Hideo Ogawa

Mithras and Cybele

In the days of the Roman Empire, several Near Eastern deities were worshipped, among them being Mithras who was originally a Persian god. During the Hellenistic period, when Mithras was in Asia Minor, he met Cybele, a native mother goddess who possessed great fame.According to F. Cumont, Mithras was identified with Attis, a god of vegetation, who assumed the role as a young lover of Cybele. Thus, it was possible for the Mithras and Cybele sects to become friendly with each other with this cordial relationship continuing throughout the period of the Roman Empire until the triumph of Christianity.Over the years, Cumonts theory has been accepted by others including Graillot. However, all of Cumonts suppositions are mainly hypothetical and a new examination of materials shows that both sects were actually not on good terms with each other, although they were never antagonistic and opposed to each others beliefs. Also, in a wider sense, many other Oriental deities —including Mithras and Cybele— were largely independent of each other.

The Meaning and Origin of the Iconography of the Ritualistic Steatite Bowl from Tel Zeror, Israel

The third seasons work of the Japanese Expedition to Tel Zeror was carried out under the direction of Prof. Dr K. Ohata in the summer of 1967, when a piece of a broken steatite bowl was found in stratum IX (thel late tenth to the early ninth centuries B. C.). We were not able to delve into studying this piece in full in the report “Tel Zeror III” which was published in 1970.Here is the first half of our comprehensive survey of the parallels as well as the final result of the restoration of the Tel Zeror piece.It is very similar to those which are owned by the Museum fuer Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, and the National Museum, Copenhagen. Thus the hand with four fingers on the surface of the bowl was restored as the left foreleg of the lion-protoma which mounted the hollow “handle”. The statement in “Tel Zeror III” that the hand is “human” is now discarded. There has been found another type of the “human” hand (palm) decoration, but in fact it was also not human, but must have been devine.On the other hand, the chronological analysis of the decorative elements of the parallels from Syria and Palestine has led us to the conclusion that their original home was not Egypt, nor Canaan, nor Anatolia; that most elements came from the artistic motifs of Hyksos and Hurrians in the Bronze Age; that they were synthesized in North Syria in the Early Iron Age under the strong influence of the decorative idea of the Urartu and Luristan arts.The cardinal points which are to be discussed in the second half of our study will be: that the ritual for which these bowls were used was not incense burning but libation; that this Iron Age cult was Nordic and that for the worship of violence and fury; that the cult was imported by Aramaean and Neo-Hittite people to the land of Israel.

ON THE ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES OF THE NABATAEANS

The social and economic development of the Nabataean Kingdom was one of the most remarkable facts in the Hellenistic Near East, whose influence, direct or indirect, would be found especially in the amazing diffusion of Oriental merchants and ideas in the Roman Empire, and, on the other hand, the process of sedentarization illustrates a pattern of the progress of the ancient society, which is also useful for sociological studies.In my former article which appeared in the “Shigaku” (Journal of the Mita Historical Society, 33), I studied the birth of the flourishing kingdom from a tribal community in which they originally led a nomadic life, and asserted that its development was mainly due to its accustomed caravan trade. And the present paper treats the economic aspect of the kingdom in relation to its commercial activities and systems, and confirms that agriculture and cattle breeding were just a secondary cause of its prosperity.