The Dolichene section of my university library is not huge, and most of it by now has spent some time on my bedside table. There was one volume in the catalogue that I had my eye on for some time: Religious Identities in the Levant from Alexander to Muhammad: Continuity and Change, edited by Michael Blömer, Achim Lichtenberger, and Rubina Raja. With Engelbert Winter, Blömer is one of the people in charge of the excavations at Doliche itself, and there are two chapters in this book largely focussed on the cult of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Dolichenus as well as others of direct or indirect relevance.
However, Blömer et al. always seemed to be checked out, and I forbore from recalling it, on the theory that if somebody needs it for actual publishable scholarship or something, they should get dibs. At last, however, I saw that Blömer et al. was listed as missing. It’s a massive great book, and I can hardly imagine someone slipping it into their carry-on for light reading as they flew off into the post-graduation sunset…. Whatever the cause, I took the disappearance of our copy as my cue to exercise my Inter-Library Loan privileges, and soon a copy of Blömer et al. was speeding from another university library towards my bedside table at last.
The chapter I had been most interested in, perhaps, was Guy Bunnens’ “The Re-emergence of Iron Age Religious Iconography in Roman Syria”, not only because this is exactly the case of IOMD, but also to get a sense of how widespread a phenomenon it was for Roman-era Hellenized people to return to their local gods from the Iron Age. According to Bunnens, there had been an iconographic hiatus coincident with the period of Persian rule. Older motifs then re-emerged on stelæ and other religious items, to a certain extent in the Hellenistic period, but particularly in the Roman one (p. 107).
Storm-gods and their entourage seem to have been the main beneficiaries of this process, and IOMD stands in the front rank of these (p. 108). The iconography of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Heliopolitanus, including the smiting posture, the mace, and bulls, was also based on Iron Age precedents, although his whip, kalathos, and pillar-shaped body are new(ish) features (p. 114)—I say newish because the whip also has a long history in the region. Other Romano-Syrian deities with Iron Age antecedents include Sun-gods at Mar‘anaz and Palmyra (pp. 109-111 and 114) and the Dolichene Castores (p. 114), as likewise the eagle with sun and moon (pp. 115-116) and a lunar standard associated with Atargatis (p. 112).
The Dolichene pantheon, then, encompasses practically all of the Iron Age religious iconography that, in Bunnens’ article, sees the day in Roman Syria. On certain occasions, IOMD and IOMH are identified, while IOMD’s close links with the Sun-god—and more broadly with the Sun–Moon–Eagle motif—need hardly be dwelt on.
To be honest, this answer is both satisfying for its apparent completeness, and disappointing for the many deities who were not rediscovered. The stag-god Kurunta, for example, and the wise Iyas/Ea/Enki seemed to have eluded the memory of Roman-era Syrians, to say nothing of somewhat more obscure deities like Inara or Hannahanna. One seal does depict a Ba‘al as Hermes (p. 117), which raises some tantalizing questions.
One of Bunnens’ rather interesting observations is the importance of peripheral sites in the transmission of Iron Age iconography (p. 124). He gives the example of the oasis town of Tayma in Arabia, where older religious traditions seem to have flourished practically without interruption (pp. 123-124), in contrast to sites such as the temple of the Storm-God at Aleppo or the Moon-God at Harran, which sank into marginal importance (p. 118).
This theme find an echo in the other chapter I was most interested in, “Religious Continuity? The Evidence from Doliche” by Michael Blömer. Doliche, Blömer stresses, was a minor town, which makes it all the more remarkable that the cult of IOMD should gain such enormous importance (p. 129). To be sure, Doliche was a prosperous little burgh situated on an important Roman road, and one of the three or four most important centres of the kingdom of Commagene—but then, Commagene was hardly a world empire. We are not talking about the Storm-God of Aleppo or the Storm-God of Damascus (the more obvious urban centres of the region), who both kept a lower profile in the Roman Empire.
But at the sanctuary on the hill known as Dülük Baba Tepesi, Blömer reports so much evidence of cult continuity from the Iron Age that one wonders why he bothered to include a question mark in the title of his article. The very Iron Age cult buildings were still in use in Hellenistic times, and when larger and finer structures were erected in Roman times, they were careful to use the Iron Age foundation walls (p. 134). Sacrifices of calves at an early summer ceremony went on, apparently for centuries, in exactly the same way (p. 133). Apart from a destruction layer attributable to Shapur’s invasion around 256, there was no apparent cessation in the use of the site for religious purposes (p. 135). Even in Christian times, Dülük Baba Tepesi saw the establishment of a thriving monastery dedicated to Mar Solomon (p. 132). (Might it be significant that the Christians too chose a wise, powerful kingly figure from hoary antiquity to venerate on this spot?)
Blömer also finds evidence of continuity between Juno Regina of Doliche and the Iron Age Kubaba, although the lion familiar to the latter has been replaced by a deer (p. 136). A stele that might have been the ancient original of the cult image at Doliche, painstaking reproduced in an archaic style, is labelled in Luwian hieroglyphics (p. 137).
All in all, these articles will not revolutionize one’s conceptions of the cultus of IOMD, but rather strengthen the impressions of Cumont and Merlat of the continuity of IOMD with the earlier Storm-Gods of the area, be they named Teshub, Tarhunzas, or Hadad. And in this regard, I would like to dissent from Blömer’s offhand comment that Western worshippers of IOMD would probably have been “unaware of the god’s ancient Near Eastern antecedents” (p. 139). They would not, to be sure, have held PhDs in comparative religion, but they would undoubtedly have been attracted to the cult of IOMD for particular reasons. One of these will likely have been that they were impressed with the cult’s venerable antiquity. Roman soldiers marched through Doliche itself in considerable numbers; some certainly visited the temple and left offerings there. Undoubtedly many were taken with the ancient god of the region: timeless in his power, punisher of the wicked, governor of heaven, commander of the Sun and Moon, god who listens and who speaks to his worshippers in dreams, then as always.
Dolichenvm 