Three centuries after the birth of Christianity, at least one wealthy family in the town on Sussita, on the east shore of the Sea of Galilee, was still adorning its home with images of goddesses.
Archeologists from the University of Haifa in Israel and Concordia University in Minnesota discovered a wall painting of Tyche, the Greek goddess of fortune.
They also found a figure of a maenad, one of the female companions of the wine and fertility god Dionysus.
"It is interesting to see that although the private residence in which two goddesses were found was in existence during the Byzantine period, when Christianity negated and eradicated idolatrous cults, one can still find clear evidence of earlier beliefs," Prof. Arthur Segal and Dr. Michael Eisenberg of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology said in a release.
The home appears to have belonged to one of the city notables. In an inner courtyard with a small fountain at its center the researchers found the fresco of Tyche, the city's goddess of fortune. Her head is crowned, her youthful gaze is focused, and she has abundant brown hair beneath her crown.
The dig also found a plate made of bone with a beautifully etched relief of a maenad. In Greek mythology, maenads accompanied Dionysus with "frenzied dances while holding a thyrsus," a staff of giant fennel topped with a pine cone that symbolized "sexuality, fertility, and the male sexual organ associated with sexual pleasure," according to a release. The maenad in question appears to be in the midst of such a frenzied dance.
Both of these images are manifestations of the cult of Greco-Roman female goddesses, but clearly survived into the Byzantine Christian era.
Sussita was first built on a mountain top during the 2nd century A.D. by the Seleucid rulers who then controlled the country. The city existed during the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Umayyad periods, until it was destroyed by a violent earthquake in the year 749 A.D. It is one of the Decapolis cities, a region where Jesus is said to have conducted some of the miracles described in the New Testament.
Author: Elizabeth Weise | Source: USA Today [September 17, 2010]