Tag: Information access

I’ve been looking at some of the entries for Syria in the CIMRM, the collection of all Mithraic monuments and inscriptions.  In particular the two altars at Sia have drawn my attention.  One is easy enough to deal with — I have a photo from the original publication, plus another from the web.

But the other one is hard to deal with.  It hadn’t been published when the CIMRM came out in 1955.  All that existed was a note in Syria journal in 1952 (thankfully online at Persee.fr), promising publication together with other monuments from the Hauran by a certain Mr.  Sabeh, who was an official at the Damascus Museum at the time.  It’s really pretty hard to find a publication from that!

Google searching suggests that possibly any publication was in “Annales Archéologiques de Syrie”, whatever that is, and that the person was a Joseph Sabeh.

But of course in 1956 the Suez incident took place, at which the USA attacked its own allies, Britain and France, and gave support to its enemy Nasser.  The collapse of British and French power left a vaccuum in the region which has never been filled, and caused 50 years of constant violence and tyranny, so that was a very strange policy for the US government of the time to pursue.  But it also meant the collapse of westernising initiatives in all these countries, and it may be that Mr Sabeh ended up hanging from a lamppost, as savagery returned to the region, rather than publishing anything.

It is annoying to be unable to find material of this kind.  Interestingly all the later references to these altars suggest to me that nobody else has ever seen the publication either!

Worse yet, I have found a photograph of a smashed and reassembled tauroctony, apparently held in the Damascus Museum.  There is no indication anywhere as to its origins, and I do not find it in CIMRM.

It’s all a sobering reminder that, while the web has made much information more accessible, it has largely done so within the region of Christendom, of western Europe and the US.  Outside that pale, little is available.

Great news – Behn’s Das Mithrasheiligtum zu Dieberg, De Gruyter (1928) has arrived.  Here’s an image of the title page as proof!

The discovery of the Mithraeum at Dieberg was something of a watershed.  I don’t know if there were monographs dedicated to individual Mithraea before then, but it set a pattern for such monographs in future.  Most notably these included the publications of Vermaseren of the splendid Mithraea of Marino and Barberini, with the amazing colour frescos.

Behn’s book was doubtless cutting-edge in its time.  But what struck me, as I looked through it, was how poor the quality of the photographs was.  They are small, grainy, and I don’t know how useful they are to the scholar.  Yet, most likely, these are the only available images of the lesser finds.

The Mithraeum in Germany tends to contain very elaborate tauroctonies, with side panels depicting what must be elements of the mythology of the mysteries of Mithras.  Unfortunately we can only guess from these what the story being told was.

So the German tauroctonies are important for the study of Mithras.  The Dieburg Mithraeum is one of these.

The volume itself is A4, and less than 50 pages, so I have made a copy of it for my own use.  I wish that I could share it; but the fact is that it will probably be in copyright when I am in my grave.  I doubt that more than a handful of people ever consult Behn’s tome; and, so long as we have oppressive copyright laws, that is the way that it will stay.

So why scan it?  Well, because I want to read it.  And I don’t read German very well.  Once the OCR has completed, I can copy and paste portions of the German text into Google Translate.  And that will give me a very fair idea of what most of the book — much of it probably waffle – says.

It has been long since I sat at my scanner on a Friday evening, and it has been a pleasant reminder of how I used to spend my weekends.  The time at my disposal grows less every year, or so it seems.  The night comes, when none of us can work.  But “ah, not yet, not yet”.^[1]

1. ^[1]Matthew Arnold, On the Rhine. From Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems, 1855.  Online here.↩

I’ve just added a page to my new Mithras site for CIMRM 1083.  This monument is perhaps the most complicated and well-preserved example of a carving of Mithras killing the bull.  It shows all sorts of events from his (unknown) mythology in side panels.  In other words, it’s a gem.  Vermaseren states that just about every book that ever mentions Mithras includes a photograph of it.  It’s famous.  It’s the classic representation.  It comes from the Nida-Heddernheim Mithraeum no 1, and apparently it’s in a museum in Wiesbaden.

Yet … I have been quite unable to find any photographs of it on the web!  Yes, the internet doesn’t have the classic relief of Mithras doing his Mithras-act.

It is worth reminding ourselves that what is online may be very skewed.  We tend to judge by availability.  Yet here we have an example where the internet is distorting the message, by omitting something really, really important.  It leads to the general question: how is the internet misleading us?

Here’s Vermaseren’s image of it, for your reference: