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Monumentum

Serapis head from Mérida

This head of Serapis from Cerro de San Albín may be unrelated to Mithras worship.
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The New Mithraeum
8 Feb 2022
Updated on May 2026

TNMM 470 ↔ CIMRM 783

Marble head (H. 0.30), found in 1902. Mus. Merida, Inv. No. 84.

Head of Serapis with long, wavy hair and beard. Round the hair a fillet. The head is flat on top and therefore must have carried a modius.

Head of Serapis in white marble. Plenty of hair and beard with disorderly curls. On the top of the head there is a horizontal cut to place the modius, which has disappeared. The eye sockets are empty (Clem. Alex. Protrep. IV, 48). Found at Cerro de San Albín in 1902. Date: middle of the 2nd century AD.

Linner suggests a Saturn-Serapis syncretism to place this statue in the context of the higher degree of Mithraism. However, given the accumulation of statues of gods of different origins, the Cerro de S. Albin seems to have been a hiding place for sacred images. The size of the statue suggests that it was a cultic icon in the sanctuary of the Nilotic gods, which undoubtedly existed in Emerita.

CIMRM II 783

García y Bellido in BAH CXXXIX, 1956, 61ff § 10 and Pl. XII.

References

Paris in RA XXIV, 1914, II No. II and fig. 9; Leite de Vasconcellos, Religoes, III, fig. 154; Melida in BAH 1914, 445 No. I and PI. II; Cat. Badajoz, No. 1081; Liailez, Mer., 187 No. 84 and fig. 65; Pidal, Hist. Esp. II 437 and fig. 242; Garcia y Bellido, Culto, fig. 20. See fig. 215.

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