Session 4: Sat. April 2, 2:00-3:45 pm EST

النحت والكتابة واللمس والتجويف: حاسّة اللمس والتفاعليّة في كنيس دورا-أوروبوس

Karen Stern Gabbay

Paintings from the Dura-Europos synagogue have dominated scholarship of the building since its discovery. Reasons for this are abundant and include the murals’ striking depictions and interpretations of biblical stories, which retain rare information about Jewish culture and ritual life in third-century Syria. Yet disproportionate attention to these paintings, in aggregate, has prioritized the ocular dimensions of synagogue life, re-inscribing visuality as the primary medium for historical engagement with the space. But seeing was not the only means of experiencing devotional landscapes in Dura. Indeed, there were other sensory means by which visitors to the Dura synagogue meaningfully engaged with their elaborately decorated surroundings to perceive, encounter, and interact with the holy and with each other. This paper re-imagines this reality, by considering the significance of additional types of sensory experiences historically conducted in the Dura synagogue, as mediated through properties of touch. It argues that the reconsideration of archaeological evidence for ancient peoples’ interfaces with the walls and architecture of the synagogue, as documented by unofficial inscriptions, drawings, and modifications to the paintings, allows us to theorize, in new ways, about ancient relationships—not only between visitors and the paintings they regarded— but also between visitors and the tactile dimensions of their built environment.

مناقشة المسائل المحلّيّة في دورا-أوروبوس: العمارة المسيحيّة في السياق

Camille Angelo and Joshua Silver

At the ancient city of Dura-Europos, private homes were architecturally adapted across the late second and third century by different religious groups to serve the needs of their communities. Although the Christian Building, Synagogue, and Mithraeum all began as domestic structures and share a similar architectural development, the former’s domestic origins have received unique attention and ongoing emphasis. This has been cultivated and maintained across decades of scholarship, both through the use of terminology that presupposes a quasi-domestic character for the building, and in the efforts to situate the structure within a model of Christian architecture that endorses a direct progression from house-church to basilica. Through a critical reexamination of the archeological and material evidence for the architectural adaptations made to the building by a Christian community in the third century, this paper argues that the emphasis does not align with material reality, but is a product of modern assumptions about ancient space. A quantitative analysis of the architectural adaptations indicates that, following its renovation to accommodate Christian community use, the building did not bear a material relationship with the specific domestic structure that had preceded it. Comparison of three-dimensional reconstructions and daylight simulations of the structure before and after renovation reveal that the architectural adaptations reconfigured the space such that visitors could use and experience it in ways that were categorically different from its domestic antecedent and, importantly, effectively divested it of the key architectural features that constituted Durene household space. Disentangling the material reality of the structure from modern imaginings, the Christian Building emerges a product of its unique built environment. The long-held view of the structure as occupying a pivotal place in a seamless trajectory of Christian architectural development is thereby shown to be untenable, while the contextual approach emerges as fruitful not only for fresh consideration of early Christianity and ritual space, but for understanding religion and the built environment at Dura-Europos more broadly.

المجتمعات العسكريّة من الشرق إلى الغرب: فهم السياقات المحلّيّة والتجاوبات في دورا-أوروبوس وفيندولاندا

Elizabeth M. Greene and Craig Harvey

Through decades of exploration, both Dura-Europos and Vindolanda have offered unique and extraordinary opportunities to understand better the Roman army and the lives of soldiers serving Rome. From the Vindolanda tablets to the Dura papyri, together with dozens of exceptional artifacts practically unknown elsewhere, the sites have pushed scholars to reconsider how the Roman military operated in both war and peace. At the same time, the sites are extraordinarily different, which allows a robust comparison and the possibility to see a range of responses to community organization in the military environment. While Vindolanda was a purpose-built fort and extramural settlement on the northwest frontier in Britannia, Dura was a multicultural city on Rome’s eastern frontier with an urban military base, which integrated the army into the fabric of the city in a way that was mostly unseen in the western empire. Nevertheless, the two sites speak to the same questions concerning the composition of the extended military community and how that population supported the Roman army and its soldiers. This paper looks at the comparable archaeological evidence from both sites to understand how their unique situations directed the organization and composition of the communities that surrounded the Roman army. The differences between the two sites highlight the necessity to incorporate local contexts and responses into our understanding of life in the empire, while the similarities may reveal uniformity in military organization and social reality.