Mithraic inscription from Anazarbus

TNMM 800 ↔ CIMRM 27b

During the Congress of Ancient Anatolian Studies in Istanbul 1952 M. Gough lectured about "a new Mithraic inscription from Anazarba". The monument has not yet been published.

One possible derivation for the name of Anazarbus might be from the Persian nabarza—invictus, an epithet of the god Mithras which has not infrequently been found in Mithraic inscriptions.

[…]

At south-west end of stadium, Bomos with projecting mouldings at top and bottom. H. 1.37; w. 0.47; th. 0.45; letters. 0.04-0.025. Smaller letters in last line only. Apart from the almost total erasure of the first 6 lines, the inscription is very badly worn.

1–5. [[- - - - - ]]
[[ὑπάτου τὸ]] β’, π(ατρὸς) π(ατρίδος) · [Μ. Αὐρή-]
λιος Σέλευκος ἱε[ρεύς καὶ]
πατὴρ διὰ βίου Διὸς [‘Ηλίου
ἀνείκητου Μίθρα τὸν [. . .
10. ...] καθ’ ὑπέσχετο τῇ πατ[ρίδι].

L.1/5 are totally erased in conformity with the damnatio memoriae of the Emperor whose name originally appeared on the stone. I have restored M. Αὔρη- at the end of L.6. Seleucus, to judge from the office which he held, must have been a man of some eminence. As πατήρ shows in L.8 he belonged to the seventh and highest grade of Mithraic initiates. Plutarch, (Vita Pompeii, XXIV), writing of the Cilician pirates, states:—ξένας δὲ θυσίας ἔθυον αὐτοὶ τὰς ἐν Ὀλύμπῳ, καὶ τελετὰς τινὰς ἀπορρήτους ἐτέλουν ὡς ἱεροὶ τοῦ Μίθρου, καὶ μέχρι δεῦρο διασώζεται καταδεικνύεσθαι πρῶτον ὑπ’ ἐκείνων. It is interesting, therefore, that of the very rare relics of Mithraism in Asia Minor, two should have a Cilician origin. The first is the inscription published here, while the other is a coin of Tarsus with the head of Gordian III on the obverse, and the effigy of the god on the reverse.

Such is the paucity of evidence of Mithraism in Asia Minor that the statuette of an initiate with the rank of leo purchased by the late Sir William Ramsay at Konya, and published by him in his Revolution in Constantinople and Turkey, pp. 214 ff., 306 ff., would be of great importance if genuine. Unfortunately, it is almost certainly a modern forgery. Not only is it a clumsy and unconvincing piece of work, but the story of its antecedents published by W. M. Calder, “Missak ΛΑΤΥΠΙΟΣ?”, JHS, XLVII, 1927, pp. 178/179, makes it virtually certain that the statuette is a fake. Professor Calder, referring to the “coating of fine dust” covering the statuette at the time that Sir William bought it, mentions that in 1912 while scrubbing a small relief for an impression, “a light brown substance with which it was coloured washed off, disclosing a white, sparkling marble, which looked as if it had been freshly carved”, and that this convinced him that the relief was a forgery, since he had never known the natural discoloration of marble to disappear in this way. It may be of interest, therefore, that when in 1950 in Cilicia I was shown a collection of appallingly bad statuettes which were certainly forgeries, all of them were coated with the “light brown substance” described by Professor Calder.