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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2012
In 1964 there was found in Temple C at Hatra a life-size marble head with cleanshaven face (PI. V, 1 and 2), now in the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad. It was lying on the podium behind the altar at the south end of the temple, and would seem to have fallen there from the place in which it had been set. The head, of which the face is extremely well preserved, appears to have been deliberately cut from the body across the neck, just below the chin. But of the body no trace has as yet come to light in Temple C or elsewhere.
The head, with its heavy, fleshy countenance, its lack of moustache and beard, its furrowed brow, facial folds, and full chin, is clearly the portrait of an elderly Roman. These features immediately distinguish it from the rather lean, smooth, flat-cheeked, moustached and bearded portraits of Hatrene kings, noblemen and so forth. Furthermore, it must be the portrait of a Roman prior to Hadrian's time, when, as is well known, thick curly hair and thick curly beards and moustaches came into fashion for men in the West.
2 For measurements, a detailed description of the head, and a list of the small damages that it has sustained, see Sumer, xxvi, 1970, 231–2.
3 e.g. the marble portrait of King Uthal in the Mosul Museum: Ghirshman, R., Iran: Parthians and Sassanians, 1962, 91, fig. 102.Google Scholar
4 Ibid., 90, fig. 101.
5 I follow here the chronological conclusions arrived at in Lepper's, F. A.Trajan's Parthian War, 1948, 95, 96.Google Scholar
6 Numismatic Chronicle, ser. 6, xviii, 1958, p. 168, nos. i, 2; pl. 14, nos. 1, 2. On the reverses is a large Roman S C, inverted, in a wreath surmounted by the Sun-god's eagle. For the obverse busts, cf. Mattingly, H., Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum, iii, 1936, pls. 41–3.Google Scholar
7 For measurements and detailed description of the head, see Sumer, xxvi, 1970, 234.
8 Oates, D., Sumer, xi, 1955, 39–43Google Scholar; Maricq, A., Syria, xxxiv, 1957, 288–296CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Oates, D., Studies in the Ancient History of Northern Iraq, 1968, 74, 75.Google Scholar
9 CAH. xii, 1939, 87, 131.
10 Ghirshman, op. cit., 40, fig. 54; Colledge, M. A. R., The Parthians, 1967, pl. 24Google Scholar; Schlumberger, D., L'orient hellénisé, 1970, 56, 59, fig. 25.Google Scholar
11 It is possible, but by no means certainly the case, that the borders of crow-stepped triangles that frequently feature on Roman mosaics were ultimately derived from oriental crow-stepped merlons: they could have been devised independently in the West.
12 Ghirshman, op. cit., 94, fig. 105; Colledge, op. cit., pl. 65 (upper part only); Berytus xvii, 1967–8, pl. 2, fig. 1.
13 Berytus x, 1952–3, p. 16. Cf. Olmstead, A. T., History of Assyria, 1923, fig. 151: Palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh.Google Scholar
14 Colledge, op. cit., pl. 55.
15 Proceedings of the British Academy xlvii, 1961, pl. 19.
16 Berytus xvii, 1967–8, pl. 2, fig. 2.
17 PBSR xviii, 1950, 1–43, pls. 1–26.
18 Ghirshman, op. cit. 92, fig. 103; Colledge, op. cit., pl. 60.
19 Homès-Fredericq, D., Hatra et ses sculptures parthes, 1963, pl. 1Google Scholar, fig. 3.
20 PBSR xviii, 1950, pl. 13.
21 The marble portrait-bust of Jarhai from Palmyra, now in the Louvre, has a coat with two broad stripes of ‘peopled’ vine-scroll down the front (Ghirshman, op. cit., 77, fig. 89). Again at Palmyra the over-all designs, intersecting circles and contiguous hexagons, painted on the ceiling of the Hypogeum of the Three Brothers were obviously borrowed from the Roman mosaicists' repertory (Schlumberger, op. cit., colour-plates on pp. 92–4).
