Читать книгу A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East онлайн
219 страница из 236
There survive also inscribed mosaics from the second and third centuries CE that raise important questions about the familiarity of Syriac speakers with Greco-Roman culture, mythology, and even literature, despite the language barrier between Greek and Syriac. The Euphrates Mosaic (228/229 CE) is inscribed in both Greek and Syriac and represents a personification of the river-god Euphrates surrounded by two symbolic female figures; they might represent Fecundity and an interpretatio graeca of the Syrian goddess Atargatis (Bm 1; see also ssss1). Another especially remarkable inscribed mosaic depicts a Greek mythological scene, the creation of mankind by Prometheus, where Zeus, overseeing the scene, is identified as “Maralahe” (Cm 11, Bowersock 2001). Furthermore, an especially impressive circle of mosaics reproduces selected scenes from the Iliad, with characters labeled in Syriac; the mosaics were produced at a time when no Syriac translation of this text is known to have circulated (or of any other piece of Greek classical literature for that matter), and Syriac speakers must have been aware of this text from Greek sources. The mosaics depict specific scenes from the Iliad, including 1.318–338, when Briseis is led away from Achilles, and 9.182–198, when Achilles and Patroclus receive the embassy of the Greeks in Achilles’s tent (Cm 3, Cm 4, Balty and Briquel-Chatonnet 2000). The mosaics with Syriac inscriptions from a villa recently discovered SW of Edessa and dating back to the first half of the third century CE include the representation of the myth of Achilles on Scyros (in the triclinium, together with other mythological scenes of dubious identification) and playful naked Erotes picking grapes from vines that develop out of craters; the scenes can be compared with iconography from Zeugma and Palmyra (Abdallah et al. 2020).