Dura Europos – Solomon’s Temple

Clark Hopkins, edited by Bernard Goldman

(Yale University Press, 1979) $19.95.

“Once, when I was involved in a train wreck, I had no recollection of the moment between the shock when I was thrown from my seat and when I began to pick myself up from the bottom of the overturned car. So it was at Dura. All I can remember is the sudden shock and then the astonishment, the disbelief ….” Clark Hopkins’ 1932 attack of vertigo was the result of the discovery of the now-famous paintings of the synagogue at Dura-Europos in Syria.

The previous season Hopkins had located a large room on the west side of the ruined city, and determined that its walls had been painted; workmen had removed the fill except for the last foot of earth covering the surfaces on which—they hoped—something might still be preserved.

“Only a few details of that day are still vivid … I clearly remember when the foot of fill dirt still covering the back wall was undercut and fell away, exposing the most amazing succession of paintings! Whole scenes, figures, and objects burst into view, brilliant in color, magnificent in the sunshine, though dwarfed against the vast backdrop of the sky and the tremendous mass of the embankment, they seemed more splendid than all else put together … painting after painting came into view.”

Read the rest of Books in Brief: The Discovery of Dura-Europos in the Biblical Archaeology Society online Library.