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Ancient History

Touching and Inscribing the Dura Europos Synagogue

Profile image of Karen B . SternKaren B . Stern

2025, Dura-Europos: Past, Present, Future, edited by Lisa Brody and Anne Hunnell Chen

https://doi.org/10.1484/M.SCA-EB.5.143377
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34 pages

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Abstract

Elaborate murals identified in the assembly hall of the Dura-Europos synagogue dominate scholarship of the building, partly because no other decorated walls survive from other ancient synagogues. Disproportionate attention to the appearances of these paintings, however, has borne unintended consequences, rein scribing the primacy of the visual and the power of visuality for ancient visitors. This chapter takes a distinct approach. Using scholarship from the history of the senses and the history of experience to differently interpret the remnants of visitors' tactile encounters with the synagogue, which include markings of graffiti and gouging they applied to its surfaces, it theorizes anew abut relationships--not just between ancient visitors to the synagogue and the paintings they regarded--but also between those visitors and the vibrant tactility, physicality, and plasticity of the spaces that surrounded them.

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Kara Schenk

AJS Review, 2010

The painted decoration in the Dura-Europos synagogue (Syria, 244–245 CE) is the most extensive surviving example of Jewish pictorial narrative in the ancient world. In its final stage, the decoration consisted of three bands of narrative panels that surrounded all four walls of the synagogue&#39;s assembly hall and led up to the Torah shrine at the center of the west wall (Figure 1). Imagery related to the Jerusalem Temple, including a symbolic image of the Temple on the Torah shrine, made up a significant part of the decoration of the Dura synagogue. There is, however, considerable scholarly disagreement as to how this imagery should be interpreted, particularly as part of a “programmatic” structure. Because the Temple image on the Torah shrine was positioned at the liturgical focal point of the synagogue and was created before the other surrounding narrative panels, the function of this image is a key component of the synagogue&#39;s decoration as a whole. Two contextualizing fact...

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Related topics

  • Ancient History
  • Cultural History
  • History of the Senses
  • Jewish History
  • Jewish - Christian Relations
  • Sensory archaeology
  • ancient Synagogues
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