The New Mithraeum Database

The exhibition The Mystery of Mithras opens at the Mariemont Museum in Belgium, home of Franz Cumont, the father of studies on the solar god.

This catalogue proposes, thanks to the contributions of some 75 international experts, a new synthesis for a complex and fascinating cult that reflects the remarkable advances in our knowledge in recent decades.

Franz Cumont considers the bas relief of Osterburken ’the most remarkable of all the monuments of the cult of Mithras found up to now’.

The marble Tauroctony of Asciano, Siena, was donated by Franz Cumont to the Academia Belgica, Rome.

This marble relief depicting Mithras as a bull-slayer was once owned by Major Holzhausen and Franz Cumont and is now housed at the Belgian Academy.

The following note deserved an entry in Vermaseren’s Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum Religionis Mithriacae.

According to F. Cumont, the Bedouins told a legend from which Nöldeke concluded that the castle of Quasr-ibn-Wardân was a fort with a mithraeum.