-et-Moselle),” Revue archéologique de l’Est et du Centre-Est 35 (1984): 315. 29. Liéger, Marguet, and Guillaume, “Sépultures mérovingiennes,” 305. Although the skeletal remains were in a poor state of preservation, the archaeologists determined that the grave was that of a female based on the grave goods, making it likely that the Pretoria ring was worn by a woman. 30. Bailey K. Young, “The Imagery of Personal Objects: Hints of ‘Do-It-Yourself’ Christian Culture in Merovingian Gaul?” in The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity, ed. Andrew Cain and Noel Lenski (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 339–54; Henri Gaillard de Semanville, with Martine Joly, “Nouvel examen de la plaqueboucle Mérovingienne de Landelinus découverte à Ladoix-Serrigny (Côte-D’Or). Apocalypse et millénarisme dans l’art Mérovingien,” Revue archeologique de L’Est 52 (2003): 297–328. 31. Rings with Jewish inscriptions are known before the more famous “house” rings of the Middle Ages. Kufic-inscribed seal rings have been found associated with Muslim burials (two men, two women) outside of Cordova from the time of the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750 CE). These matrices were not monograms but rather invocations to God and Mohamad inscribed on carnelian in the negative so they could be used as seal matrices. The excavators deemed them to be deliberately included in the burial with a view to protection in the afterlife. See Ana Labarta Gómez, Inmaculada López Flores, and Augustín López Jiménez, “Anillos y cornalinas de

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época Califal hallandos en cuatro enterramientos Cordobeses,” Anales de arqueología Cordobesa 25–26 (2014–2015): 255–78. My thanks to Genevra Kornbluth for this reference. 32. Deloche, Étude historique, xxvi. A bronze ring bearing a Chi-Rho sign is part of the Niederbreisig cache in the Morgan collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: see fig. 11.11, Brown, Kidd, and Little, eds., “On the Frontiers of Byzantium,” From Attila to Charlemagne, 127. Further afield, a Chi-Rho monogram appears on a ring from Lacobriga (Fiães) in Portugal; see Graça Cravinho and Shua AmoraiStark, “Christian Gems from Portugal in Context,” in “The Christian Gems from Portugal in Context,” in Gems of Heaven: Recent Research on Engraved Gemstones in Late Antiquity, AD 200–600, ed. Chris Entwistle and Noël Adams (London: British Museum, 2011), 114–26. 33. Possidius, Vita S. Augustini 24: “Numquam clavem, nunquam annulum in manu habens,” English version by Herbert T. Weiskotton, 96. Sancti Aviti Epistolae, Ep. LXXXVII (78), MGH, AA 6,2 (Munich, 1985), 96. 34. My thanks to Mark Ellison for bringing this example to my attention. By the Carolingian era, it was more common for monograms to have distinct lettering. 35. Famously, the monograms of Justinian and Theodora were carved into the capitals in Hagia Eirene, Istanbul; at St. John’s, Ephesus; and in San Vitale, Ravenna, during the time of the exarchate. The cruciform monogram was used on coinage as early as the time of Justin I. See Werner Seibt, “The Use of Monograms on Byzantine Seals in the Early Middle Ages (6th to 9th centuries),” Parekbolai 6 (2016): 1–14. 36. On recovering Merovingian religious architectural forms, see Sébastien Bully, “L’architecture religieuse,” in Les temps mérovingiens. Trois siècles d’art et de culture (451–751), ed. Isabelle Bardiès-Fronty, Charlotte Denoël, and Inès VillelaPetit, (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux—Grand Palais, 2016), 25–27 ; and Pascale Chevalier, “Merovingian Religious Architecture,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Merovingian World, ed. Bonnie Effros and Isabel Moreira (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 657–92. 37. Anna Muthesius, “Memory and Meaning: Graphic Sign and Abstract Symbol in Byzantine Silk Weaving (from the Sixth to Tenth/Eleventh Centuries).” In Graphic Signs of Identity, Faith, and Power in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Ildar Garipzanov, Caroline Goodson, and Henry McGuire (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2017). 38. Isidore of Seville, De ecclesiasticis officiis 2, v, 12: “Datur et annulus propter signum pontificalis honoris vel signaculum secretorum,” col. 784. 39. Deloche, Le porte des anneaux, 69. 40. Deloche, Étude historique, cites ring of Aster (n215). 41. Now lost, the Berteildis ring was described and reproduced in early publications: Adrien Prévost de Longpérier described the Berteildis ring in 1870 (Comptes rendus Ac. Inscr. Et Belles Lettres N.S. 6 [1870], pp. 316ff.); Deloche, Étude historique (1900) #186 (p. 203); S. Ricci, Catalogue of a Collection of Ancient Rings Formed by the Late E. Guilhou (1912), #1029. Images of the ring on the Internet are of a modern reproduction. The illustration in this article (figure 11.7), which includes

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a view of what the seal impression would look like, is by Reilly Jensen. Copyright belongs to the author. 42. Edmond Le Blant, Nouveau recueil des inscriptions chrétiennes de la Gaule antérieures au VIIIe siècle (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1892), #49 (p. 71). 43. The Arnegundis ring was discovered during excavations conducted by Michel Fleury and others beneath the basilica of Saint-Denis north of Paris. The ring was found in a richly furnished female grave alongside other pieces of jewelry and clothing. Numerous publications have examined the ring, with most accepting the grave’s attribution to Queen Aregundis. For a description of the grave items compiled close to the time of discovery, see A. France-Lanord and Michel Fleury, “Les bijoux mérovingiens d’Arnegonde,” Art de France 1 (1961): 7–18. 44. Maria R. Alföldi, “Zum Ring der Königin Arnegunde,” Germania 41 (1963): 55–58, argued that the central monogram of the Arnegundis ring read “regine” or “reginae,” a solution accepted by Michel Fleury, “L’anneau sigillaire d’Arégonde.” Like Alföldi, Fleury noted the problem of the missing letter S. 45. D. M. Wilson, “A Ring of Queen Arnegunde,” Germania 42 (1964): 265–68. 46. Périn, “Portrait posthume,” 1007 and 1004–06, on the storied fate of the grave’s remains. Reporting on the newest round of investigations using modern technology, Périn revised earlier assessments of the age of the skeletal remains, thus making it possible to argue that the ring could indeed have come from the grave of the sixth-century Frankish queen, Aregund. 47. A point made by Bonnie Effros, Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology, 122–23. 48. Le Blant, Inscriptions chrétiennes, 351–53 ; Deloche, Étude historique, 277, #247. 49. Heli Roosens and Aresene Geubel, “Un anneau sigillaire Mérovingien,” Revue du Nord 276 (1988): 99–106; alternative attribution in Patrick Périn, “Un anneau sigillaire Mérovingien bien énigmatique,” Bulletin de liaison de l’Association française d’Archéologie Mérovingienne 12 (1988): 144–46. 50. Eugen Ewig, “Die Namengebung bei den ältesten Frankenkönigen und im merowingischen Königshaus,” Francia 18 (1991): 21–69; Régine Le Jan, “Personal Names and the Transformation on Kinship,” in Personal Names: Studies of Medieval Europe, ed. George T. Beech, Monique Bourin, and Pascale Chareille (Kalamazoo: University of Michigan, 2002), 31–50. 51. Vita Audoini episcopi Rotomagensis. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum 5, ed. Bruno Krusch, (Hanover: MGH, 1910), 553–57 (ch. 1). 52. Bede, Ecclesiastical History 2.9, 162 : “Aedilbergae . . . quae alio nomine Tatae vocabatur.” 53. Wolfgang Haubrichs, “Saint-Trivier des Dombes et la conversion des Warasques. Deux témoins de l’acculturation Burgundo-Romane,” in Les royaumes de Bourgogne jusqu’en 1032. À travers la culture et la religion, ed. Anne Wagner and Nicole Brocard (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2018). I would like to thank Becca Gosse for drawing my attention to this article. 54. On Frankish naming patterns, see Ewig, “Die Namengebung.”

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55. John 10:2–3: “The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.” Revelation 2:17: “To everyone who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give a white stone, and on the white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it.” The presence of white quartz stones in some Celtic burials has sometimes been linked to this passage in Revelation. Although the practice predates Christianity, and no names were inscribed on them, their presence in Christian burials might indicate knowledge of this passage and signaled preparation for the new name. 56. Mark Handley, Death, Society and Culture: Inscriptions and Epitaphs in Gaul and Spain, AD 300–750, BAR International Series 1135 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2003), 175. 57. Lynda L. Coon, Dark Age Bodies: Gender and Monastic Practice in the Early Medieval West (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2011), 216–46, esp. 228ff. 58. “Qui autem anulum habet et patrem habet et filium et spiritum sanctum, quia signavit deus . . . Ergo signati sumus, sicut ut legimus: credentes inquit signati estis spiritu sancto,” quoting Ephesians 1:13. Ambrose of Milan, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam, bk. 7. 232 (p. 294). Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 7.iii. 22: “Just as through baptism we die and are reborn in Christ, so we are sealed by the spirit, which is the Finger of God and a spiritual seal” (p. 159). 59. Drawing on earlier authors, Bede, On the Nature of Things, 31 (p. 92), explained how a rainbow is formed, likening it to the way the sun’s ray bounces back from a cloud “like wax giving back the image of a ring.” 60. On this process, see Bonnie Effros, Caring for Body and Soul: Burial and the Afterlife in the Merovingian World (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 61. Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak, “Medieval Women in French Sigillographic Sources,” in Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History, ed. Joel T. Rosenthal (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 10. 62. Charte Artem/CMJS n°4509, Chartes originales antérieures à 1121 conservées en France, accessed March 29, 2012, http:​/​/www​​.cn​-t​​elma.​​fr​/or​​igina​​ux​/ch​​a​rte4​​509/. This database is available through the Medieval Academy’s digital database library. 63. The decline in papyrus availability may factor into a decline in seals and seal rings; however, it should be noted that wax seals could be affixed to parchment scraps as well as to papyrus, and seal rings were not necessarily tied to authenticating written documents. 64. See Anthony Cutler, “The Right Hand’s Cunning: Craftsmanship and the Demand for Art in Late Antiquity,” Speculum 72 (1997): 971–94, on the importance of examining “the relationship between the way things came into being in late antiquity, and the degree to which contemporary commentators understood the nature of both substances and the objects fabricated from them.” As noted by Cutler (p. 981), “It is the nature of the market in objects made ‘on spec,’ and bought without benefit of a prior order, that remains darkest to us, precisely because such trade involved no documents.”

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65. Garipzanov, Graphic Signs, 199–241. 66. Lawrence Nees, “‘Merovingian’ Illuminated Manuscripts and Their Links with the Eastern Mediterranean World,” in East and West in the Early Middle Ages, ed. S. Esders, Y. Fox, Y. Hen, and L. Sarti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 297–317. 67. Deloche, Le porte des anneaux, 66–67, identified a group of references that cluster around the first decades of the seventh century: Isidore of Seville, De ecclesiasticis officiis, II, v, 12; Decretal of Pope Boniface IV at 3rd Council of Rome in 610 and 4th Council of Toledo, December 633. 68. Engraved gems were recorded as having been part of the burials of Bishop Agilbert of Paris, c. 670, and the seventh-century Bishop Ebergisil of Meaux, as noted by Deloche, Le porte des anneaux, 67. 69. Bedos-Rezak, “Medieval Women,” 10.

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Index

Page references for figures are italicized Adam and Eve, 194; creation of, 234; Fall of, 218, 233; iconography, 214, 229–30, 233; Irenaeus fragment XIV, 218–19, 226, 234; Life of Adam and Eve, 217, 224, 225, 229. See also, marriage, division of labors; marriage, harmony anthropophagy, x, 53, 67n1; of children, 53, 57, 59; as divine punishment, 54; The Epic of Atrahasis, 56; The Jewish War, 56, 68n23; by mothers, 57–60 Aphrodite, 107, 108, 221 Aramaic, 113, 148 ascetic life: celibacy, 4, 8, 10–11, 19; cultural expectations for women, 9, 17, 18; holiness, 8; marriage, 8–9, 12–13; resistance to, 235, 249n123 Asherah, 74, 80; cult object, 81, 85; in Israelite worship, 79, 81, 88n44. See also Hebrew Bible, Asherah Assyrian reliefs: Siege of a City, 61, 63, 64, 65; of war captives, 62, 63, 66 Assyrian wall paintings, 61, 62 authorship, female, xivn1, 58, 216, 217; De laudibus Christi, 217; Proba, 217–18, 224, 235 authorship, male, vii, ix, xvn4, 130, 216

Balty, Janine, 170, 183, 184 belts, 280–81, 295n82, 296n91 Book of the Dead, 28 bridal chamber, 190–91, 193–94, 207n147 Brigham Young University Symposium, vii–viii, ix Byzantine church, 261. See also Mary cannibalism. See anthropophagy catacombs, 16, 126, 203n75. See also Victoria sanctimonialis of Dougga chastity: of deacons, 265, 288nn33–34; in partnerships, 206n129. See also ascetic life, celibacy Christianity, early, 5; iconography, 170, 174, 199n25; public conduct, 7, 17. See also Greco-Romanism, and Christianity Christianity, Saint Thomas, xii, 170, 193, 198n10 Christianity, Valentinian, xii, 170, 191, 193, 196, 198n9; Excerpts of Theodotus, 192; rituals, 181, 195–96, 207n147. See also bridal chamber; Gnosticism; marriage, divine couple Chrysostom, John, 190 Cicero, 3

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circle within square, 182–84, 193, 203n76. See also mosaic floor panels, Nuptial Banquet panel Clement of Alexandria, 189, 192, 308. See also philosophy, and Christianity comparative approach. See interdisciplinary approach curtains. See veils deaconess, 10, 264; clothing of, 265, 275; as holy spirit, 10; ordination of, 11, 264, 267, 289nn47–48; ritual participation, 21n16, 21n22, 288n36, 289n41 Deir el-Balah cemetery, x, 25. See also New Kingdom Egypt divorce, 2 duat (underworld), 31, 32 Dunand, Maurice, 169, 197n3 Dura Europos synagogue, 97, 98; ceiling tiles, 100–101; floor plan, 101, 102. See also synagogues, female participation in Dura Europos wall paintings, xi, 118n26; “Elijah Restores the Widow’s Son,” xi, 107, 109;“Ezekiel in the Valley of the Dry Bones,” 109, 110; “Infancy of Moses,” xi, 106; interpretations of, 103, 115n3; personal identification with, 98, 104, 107–8, 118n22; “Purim Panel,” xi, 102–4 Egeria, 11, 14 Egyptian deity: Bastet, 30, 32; Bes, 28, 29, 31, 33; Hathor, 32, 35, 37; Osiris, 32; Ptah, 36; Ra, 30, 37; Tait, 74 Elisabeth, 274, 280 Endymion, 133, 134 epigraphic evidence, 148, 158 eroticism, 34, 40; girdles, 34–35. See also Egyptian deity, Hathor; grooming Esther, 102, 103, 118n24; hybrid identity, 104; leadership, 104, 119n29. See also Dura Europos wall paintings, “Purim Panel”

Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, 188–89 Eve, xii, 191; images of, 213, 214, 227, 242n60; negative portrayal of, 216, 266; positive portrayal of, 217–19, 235; prayer, 225, 244n78; relatability, 234–35 female gaze, xi, xii, 128, 137, 219. See also Projecta Casket; Roman sarcophagi fertility, 34, 40, 104, 107, 150. See also Aphrodite; Egyptian deity, Bastet; Egyptian deity, Hathor; grooming; Tyche funerary artifacts, xi, 321; Arles “Trinity” Sarcophagus, 232–34; gold-glass medallion, 226, 227; Velletri Plaque, 230, 231–32. See also Deir el-Balah cemetery; Palmyrene relief portraits; Roman sarcophagi gender equality, 18, 216, 248n117 gestures: in Euteknia panel, 190, 194; joining hands, 179–80, 194, 218, 229, 230; orant posture, 225–26, 232; reclining figures, 203n75; speech, 216, 244n84, 266, 268–69, 277, 291n52; Venus pudica, 220, 221, 230, 244n81, 248n117. See also Palmyrene relief portraits, pudicitia Gnosticism, xii, 170, 187, 204n93 Gospel of Philip, 187, 193, 195, 196. See also Christianity, Valentinian Gospel of Thomas, 187. See also Christianity, Saint Thomas Greco-Romanism, xii, 178; and Christianity, 185, 188, 198n13, 203n84 grooming: baldness, 39; cosmetics, 35; hairstyles, 228, 246n98; mirrors, 35, 36, 40; razors, 37, 38; shaving, 37–39; spoon, 34; wigs, 37, 39 Hand of God, 109, 110. See also widow, of Zarephath hare, 183, 184. See also fertility

Index

Hebrew Bible: anthropophagy, x, 53; Asherah, 80; prophetesses, 91n79; siege warfare, 53; weaving, 73 Hellenistic style, xii, 104 Hens-Piazza, Gina, 58, 60 heresy, 174, 192, 195 holiness, 2, 8, 10; belonging to God, 4; holy ground, 16, 126; of images, 174; of persons and objects, 7, 14, 113; through ritual, 113. See also ascetic life; Nazianzen, Gregory, family of home: hospitality, 173; worship, 174–75 Huldah, xi, 71, 85; connection to Asherah, 91n84; connection to YHWH, 83; family of, 82, 84; prophetic authentication, 81, 83, 92n98. See also sêp̄ er hatōrāh (Book of the Law) Hurcombe, Linda M., 55 Hylen, Susan, 18 iconography, interpretation of, 215 identity transferal, 41–42 identity transformation, 42 idolatry, 81, 82 Ignatius of Antioch, 10, 178 interdisciplinary approach, viii, ix, 40, 55 Irenaeus of Lyon, 191–93, 195 Jesus Christ, 228, 282; body of, 192, 274; Christ-Logos, 233; redemption through, 233; virga, 228 jewelry, 28, 155; amulets, 28, 29, 30; carnelian, 29, 30–31; earrings, 155; gold, 32, 33, 309, 328n26; seal rings, 309, 311, 314; signet rings, 31, 32, 33. See also monogram rings Jewish artistic tradition, 97, 115n2 Karras, Valerie, 264–65, 266 King Josiah, 79; reformation, 71, 81, 83–84

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the Levant, 31, 41 the Levant, cult sites in, 75; Kadesh Barnea, 77; Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, 76; Meggido cult, 78; Tel eṣ-Ṣafî/Gath, 77, 78, 79; Tel MiqneEkron, 77; Tel Qasile, 77; Tel Ta’anach, 78. See also textiles, preservation of MacMullen, Ramsay, viii male gaze, 130, 220 marriage: celebration of, 190, 191, 193; divine couple, 195, 196; division of labors, 215, 233; harmony, 218, 230–31; mixed, 2, 6; spiritual marriage, 206n129. See also circle within square Mary, xii, 257; depictions of, 258, 259, 260, 274; as provider of the Eucharist, 258, 261, 271, 282; relatability, 269; temple, 262–63, 263. See also priestly motherhood material culture: definition of, ix; and gender, vii, 55; from Syria, xii material religious expression, 71, 83, 85, 86n3. See also weaving Mediterranean, xiii, 5–6, 199n25 mirrors, 175–76, 196, 201n61, 222, 242. See also grooming, mirrors monogram rings, xiii, 303, 304, 311, 325n3; Arnegundis ring, 317, 318, 330n43; Berteildis ring, 317, 318; gender, 307; preservation of, 306; as religious ornament, 305, 313, 323 mosaic floor panels, 169, 173, 315; arrangement of, 172, 173, 200n42, 201n56; cultic ritual/initiation, 181; Euteknia panel, 176, 200n44; Nuptial Banquet panel, 182, 184; Peleus and Thetis panel, 179, 180 mosaics, 272, 274, 276, 278–79 mothers, role of, 177; childbearing, 266, 281; self-sacrifice, 65–66, 283; in warfare, 54, 56–57, 63 mourning behavior, 125, 128, 139; funerary rituals, 130, 138; garlands,

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130–31, 132, 133, 142n39; lamps, 133, 134, 136; mother, 130 museums, Japanese: Hirayama Ikuo Silk Road Museum, 147, 151, 153; Matsushita Museum of Art, 153, 154, 156; Okayama Orient Museum, 147, 149, 150, 151 Nazianzen, Gregory, family of: Gorgonia (sister), 8–9; Nonna (mother), 8, 9 Neoplatonism, xii New Kingdom Egypt, 32; afterlife, 28, 31, 32, 37; cultural identity, 27, 33, 41; gender identity, 27, 30, 35, 39, 40; personal adornment, 26–27, 321; religious identity, 27, 30, 37; socioeconomic status, 27, 28, 36, 37, 39, 40. See also textiles; grooming; jewelry Niobid Sarcophogus, xi, 126–28, 129. See also Roman sarcophagi nudity, 106, 120n36, 223, 230, 246n103. See also Venus pudica; Pharaoh’s daughter oil lamps, 136, 214, 220, 223; conversion, 224; female duty, 221, 224; five wise maidens, 224; prayer, 224–25 paganism. See Greco-Romanism Palmyra, Syria, 147 Palmyrene relief portraits, xi, 148, 159; dating of, 155, 157; headdresses, 154; jewelry, 155; keys, 151, 152, 153; L’wmt, 154, 156; pudicitia, 149, 150, 151, 154, 155, 162n42; spindle and distaff, 149, 158; veils, 151, 154, 161nn28–29 Palmyrene women, role of, 147, 148, 160; domestic, 149, 150; finances, 148, 158; funerary rites, 152. See also Palmyrene relief portraits Parthian art, 104

patriarchy, 84, 270 patronage, 171, 186; female, 16, 169. See also Roman sarcophagi, female patronage Paul, teachings of: celibacy, 11; divorce, 2; holiness, 3, 4, 6, 18 pearls, 282 personification, female, 178–79, 195, 207n150. See also mosaic floor panels, Euteknia panel Pharaoh’s daughter, 106 Philip “the Arab,” 171 philosophy: and Christianity, 189–90; Neoplatonism, 170, 186 pomegranates, 35, 73 pregnancy, 29, 68, 274, 281. See also Egyptian deity, Bes presbytera, 12; Leta from Calabria, 12–13; Vitalia, Flavia, 12 priestess, Egyptian, 39; of Hathor, 37, 42. See also grooming, baldness; textiles, bleach priestly motherhood, xiii, 259, 277, 281 priestly vestment: Egyptian, 74; Israelite, 73–74, 77, 90n73. See also textiles, sha’atnez (wool-and-linen blend) Projecta Casket, 128, 181, 203n84, 221–22 prophet, 4 prophetess, 83, 91n79, 217; Asia Minor Montanist, 7–8. See also Huldah rituals: funerary, 125–26, 132–34, 229; in households, 169, 171, 224; marriage, 181–82, 193, 202n64, 218. See also Christianity, Valentinian, rituals Roman matrona, xi, 155, 158 Roman rule, Jewish resistance of, 98, 116n7 Roman sarcophagi, xi, 125; cult sites, 127, 136; Endymion sarcophagus, 134–35; female patronage, 127, 128, 135; installation of, 137; Ipogeo delle

Index

Ghirlande, 132; Niobid Sarcophagus, xi, 126–28, 129; Orestes sarcophagus, 130, 136; Tomba della Medusa, 126; Tomb of the Haterii, 133, 134. See also presbytera roses, 183, 184, 202n73 sacred space, xi, 98, 126; human participation, 98, 114 Saint Thecla, 14; cult of, 14–16; sanctuary of, 15 scrolls, 177, 200n46, 227, 232 Selene (moon goddess), 133, 134 sêp̄ er hatōrāh (Book of the Law), 83, 86n3, 90n74, 91n86 Shahba-Philippopolis, Syria, xii, 169– 70, 172, 185. See also mosaic floor panels shells, 282 siege warfare, x, 60; Babylon siege of Jerusalem, 56; Ben-Hadad of Aram, 57; escape, 63, 65; rape, 68. See also Assyrian reliefs; Assyrian wall paintings Smith, Jonathan Z., 97, 111; theory of emplacement, 97, 111, 113. See also sacred space Socrates, 189 speech, 226 symbolic interpretation, 187 synagogues, female participation in, 99; benefactors, 99; Jerusalem temple, 83, 85; separate seating, 100–101, 117n18 Syria, xii, 188 Tadmor. See Palmyra, Syria Tertullian, 7, 195, 208nn152–54; on Eve, 216, 239 textiles, xi, 39; bleach, 41; and holiness, 74; linen, 40, 41, 46n67, 73, 74; preservation of, 39, 75; production

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of, 72, 149, 270; in rituals, 74; sha’atnez (wool-and-linen blend), 73, 77; wool, 41, 73, 270, 273 textual religious worship, 84; and scribal authority, 84, 85 Theodosius, 188 tomb, 118. See Deir el-Balah cemetery Torah, 113; niche, 111, 112, 120n47; reading of, 113, 116n9 torches, 181 Tyche (goddess), 104, 105, 106 veils, 280, 298n100; parapatesma, 177– 78, 194. See also Palmyrene relief portraits, veils Victoria sanctimonialis of Dougga, 16, 17, 18 viewer, 175, 186; interpretation, 179; sight, 199n36; transformation of, 175, 186, 196 weaving: and female deity, 74, 160n14, 160n19; loom weights, 75, 76, 77, 78, 88n37; as religious expression, 73, 85; womanhood, 71. See also Asherah; textiles; the Levant, cult sites in widow, 21n15; of Ephesus, 133; funerary responsibilities, 135; remarried, 6; of Zarephath, 107, 109, 110. See also Dura Europos wall paintings, “Elijah Restores the Widow’s Son” women: enslavement of, 62; as guides, 186, 188; learning of, 227–28; liberation of, 19–20; as protectors, 102, 105, 108; subordination of, 20, 85, 160n21, 244n78; who resist authority, 102 Yahwistic religion, 81, 85 Yasin, Anne-Marie, 98, 111

About the Contributors

Lincoln H. Blumell is an associate professor in the Department of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Calgary, University of Oxford, and University of Toronto. He specializes in Early Christianity and Greek and Coptic papyrology and epigraphy. He has published three books: Lettered Christians: Christians, Letters, and Late Antique Oxyrhynchus (Brill, 2012); Christian Oxyrhyhnchus: Texts, Documents, and Sources (Baylor University Press, 2015), with T. A. Wayment; and Didymus the Blind’s Commentary on the Psalms 26:10–29:2 and 36:1–3 (Brepols, 2019), with T. W. Mackay and Gregg Schwendner. He is also the author of numerous articles. Amanda Colleen Brown holds a master of arts in the Bible and the Ancient Near East from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she studied Akkadian, Modern Hebrew, and Israelite popular religion as it relates to women’s narratives. She previously graduated from Brigham Young University with a bachelor of arts in Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Her research interests include the functional role of death narratives in religious texts, textual analysis of nineteenth-century hymns, and women’s religious experience.  Mark D. Ellison is an associate professor in the Department of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University. He received a PhD in early Christianity and early Christian art from Vanderbilt University, and an MA in religious studies (Bible and archaeology) from the University of South Florida. With Robin M. Jensen (University of Notre Dame) he is co-editor of  The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Art (2018), and serves as

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About the Contributors

co-chair of the Art and Religions of Antiquity program unit of the Society of Biblical Literature. Maria Evangelatou is a professor in the Department of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches courses on ancient Greek, Byzantine, and Islamic visual culture. Her research and publications focus on Byzantine visual culture with special attention to Marian iconography and gender, as well as illuminated manuscripts and the interrelation of word and image. A secondary research interest focuses on the theological and devotional implications of the work of El Greco. She is the author of A contextual reading of Ethiopian crosses through form and ritual: kaleidoscopes of meaning (Gorgias Press 2018). Sarah E. G. Fein is a PhD candidate in the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Department at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. She is currently serving as a Dissertation Scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center. Her areas of interest include Hebrew Bible, Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity, and women and gender studies. Sarah’s dissertation is on the reception history of biblical mothers in early Jewish art and literature. She lives in Northampton, MA with her husband and two daughters. Kerry Hull is a professor in the Department of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University, and formerly a professor at Reitaku University, Japan, and a lecturer at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and Hosei University, Japan. He received a PhD in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2003. His research interests include Mesoamerican epigraphy, Mesoamerican languages, Maya oral traditions and narratives, ceremonialism, Greek epigraphy, ethno-ornithology, and Polynesian linguistics. He most recently is the author of A Dictionary of Ch'orti' Mayan-SpanishEnglish (2016). He is co-editor of Parallel Worlds: Genre, Discourse, and Poetics in Contemporary, Colonial, and Classic Maya Literature (2012) and co-editor of The Ch’orti’ Maya Area: Past and Present (2009). Susannah M. Larry is assistant professor of biblical studies at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana. She earned her PhD in Hebrew Bible from Vanderbilt University, and has taught courses on the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Biblical Hebrew, Confronting Sexualized Violence in the Bible, and Feminist Theology and Biblical Interpretation. She is the author of the book, Leaving Silence: Sexualized Violence, the Bible, and Standing with Survivors. Sarah Madole Lewis is associate professor of art history at the Borough of Manhattan Community College—City University of New York. Her research

About the Contributors

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interests include Roman sarcophagi in their social contexts with a focus on the city of Rome and the Eastern Mediterranean.  Isabel Moreira is professor of history at the University of Utah, and James L. Clayton Research Professor (2020–2022). Her publications include Heaven’s Purge: Purgatory in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2010); Dreams, Visions and Spiritual Authority in Merovingian Gaul (Cornell University Press, 2000); co-editor with Margaret Toscano, Hell and Its Afterlife: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Ashgate, 2010); and co-editor with Bonnie Effros, The Oxford Handbook of the Merovingian World (Oxford University Press, 2020).  Carolyn Osiek taught for many years at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago, and is Charles Fischer Professor of New Testament emerita at Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University. She has published on topics of women in the church, second century, and social context of early Christianity, and continues to research and write in these areas.  Krystal V. L. Pierce is an assistant professor in the Department of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University. She received a PhD in Egyptian Archaeology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from UCLA and an MA and BA in Near Eastern Studies from UC Berkeley. Her research interests include Egyptian and Near Eastern cultural and social identities, personhood and gender, and foreign relations during the Late Bronze Age. She has excavated in Egypt and Israel and is currently the head registrar at the Tel Shimron Excavations in Israel and chair of the Archaeology of Egypt session at ASOR. Her most recent publication is the co-edited volume, Excavations at the Seila Pyramid and Fag el-Gamous Cemetery (Brill 2020). Catherine Gines Taylor is the Hugh W. Nibley Postdoctoral Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. She received a PhD in Art History from the University of Manchester, specializing in early Christian art and iconography. Her work is focused on the intersections of art, lay piety, Christian patronage, scripture, and patristic texts. More specifically, her current research centers on images of women within the late ancient Christian contexts of southern Gaul. She is the author of Late Antique Images of the Virgin Annunciate Spinning: Allotting the Scarlet and the Purple (Brill 2018), and several articles.