Yale University Art Gallery

Scope

Encyclopedic university collection; for this platform, the Dura-Europos finds.

History of the collection

Yale excavated Dura-Europos on the Euphrates jointly with the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters between 1928 and 1937, under the division-of-finds arrangements then standard. The city fell in the mid-third century CE and was not reoccupied, which is why organic material survived.

Collection notes

The painted scutum is the only substantially complete Roman body shield known, and confirms the plywood laminate construction that Polybius describes and that no other find attests.

Dura also produced the earliest known Christian house church and an extensively painted synagogue, both of which complicate assumptions about religious imagery in the period.