Two Mithras-Attis terracotta from Kerch

TNMM 272 ↔ CIMRM 11 & 12

Tablet of terracotta. Together with the following No. from a grave at Glinitschtsche, Kertsch. Formerly at Leningrad, Ermitage, dep. Kertsch No. 893d; actually Museum Odessa (H. 0.139 Br. 0.105).

Mithras dressed in a pair of trousers and a jacket, leaving the stomach and genitals uncovered, keeps a buffalo-like bull under control with one knee, grasping one of its horns with the l.h. In his lifted r.h. he held the knife, which has got lost. On the reverse there is a triangular fire hole.

CIMRM 12

Terracotta tablet (H. 0.11 Br. 0.095). Since 1878 in the Ermitage at Leningrad, afterwards in Museum at Odessa.

Mithras dressed in the same outfit as on No. 11, kills the buffalo-like bull. He kneels on the back of the animal, grasping its horn with his left and holding out his r.h. to thrust the animal down. Head of the bull has been restored.

Cumont is of the opinion that both works are casts from moulds from Asia Minor.

Five small terracotta reliefs (14cm high), four of them very similar, were discovered in unknown circumstances in the 19th century at Panticapaea in Chersonese, now Kerch in the Crimea. They are now in the Odessa Archaeological Museum in Ukraine.

The example shown here depicts a child or adolescent dressed in an oriental costume and wearing a Phrygian cap. With his left knee he holds a fallen bull, whose head he pulls back with a horn, and prepares to strike it, his right arm raised, armed with a knife, now broken, in a sacrificial posture. The tunic tied across the chest and the open trousers reveal the figure's abdomen and sex.

The date of this terracotta (between the 1st and 2nd centuries BC) and the identity of the figure depicted (Mithra, Mithra-Attis, Attis, even Eros?) divide modern scholars and raise the question of the Mithraic nature of this artefact. The absence of relevant iconographic units (the dog, the scorpion, the serpent), the god's costume and his gestures seem to prevent us from seeing it as a local variant, even if tinged with iconographic hybridisation, of the tauroctony scene as it had become established in the Empire at the end of the 1st century AD.

This particular case, selected among others, raises the question of how to identify a series of documents, whether they belong to Mithraic iconography and, consequently, how to integrate them into repertoires and studies on the subject.