This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Most surviving tauroctony reliefs show the god alone with his fixed cast of animal attendants. The Dura-Europos relief does something its holding museum, Yale University Art Gallery, calls extremely rare: it adds a second scene to one side, a group of ordinary men, robed and gathered, among them the man who paid for the carving. A Greek inscription names him, Zenobius, also called Eiaeibas, son of Iariboles, strategos, commanding officer of a unit of archers stationed at the garrison, and dates the dedication to the year 482 of the Seleucid calendar, close to 170 CE. Beside him stand men the inscription calls his fellow initiates. This is not evidence about what Mithraism taught, which the relief still withholds, but it is unusually direct evidence about who practiced it in one specific place: not priests alone, not a cult of anonymous symbolism, but a named Roman officer and the soldiers under him, commissioning an image of their own god for their own underground room. Excavated by the joint Yale and French expedition of 1928 to 1937 and held at Yale since 1935, the relief is now read less as a text of belief than as a record of a real congregation choosing to put its own faces, however briefly sketched, into the corner of a scene the cult otherwise kept impersonal.