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An Arabian Trinity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

G. W. Bowersock
G. W. Bowersock
Affiliation:
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
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Extract

In 1875 the collector and scholar Wilhelm Froehner published a short text incised on a gem of red jasper that had been offered to him in Nazareth for possible purchase. Of the six lines of this text only the first three have been much cited because they consist of three gods’ names, and reference has customarily been not to Froehner's original publication but to Louis Robert's quotation from it in his Collection Froehner of 1936. In making an apposite allusion to the Froehner gem in her excellent study of the cults of the Hawran in the Roman period, Dominique Sourdel was under the impression that the great nineteenth-century collector had actually acquired the piece; but Froehner himself reports unambiguously that he refused to pay the dealer's price. The object has therefore been lost to the world of scholarship. Nonetheless Froehner's transcription, entirely baffling to him in its second half, is worth resurrecting in the light of more recent discoveries in the Roman Near East. It bears upon several important cults among the inhabitants of provincia Arabia.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 79 , Issue 1-3: Christians Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Krister Stendahl on His Sixty-fifth Birthday , July 1986 , pp. 17 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1986

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References

1 Froehner, Wilhelm, Mélanges d'épigraphie et d'archéologie (Paris: Detaille, 1875) 52–53.Google Scholar

2 Robert, Louis, Collection Froehner (Paris: Éditions des Bibliothèques Nationales, 1936) 1.Google Scholar 115 n. 3, cited in Sourdel, Dominique, Les cultes du Hawran à l'époque romaine (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1952) 77Google Scholar n. 2, and in Bowersock, G. W., “The Arabian Ares,” Tria Corda: Scritti in onore di Arnaldo Momigliano (Como, 1983) 44 n. 3.Google Scholar

3 Sourdel, Les cultes, 77 (“recueilli jadis par Froehner”).

4 For full documentation on Theandrios/Theandrites see ibid., 78–81.

5 For Dusares, see Sourdel, Les cultes, 59–68 and, most recently, Kindler, A., The Coinage of Bostra (Warminster: Aris & Philips, 1983) 79–83.Google Scholar

6 Sourdel, Les cultes, 78–81. Cf. Cantineau, Jean, Le nabatéen (2 vols. in 1; Paris: Leroux, 1932) 2.Google Scholar 145 and Maurice Sartre, Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie, vol. 13: Bostra (Bibliothèque Archéologique et Historique 113; Paris: Geuthner, 1982) nos. 9084 and 9370.Google Scholar

7 Sourdel, Les cultes, 78–80.

8 See Bowersock, “Arabian Ares.”

9 Teixidor, Javier, The Pantheon of Palmyra (Leiden: Brill, 1979) 69–71Google Scholar with pi. XXI.1. A full and admirable account of Arṣu by Pascale Linant de Bellefonds may be found in Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, 2. 615–18.

10 The figure on the reverse of the coin which is no. 34 (p. 117) in Kindler's catalogue (above, n. 5) has been universally identified as Dusares, but comparison with the iconography of Arṣu, as it can be conveniently studied in the plates of the LIMC article (above, n. 9), proves incontrovertibly that he is the camel-rider. I make this point at greater length and with illustrations in my contribution to a Symposium on Caravan Cities (September 1985 at Petra).

11 In “Arabian Ares” I emphasized the novelty of the Arsapolis types in the coinage of Rabbathmoba but had not realized at that time that the element “Arsa” simply represented the Semitic name of the god Arṣu, which was pronounced locally as “Arsa.” For the pronunciation see J. T. Milik, Dédicaces faites par des dieux (Paris, 1972) 49.

12 No. 18 (p. 110) in Kindler.

13 No. 33 (p. 116), no. 47 (p. 122), no. 52 (p. 124) in Kindler. Coins of Philip show an anthropomorphic Dusares: Kindler no. 43 (p. 121). The simultaneity of the aniconic and anthropomorphic forms can be seen in two coins of Caracalla from 209/10, one with an anthropomorphic Dusares (Kindler no. 29 [p. 114]), the other with an aniconic Dusares (Kindler no. 30 [p. 115]). The obverse die for the two coins is probably the same: Spijkerman, Augusto, The Coins of the Decapolis and Provincia Arabia (Jerusalem: Franciscan, 1978)Google Scholar Bostra, 76 (nos. 37 and 38).

14 J. T. Milik, “Nouvelles inscriptions nabatéennes,” Syria 35 (1958) 227–51 esp. 248.

15 Naster, P., “Le culte du dieu nabatéen Dousarès reflété par les monnaies d'époque impériale,” Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Numismatics, Berne, September, 1979 (Wetteren, 1982) 1Google Scholar. 399–408, esp. 404.

16 Damascius, PG 103.1290. Cf. the good article on Theandrios by Höfer in Roscher's Lexicon

17 ILS 4349 (Pannonia); Robert, L., REG 49 (1936) 1–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar (Volubilis), reprinted in his Opera Minora Selecta 2. 939–44. On Manaf see also Sourdel, Les cultes, 84–85.

18 LPGL, p. 615 s.v. θεανδρίτης: “word coined to describe Christ as a compound being.”

19 Sourdel, Les cultes, 78 n. 2.