Профиль

I initially thought it was a sphinx like on the helmet of Athena Parthenos, but I think you could be right. It’s very worn.

That’s a good point. Some Roman authors certainly thought the priests weren’t so moral! I think it was likely ordinary water unless temples kept small amounts like some people today have flasks of water from Lourdes or the River Jordan. This practice could be linked to the New Year Festival.

These vases may have contained ‘Nile water’, which is intriguing when you consider how prosaic river water is. There was a shrine to Hydreios in Delos (late second century BCE) but I suspect the hand covering is Roman, when we see another flowering of the Egyptian cults across the Empire.

Good point. There are surviving images with similar details from other Isis / Serapis temples outside Egypt suggesting it was common if not universal practice.

Great article. Another interesting piece of evidence, similar to the Berenike Buddha, is the so called Pompeii Lakshmi, an ivory figurine possibly from Bhokardan in India

Pompeii Lakshmi - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

It’s cosier than the London one. You can imagine all the people packed in the space.

The mosaics and wall paintings are amazing. You really get a sense of the ancient town.

It’s worth it. If ever you’re in Rome, it’s fairly way to get there by public transport

I thought I would be done by lunchtime and stumbled out at 5pm, feeling I hadn’t seen it all.

It’s towards the southern edge of the city centre. If you’re getting metro you can go via Piramide. Also relatively close to Centrale Montemartini.

It’s quite a statement: “I’m so rich I got gout, that I had to dedicate this expensive sculpture.”

It’s an intriguing phenomenon. Animal rearing and mummification appears to have been done on an industrial scale at this date, which implies it was profitable, possibly benefitting local communities beyond the temples, but the beliefs/ reasons are harder to ascertain.

The text is graffiti but the image is often read as someone voiding under divine protection.