Return to Dura Europos
It was like a page from the Arabian Nights. Aladdin’s lamp had been rubbed and suddenly from the dry, brown bare desert had appeared paintings, not just one nor a panel nor a wall, but a whole building of scene after scene, all drawn from the Old Testament in a way never dreamed of before.’
This is how the American archaeologist, Clark Hopkins, described the ‘sensational’ discovery sixty-five years ago this month of the synagogue at Dura Europos in Syria. By then the Franco-American team had been digging for six seasons at the site, which had already earned the sobriquet ‘Pompeii of the East’ because of its marvellous finds.
Dura Europos had been known about for a long time from literary sources. The Assyrians had first made use of the prominent escarpment jutting out over the west bank of the River Euphrates, around 1,000 years before the birth of Christ. The city had been re-established in the third century BC by Nicanor, a general of Seleucus I.
Dura means ‘fortress’ and it was indeed a fortified city, bounded on two sides by deep ravines, on a third by the Euphrates and on the fourth side, which faced west into the desert, by huge walls and towers of mud and stone.
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