Since graduating from Yale with my Masters Degree in Religion and Art in 2002, I’ve thought and written a great deal about Dura Europos.

From Wikipedia:

Dura-Europos (“Fort Europos”) [4] was a Hellenistic, Parthian and Roman border city built on an escarpment ninety meters above the right bank of the Euphrates river.

It is located near the village of Salhiyé, in today’s Syria.

Dura-Europos is extremely important for archaeological reasons. As it was abandoned after its conquest in 256–7, nothing was built over it and no later building programs obscured the architectonic features of the ancient city. Its location on the edge of empires meant for a co-mingling of cultural traditions, much of which was preserved under the city’s ruins. Some remarkable finds have been brought to light, including numerous temples, wall decorations, inscriptions, military equipment, tombs, and even dramatic evidence of the siege that brought about the city’s end.

I had the occasional odd job in high school and college, but my first “real” job was at the Yale University Art Gallery where I was hired to help digitize the University’s (mostly basement contained) collection of monuments, beads, frescos, reliefs, statues and paintings from Dura Europos.

I was given a digital camera (the first time I had used one of those), an all access pass to the incredible basement of the Gallery (think Indiana Jones) and a few hours a day to systematically take pictures, scan slides and immerse myself in this sadly all-but forgotten ancient outpost.

Yale has approximately 85,000 objects in its Dura Europos collection, and we did scan, shoot and categorize a number of those items over the course of the year when I worked on the project. I can’t tell you how many accession numbers I arranged on the little blackboard indicating the date an object was re-discovered and in what order. I still have nightmares about those little placard numbers.

However, it was an incredible experience.

I eventually moved on within the Gallery to work with the amazing Prof Susan Matheson who was Head Curator and Curator of Ancient Art and even got to publish my first book there on Yale’s colleciton of Assyrian Art.

So, it’s great to see the Yale Dura Europos collection (well 12,000 parts of it) now online in a searchable database.

I felt as if I was leaving Dura Europos behind when I graduated with my Masters in 2002. However, it’s glad to see such an early, careful and systematic attempt at digitizing information come to fruition.

I’m hopeful this will allow future scholars and enthusiasts to discover the same quarky uniqueness of Dura Europos that has drawn me, like a magnet, to that small city above the Euphrates.

Dura Europos Collection – Yale University Art Gallery