The roundel showing Bellerophon riding Pegasus and overcoming the Chimaera
The Chi Rho was the symbol adopted by the Roman emperor Constantine after his conversion to Christianity in the year 312. Our floor was almost certainly made about forty years later. (We can be pretty confident of that, because both Christ and Bellerophon wear their hair in the fashion of about 350.) And it was Constantine’s conversion at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge that made our floor possible. Before he converted, no villa owner would have dared display their Christian faith so brazenly – practising Christians had been persecuted. But now, everything was different. Professor Dame Averil Cameron, of Oxford University, explains:
The emperor Constantine is supposed to have seen a vision of a cross in the sky some time before the battle and seems to have converted himself to Christianity. Thereafter he never deviated from giving privileges to Christians, which was a complete overturning of what had been happening when Christianity had not even been legal. What he did was to give tax privileges to Christian priests, to intervene in Christian disputes, to declare Christianity a legal religion, to give money to Christian churches, to start building Christian churches. All of those actions together gave a great fillip to Christianity.
It was this fillip that must have given the owner of our villa the confidence to show us Christ looking out at us, full face, unequivocally a man of power. He wears the rich robes and the stylish hairdo that might well have been sported by the villa owner himself, but this is no local ruler and indeed no local god. The monogram makes it clear that what we are being shown is Jesus Christ. There is a further clue to this man’s true nature: on either side of Christ’s head the artist has put pomegranates. To any educated visitor this would recall at once the myth of Persephone carried off to the Underworld, rescued by her mother, and brought back to the land of the living. While in the Underworld Persephone had eaten seeds from a pomegranate, and so had to spend part of every year in darkness. Her myth is a great allegory of the cycle of the seasons, of death and rebirth, of descent into hell and return to the light. By the inclusion of this simple fruit the artist links Jesus to the pagan gods who had also been gods of dying and returning – to Orpheus, who went to the Underworld in search of Eurydice and returned, and to Bacchus, who was similarly associated with resurrection. This Dorset Christ thus pulls together all the hopes of the ancient world, and the deepest of all human hopes: that death is only part of a larger story that will culminate in abundance of life and even greater fruitfulness.
We don’t know what kind of room this mosaic was in. In grand Roman villas the room with the best mosaic was usually the dining room, but in this case that seems unlikely. There was no under-floor heating in the room and it faced north, so it would have been far too cold for Dorset dining. Normally the walls, as well as the floor, would indicate a room’s purpose, but the walls of this room are long gone. There is one intriguing possibility – the figure of Christ faces east, and there would have been just enough space for an altar between it and the wall. So this room might have been an early house church.
People have often worried about the idea of Christ being shown on a floor, and eventually this worried the Romans too. In 427 the emperor specifically banned the making of images of Christ on mosaic floors and ordered all existing ones to be removed. But by the time of this proclamation Britain had ceased to be a part of the Roman Empire. The villa at Hinton St Mary had probably been abandoned and so its floor remained untouched. On the whole, the withdrawal of Roman power spelt cultural catastrophe, but in this instance we should perhaps be grateful.
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Arabian Bronze Hand
Bronze hand, from Yemen
AD 100–300
In recent chapters we have been looking at images of the Buddha, of Hindu gods and of Christ. This object is a right hand, cast in bronze, but it is not the hand of a god: it is a gift to a god. It is a human hand, an almost literal manifestation of the expression ‘to give your right hand for something’. The man whose hand is represented here wished to put his hand into the hand of his particular god and to gain his favour – he even shared the god’s name, Ta’lab.
About 1,700 years ago there were far more religions in the world than today, and many more gods. Gods then tended to have strictly local responsibilities, not the worldwide embrace that we’re used to now. In Mecca, for example, before Muhammad, pilgrims worshipped in a temple that had a statue of a different god for every day of the year. Our latest object was a gift to one of those numberless Arabian gods that did not survive the coming of Muhammad. His full name was Ta’lab Riyam, meaning ‘the strong one of Riyam’. Riyam was a Yemeni hill town, and Ta’lab protected the local hill people. Yemen in the third century AD was a prosperous place, a hub of international trade that produced some of the most sought-after commodities for the vast markets of the Mediterranean, the Middle East and India. It was Yemen that supplied the whole Roman Empire with frankincense and myrrh.
The bronze hand once belonged to a man called Wahab Ta’lab. It is life-size, slightly smaller than my own hand, made of bronze and surprisingly heavy. It’s very lifelike but as it has no arm attached to it, it does look as though it’s been severed. But, according to Jeremy Field, orthopaedic and hand surgeon at Cheltenham General Hospital, this is not the case:
They have done the impression of the veins so carefully, which would probably go against its being some form of amputation. If a hand was amputated the veins would be empty because obviously the blood drains out. These are very carefully crafted and really quite beautiful. I’m sure this is a cast of a human hand, but there are certain things that are slightly odd about it. The nails are spoon-shaped, indicative of someone who might have had anaemia; the fingers are really thin and spindly, and also there is a deformity of the little finger, which I think has probably been broken at some stage.
It is small medical details like these that after 1,700 years of oblivion bring Wahab Ta’lab back to life. I find myself wondering how old he was – the veins on the back of the hand are very prominent – and above all wondering how he broke his little finger. Was it perhaps in battle? It doesn’t look as though it was in the fields – this doesn’t seem like the hand of a labourer. A fortune-teller of course would look at once for the lines on the palm of the hand; but the palm of this hand has been left unworked. There are lines, though, but they are on the back, and they are lines of text, written in an ancient Yemeni language which is linked both to modern Hebrew and to Arabic. The inscription tells us what this object was for and where it was displayed:
Son of Hisam, [the] Yursamite, subject of the Banu Sukhaym, has dedicated for his well-being this his right hand to their patron Ta’lab Riyam in his the god’s shrine dhu-Qabrat in the city of Zafar.
It is a pretty baffling series of names and places, but for historians trying to reconstruct the society and the religion of ancient Yemen almost all you have to go on is inscriptions like this one, and it does contain a great deal of information. When the inscription is teased out by experts, we learn that this bronze hand was dedicated at the temple of the god Ta’lab Riyam in a place called Zafar, high in the Yemeni hills. The owner of the hand, Wahab Ta’lab, tells us that he belongs to a clan and that that clan in turn is part of a larger tribal organization whose god was Ta’lab. So Wahab Ta’lab had obviously been named after his own god, and as a further sign of faith he has dedicated his hand publicly to Ta’lab at the centre of the city of Zafar, where it would have been seen along with other offerings of gold, bronze or alabaster representing human figures, animals, arrows and spear heads. In return for these offerings, the god Ta’lab was expected in general terms to bring good fortune to the donors.
Wahab Ta’lab must have been fairly well established to start with – only a man of real wealth could offer a bronze hand as beautifully made as this. But by the international standards of the day his whole society was wealthy. At the time our hand was made most of south Arabia was effectively one state
– a confederation of tribes like Wahab Ta’lab’s, known to historians as the Himyarite kingdom. Many monumental buildings survive along with numerous inscriptions, which are evidence of a rich, sophisticated and in some measure literate society. Yemen at this point was no backwater; it dominated the entrance to the Red Sea and with it the great trade route that linked Egypt and the rest of the Roman Empire to India. Writing before AD 79, the Roman author Pliny the Elder explained why the Yemenis were so rich:
The chief productions of Arabia are frankincense and myrrh … they are the richest nations in the world, seeing that such vast wealth flows in upon them from both the Roman and the Parthian empires; for they sell the produce of the sea or of their forests, while they purchase nothing whatever in return.
The ‘Incense Road’ was in its way as important for the exchange of goods and ideas as the Silk Road. Frankincense was used by the Romans in vast quantities and was the principal form of incense in the ancient world. The altar of every god in the Roman Empire, from Syria to Cirencester, burned with Yemeni incense. Myrrh had various uses: as an antiseptic for dressing wounds; for embalming – it was essential for Egyptian mummification; and in perfume. Although it’s not a strong fragrance, it has the longest life of any scent known. Indeed it was myrrh that lay behind ‘all the perfumes of Arabia’ that could not sweeten Lady Macbeth’s bloodstained hand, although they would certainly have washed and sweetened Wahab Ta’lab’s. Both frankincense and myrrh were very expensive. A pound of frankincense cost the equivalent of a Roman labourer’s salary for a month, and a pound of myrrh twice as much. So when the Magi bring frankincense and myrrh to the infant Jesus, they are bringing gifts not only fit for a god – they are also as valuable as their other gift, gold.
We have no other contemporary written sources from the Yemen apart from terse and opaque inscriptions like this one, but this hand, together with other pieces of bronze sculpture of similar quality and the ancient industrial slag recently discovered in south Arabia, show that Yemen was then a major centre of bronze production. Wahab Ta’lab’s hand is clearly the product of skilled metalworkers. If you look at it carefully you can see that it has been cast using the lost-wax technique (see Chapter 18) and is very beautifully finished at the wrist. So our bronze hand is definitely a complete object, not a fragment broken off from a larger sculpture.
Offering replica body parts to the gods was by no means peculiar to Arabia – you find them in Greek temples, in medieval pilgrim shrines and in many modern Roman Catholic churches, used to ask a god or a saint for bodily healing or as a thank you for recovery. Wahab Ta’lab’s hand speaks to us from a religious world that was dominated by local gods who looked after particular places and peoples. But it was a world that was not going to last; Arabian aromatics had powered the religious life of the pagan Roman Empire, but when that empire converted to Christianity and no longer needed frankincense for worship, the incense trade was dealt a massive blow, contributing to a collapse in the Yemen economy. Local gods like Ta’lab disappeared, perhaps because they were no longer delivering the promised prosperity. Suddenly, in the 370s, offerings to traditional gods just stopped and their place was taken by other gods with a wider, universal reach. These are the religions of today. Within the next couple of centuries the rulers of Yemen shifted from Judaism to Christianity to Zoroastrianism and finally, in 628, to Islam, which has remained the dominant religion of Yemen ever since. Local gods like Ta’lab no longer stood a chance in the face of great supra-national faiths.
But some elements of Ta’lab’s world did live on. We know, for example, that like many Arabian gods he was venerated through pilgrimages to his shrine. The religious historian Professor Philip Jenkins, of Pennsylvania State University, is fascinated by elusive survivals like this:
There are aspects of the old pagan Arabian religion which do live on into Islam and into Muslim times, especially in the practice of the pilgrimage, the Hajj, to Mecca. Muslims would absolutely reject any pagan context, obviously. They frame it in terms of Abraham and his story; but probably the events of the Hajj closely recall what would have happened in pagan times at that centre.
I’ve suggested that religions die. But perhaps they leave ghosts – and you can see across the Middle East many ghosts, many survivals of older religions in the newly successful religions. So, as you look at Islam, for example, you see many survivals from Christianity and Judaism – the Qur’an is littered with stories which make no sense except in terms of what the Christians and Jews of that time would have understood. Also, in terms of the buildings of Islam, the institutions of Islam and the mystical practices of Islam, you can see a great many of these ghostly survivals. Then as Islam spreads it carries on drawing in new kinds of pattern from older religions and evokes new ghosts.
Eventually that spreading Islam would conquer most of the world we’ve been looking at in this section; indeed it would conquer all the places from which our objects have come, except Dorset. Next I will be examining how those victorious Islamic rulers administered their conquests.
PART TEN
The Silk Road and Beyond
AD 400–800
The Silk Road from China to the Mediterranean was at its peak between AD 500 and 800, the time of the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ in western Europe. This trade route connected a revived Tang Dynasty China with the newly formed Islamic caliphate, which erupted from Arabia and conquered the Middle East and North Africa with astonishing rapidity. It was not only people and goods that spread along the Silk Road but also ideas. Along it, Buddhism spread from India into China and then beyond, into the newly formed kingdom of Korea. South Asian products even made their way to remote Britain, as we can see from the gems found in the Sutton Hoo burial. At the same time, but entirely separately, the first organized states in South America were flourishing.
Gold coin issued by Abd al-Malik showing an image of the caliph himself (top)
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Gold Coins of Abd al-Malik
Gold coins, minted in Damascus, Syria
MINTED AD 696–697
These two dinar coins sum up one of the greatest political and religious upheavals ever – the permanent transformation of the Middle East in the years following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. For Muslims, the clock of history was reset when Muhammad and his followers moved from Mecca to Medina. That event, the Hijra, which took place in the year 622 by Christian reckoning, marked for Islam the beginning of year 1 in a new calendar. For his followers, the Prophet’s teachings had so transformed society that time had begun again. The next few objects will show something of what the world looked like at this pivotal moment. They were all made in the years around Muhammad’s death in the Hijra year 11, or AD 632, and they come from Syria, China, England, Peru and Korea. Everywhere they give insight into the interaction of power and faith.
In the fifty years after the death of the Prophet, Arabian armies shattered the political status quo across the Middle East, conquering Egypt and Syria, Iraq and Iran. The power of Islam had spread as far in a few decades as Christianity and Buddhism had in as many centuries. In Damascus in the mid 690s the inhabitants of the city must have had a strong sense that their world was being totally transformed. Still in appearance a Christian Roman metropolis, Damascus, conquered by Muslim armies in 635, had become the capital of a new Islamic empire. The head of this burgeoning empire, the caliph, was remote in his palace, and the Islamic armies were segregated in their barracks, but the people in the bazaars and streets of Damascus were about to have their new reality brought home to them in something they handled every day – money.
In the early 690s Damascus merchants might not have understood that their world had changed permanently. Despite decades of Islamic rule they were still using the coins of their former rulers, the Christian Byzantine emperors, and those coins were full of Christian symbolism. It was quite reasonable to think that, sooner or later, the emperor would return to defeat his enemies, as he had several times before. But he did no
t. Damascus has remained a Muslim city to this day, and perhaps the most visible sign that this new Islamic regime was going to last was the change in the coinage.
A History of the World in 100 Objects Page 26
