Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europos Collection: The Mithraeum

The Yale University Art Gallery holds the Dura-Europos Collection, the finds from the joint Yale and French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters excavation of the fortified Roman frontier town on the middle Euphrates in the 1920s and 1930s, and publishes its own record of the site's mithraeum, including the reconstructed shrine on permanent display in New Haven and the online Dura-Europos: Excavating Antiquity collection. That record dates the mithraeum's founding and dedication to 168 to 169 CE, commissioned by Palmyrene archers of the Roman garrison; a substantial renovation and enlargement to 209 to 211 CE; and a third and final building phase, to which the surviving wall paintings belong, to around 240 CE. Its strength is direct institutional custody, ninety years of continuous stewardship of the excavated material and its own excavation and inscription record, including the Palmyrene dedicatory inscription naming the commissioning officer that the founding date rests on. Its limit is that it is a museum collection and exhibition record rather than a peer reviewed excavation report in its own right, so it is cited here for the site's dating and building history as the Gallery itself states it, alongside rather than replacing the specialist excavation literature.