Mithras for sale! – A Cautes figure at auction in Monte Carlo (CIMRM 645 / 646)

Exciting news for those with rather more money than myself – a two foot (67 cms) tall statue of Cautes, one of the torch-bearers (“dadophores”), the attendants of Mithras, is up for sale at the Interencheres sale “From Caesar to Caesar” in Monte Carlo on the 8th August 2026. The lot is here on the auction house website. Here’s one of the images: The inscription is “Hymnus inbicto” (for “invicto”), “Hymnus (gives this) to the unconquered (god)”. The estimate is 30,000 euros – about $34,000 –…

A few days ago I wrote about locating the 18th century publication of an early Coptic fragments of the acts of St Coluthius. This was important, not for the content, but for the preface explaining how Cardinal Stefano Borgia came to own some parchment pages from the White Monastery at Sohag in Egypt; the first in Europe to do so. I’ve not had time to read this preface as yet. But by coincidence I learned today that those parchment pages have just been digitised and indeed uploaded to the…

Csaba Szabo, one of the most active current Mithras scholars, has a new book out from Cambridge Scholars Publishing on Mithras in Dacia. His blog, with details, is here. Details: Csaba Szabó, Mithras in Roman Dacia: Local Appropriations of a Universal God. Cambridge Scholars (2026). ISBN13: 978-1-0364-7770-7. Blurb: The Roman cult of Mithras ranks among the ancient religious traditions that have left some of the most striking archaeological remains in Central and Eastern Europe. This volume…

I learn today that Brepols have published some new English translations of two works by Tertullian: the Ad Martyras and the De Fuga in Persecutione. Both are translated by Thomas J. Heffernan for the Brepols Library of Christian Sources. The publisher page is here. I’ve added this to the Tertullian Project pages also. That makes the first update since 2023. Another interesting email reached me from Anne Popkema, at a library of which I had never heard – Tresoar in Frisia, in the Netherlands. It…

One of the earliest enthusiasts for Coptic literature was Cardinal Stefano Borgia (1731-1804), a Papal bureaucrat who created a museum in the Borgia Palace in his home town of Velletri. He spent considerable sums acquiring material for it, and especially material from Egypt. There is a 1781 publication which describes how he obtained some Coptic fragments which we now know to come from the White Monastery in Sohag in middle Egypt. The publication is referenced by Stephen Emmel in his…

I reported yesterday on the discovery of two new sermons by St Augustine in a Latin manuscript in a monastery in Poland. One statement in the press release is also of great interest. The discoverer, Prof. Christian Tornau, of the University of Würzburg, stated: “An old catalogue from the monastery mentions a text that bears the same headings and has the same sequence of content as our manuscript. It could have served as a model,” the researcher explains. Tornau cannot confirm this assumption…

Excellent news from the University of Würzburg, where a researcher has discovered two unknown sermons by St Augustine in a Latin manuscript in Poland! The reporting (by Martin Brandstätter) is unusually good: One day in 2024, the phone rang for Professor Christian Tornau, a Latinist at the University of Würzburg: An employee of the Bad Doberan Monastery Association in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania asked him to decipher a 12th-century manuscript that originally belonged to Bad Doberan Abbey but…

Today I received an email asking me about a letter of St Shenouda of Atripe, the 4th century Coptic abbot. The letter in question was apparently written to a nun, saying “I knew you long ago.” The email asked if I knew the source. Well, I have almost no familiarity with the works of Shenouda (or Shenoute), so I thought that I would poke around a bit. The email author was French, so I wondered what existed in French. Interestingly Emile Amelineau translated some material by Shenouda into French…

The letters of the 6th century sophist Aeneas of Gaza have been sitting in a folder on my desktop for a month or two now, and I want to make some progress with making a translation into English. It’s not a big text. Each letter is only a short paragraph, and there are only twenty-five letters. So the whole text would fill less than a dozen pages perhaps. I have the 1962 edition with Italian translation by Lidia Massa Positano, which is more than a hundred pages. There seems to be a rule that…

Easily the most important monument in Istanbul is one that few visitors look at. Located today in the Hippodrome is an ancient bronze column missing its head. This is, in fact, the monument erected by the Greek states to commemorate the victory over the Persians at Marathon, and moved here later. It is extraordinary that it still exists. Originally it had a golden disk at the top, supported by three serpent headed brackets, but the latter were broken off during the Ottoman period. However there…

As I mentioned a day or two ago, Alin Suciu has proposed that a Coptic text in a papyrus in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow is in fact the remains of a lost work by the 2nd century writer Melito of Sardis. His article will appear in Adamantius sometime later this year or early next. But the first page of it is on Academia.edu here, and begins as follows: In the early 1990s, Alla Elanskaya published a fragmentary Sahidic papyrus codex housed at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow[1]. The manuscript…

A rather charming twitter post from here, about a saint unknown to me: In Wales, the 27th of May is the feast day of St Melangell, the patron saint of hares. St Melangell’s patronage of hares is attributed to a story of how she protected a hare (under her dress) from a pack of snarling hunting dogs belonging to a Welsh prince, named Brochwel. After hearing how she came to be in Wales (she was an Irish princess who had fled an arranged marriage in Ireland) Prince Brochwel granted her the land on…

Ten years ago Alin Suciu proposed that a homily preserved in Sahidic Coptic in a fragmentary manuscript in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow was in fact a genuine work by second-century patristic author Melito of Sardis. Remarkably his article arguing this is now about to appear, in Adamantius. The first page is on Academia.edu here. Here’s the abstract: This article reexamines a fragmentary Sahidic papyrus codex in Moscow that preserves a homily on baptism and the four cosmic elements. First edited…

Back in 2017, I reported on the discovery of the log book of Inspector Merer in the Wadi al-Jarf in Egypt. Merer was the captain of one of the boats that shipped stone to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu / Cheops at Giza. In antiquity the Nile had seven branches which emptied into the sea in the Nile Delta. We can see from tomb paintings that in those days there were tropical animals such as crocodiles and hippopotamus in Egypt. But only two branches of the Nile delta remain today, and the…

As promised, yesterday I scanned the text of the ancient Latin translation of the first homily of Eusebius of Emesa (fl. ca. 330), “De arbitrio, voluntate Pauli and domini passione”, “On freewill, the will of Paul, and the passion of the Lord”. This work has the reference number CPG 3525. In fact I learn from the CPG that this is one of the few homilies by Eusebius of Emesa where the original Greek is preserved; printed in PG 86: 536-545. Here’s the scan, in MS Word .docx format, of the edition…

This evening I started work on the homilies of Eusebius of Emesa. Homily 1, De Arbitrio, is 31 pages of Latin in Buytaert’s critical edition – the only edition. I pulled these into Finereader, and ran the Latin recognition on them. Then started going through them, shrinking the default rectangles for text recognition to exclude line numbers and apparatus. I did 15 pages before I had to break off. On Monday I’ll do the rest, make whatever minor corrections are needed, and upload it here. Then…