64 Friday, December 21, 1979 THE DETROIT EWISH NEWS Historic Dura-Europos Archeology in Goldman-Edited Volume By DR. BERNARD Prof. Hopkins recalls the discovery of the synagogue at Dura-Europos: "I clearly remember when the foot of fill dirt still cover- ing the back wall was undercut and fell away, ex- posing the most amazing succession of paintings! Whole scenes, figures and objects burst into view, bril- liant in color, magnificent in the sunshine. Though dwarfed against the vast backdrop of the sky and the tremendous mass of the em- bankment, they seemed more splendid than all else put together." Prof. Hopkins stared in astonishment as his Arab workman cleared the dirt from the synagogue wall that had been hidden for more than 1,600 years. No one had dreamed of finding a synagogue of the Third Century CE still standing on the eastern edge of the Syrian desert. And no one would have believed possi- ble that an ancient oriental synagogue would have walls covered with paint- ings drawn from Exodus, Numbers, I Samuel, the Book of Esther, I Kings, etc. The discovery and ex- cavation in the 1930s of the border town of Dura-Europos precipit- ously perched on a cliff overlooking the Eup- hrates River are almost as exciting as its history. Hopkins weaves both stories together in "The Discovery of Dura- Europos," with 78 photo- graphs recording the rich Roman cameos, and Greek statues. The shopkeepers and craftsmen of Dura bar- gained and prayed in var- ious dialects of Greek, Pahlevi, Aramaic, Latin and Hebrew under the watchful eyes of Roman legionaries in the fateful Third Century CE. They must have been nervous troops, for the pax romana in Asia was very fragile. From the east, from across the Euphrates, came the saber rattlings of a new Persian dynasty, the Sasa- nian, that wanted to restore all Western Asia to the fief- dom of their Persian ances- tors — Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes and Artaxerxes. Western Asia was once again to be the Persian em- pire tinder the Sasian king Shaput. I. In the course of his western sweep of 256 CE he laid siege to Dura, stormed its walls, emptied its houses and streets, and returned it to the desert wastes. These changing for- tunes of Dura were painstakingly revealed month by month as the ar- cheologists dug out Roman baths, Parthian temples, Greek shrines, merchants' shops, a Christian baptis- tery, civic archives, and the armored skeletons of soldiers, still posed as they fell in the final onslaught against the city walls. In the course of this rich harvest of finds, a worker reported to Hopkins the jagged edge of a wall of painted plaster sticking out of the embankment piled up against the city fortifica- tions. Hopkins had the line of plaster followed, outlining the four walls of a very large room buried beneath. The room was in a residential section just to the north of the city gate. The workmen early West. A mixed were warned to dig out the population of Arabs, Sy- painted walls with utmost rians, Greeks Iranians, caution to guard against Romans and Jews raised their collapsing. Not too their families behind the long before, the lives of two city walls, prayed to their workmen were lost when a gods in their different wall they were working on temples, supplied the suddenly fell and buried troops moving in and out them. of the city, traded with Finally, by the last week the merchant caravans coming in from the des- of November 1932, suffi- cient dirt had been removed ert, bought and sold in the city's bazaar, and from the room to allow the buried their dead in un- dirt to be cut away from the derground tombs in the plaster face of one wall and to expose several panels of desert. painting. Like a frontier town in Hopkins and his early Kansas, Dura served amazed companions had as a way station, a rest stop, no idea what they had on the long highway be- found. There were troops tween East and West. dressed in Roman armor; Spices from India, silks probably the hall was from China, and furs from part of a Roman military Central Asia were traded temple. But then they across the counters of the slowly read an Aramaic souq for Egyptian glass, inscription between the One of Alexander the • Great's generals had founded the town as a mili- tary outpost and caravan stop, but his Greek suc- cessors were forced to relin- quish it as their holdings in Syria shrank. Parthian-Iranian troops marched into the walled town in the late Second Century BCE, occupying the fortress as a defensive shield for their expanding empire. A few hundred years la- ter, Roman commercial am- bitions in Asia dictated the need for a firm line of de- He recalls how Dura- fense along the Tigris and Europos was accidentally Euphrates Rivers. Thus, the rediscovered by a company citizens of Dura in the early of British troops retreating Second Century CE down the Euphrates when watched the Roman legions the Arabs broke into open troop down "Main Street," revolt in 1920. The soldiers take over the governor's had dug in for the night in palace, and begin to build the corner of some old ruins their barracks and temples. and found life-size figures The people of Dura adjusted painted on the plastered to their new, Roman over- lord, much as the Syrian walls. British headquarters sent Arabs adjusted to the Twen- tieth Century invasion of the American ar- cheologist James Henry archeologists. Dura had been a bustl- Breasted to investigate. He had but a single day to examine the paintings be- fore dashing for safety across the Syrian desert to the coast. What little he saw was sufficient to convince him that the crumbling for- tress held a previously un- read chapter in ancient his- tory. Dura-Europos received the full archeological treatment by teams of French and American ex- cavators for 12 years, four of them under the direction of Clark Hopkins. Over these years, he and his colleaguei uncovered the remains of a heavily walled border town that had weathered the MOSES political and military big border town, resem- storms that swept Western bling in many ways the Asia from 300 BCE until raw frontier towns of our 256 CE. GOLDMAN (Editor's note: Perhaps the most important in this century's archeological findings is described in the Yale University vol- ume "The Discovery of Dura-Europos." The volume describing the discovery was by Prof. Clark Hopkins. Its completion is credited to Dr. Bernard Goldman, _ director of the Wayne State University Press DR. BERNARD GOLDMAN and professor of art and finds and the day-to-day art history at the univer- life on a desert dig. sity.) The town had been abruptly put to death by invading Persians, abandoned to the desert sands, and had even lost its name, until the spade of the archeologist brought it back to a new life. An aerial view of Dura-Europos, Syria. PROF CLARK HOPKINS reveal more paintings: Jacob's dream, the plague of hail and fire over Egypt, Moses leading the children of Israel, the numbering of the tribes, the high priest Aaron before the Temple, Haman forced to lead the horse of Mordecai. In the center of the wall facing the Holy Land was revealed the niche that once held the Torah scrolls; painted above was Ab- raham sacrificing Isaac and the Temple menora. Today, the synagogue of Dura is world-famous as the earliest and only discovered synagogue to have a sanctuary covered with paintings based on the Bible. Unfortunately we know almost nothing else about the Jewish community there. The synagogue had been made from converted houses, and it must have stood in the center of the Jewish enclave on the west- ern edge of the town, sur- rounded by pious houses and shops. We know that in the first centuries CE, in lower Mesopotamia, there were important Jewish centers of learning. But we have no mention of the Jews of Dura from any sources other than the synagogue itself. Here lived a community of Jews who, although lost by his- tory entirely, now speaks eloquently across the chasm of centuries through the medium ' of their synagogue's paintings. Hopkins had the murals detached from their brick walls. He argued to have them sent to the museum at Yale University, but the Syrian government insisted on keeping them as national treasures. The paintings were shipped to Damascus where a museum was built around the reconstruction of the synagogue; and there the paintings remain today. The expedition's artist made exact copies of the murals while they were still at Dura, and these reproductions are now housed at Yale, the only record in America of the paintings. A combination of the American Depression and the first rumblings in ad- vance of World War II brought the excavations of Dura to a close in 1937. The outlines of entire city blocks of buildings yet unexca- vated can be traced under the sand. Dozens of un- explored tombs stretch out into the desert. Hundreds more fragments of writing on parchment and papyrus undoubtedly remain buried and unread. Probably the more impor- tant buildings of Dura were excavated in the 1930s. But, the completely unexpected discovery of the synagogue stands as constant reminder that one can never be sure of what lies buried under the sands. Clark Hopkins was forced to put down his pen in 1976 at the age of 80. His book, like the synagogue of Dura, is a tribute to his skills as archeologist, a volume for both layman and scholar. feet of a large figure: "Moses, when he went out from Egypt and cleft the sea." "A pity," writes Hopkins, "we could not, by some magic, tell that ancient Dura writer how much this inscription meant to us." Now the careful remov- ing of the debris began to Painting of the priest Aaron from the Dura- Europos Synagogue.