Amulets, Pendants and Otherwise...

At last, I have an assignment. 

 

Dear reader, you may recall that a few days ago, a pendant printed with a lion was recovered from the destruction fill in square D5.  It is about the size of nickel and made of amber-colored glass pressed with some sort of stamp (similar to casting coins - notice how the extra glass ballooned past the edges of the design).  A glass loop on the top allowed it to be worn as a necklace. 

 

 

This certainly is an exiting find, but unless an archaeologist is very familiar with such an object, only so much identification can occur on the dig site. 

 

This is where one lonely, dirt-longing graduate student steps in.  On Tuesday, Dr. Schuler sent me a picture of the pendant, along with his cursory notes and these questions:

What can you find about such amulets?

Date?

Distribution?

Manufacture?

 

Thus began my own treasure hunt, several thousand miles away.  Instead of sifting through dirt, I struggled through an enormous library catalog, attempting to create the right combination of key words to "unearth" the correct book or article.  For the lion pendant, this meant searching through encyclopedias of Holy Land archaeology, collections of ancient glass, lists of early Christian antiquities and excavation reports.  Once I figured out that stamped glass pendants appear frequently, it was only a mater of time before I found something similar to the NEC find.         

 

As luck would have it, this sort of lion-pendant is common enough to show up in...drum roll please....FOUR of the forty or so books I looked through.  I admit to a certain amount of thrill to this type of investigation, because just as on the dig, after wading through a load of irrelevant dirt, the most astounding discoveries appear.  Geek that I am, my heart jumped out of its cavity when I turned a page in "Roman, Byzantine, and Early Medieval Glass" and saw two yellow lion "pendant stamped medallions" smiling back at me:

 

 

 

 

You'll notice, however, that this lion doesn't quite match up with the one discovered at NEC.  Furthermore, there wasn't a lot of extra information given for this pendant, such as where it was found, how it was made and where it was discovered besides "Eastern Mediterranean." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This meant that I had to look at the footnotes of the article, and drag up another excavation report.  Here, in a listing of a 4^th century tomb at Tarshiha (northern Israel) discovered in 1933, I found this picture:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now, this one is MUCH closer stylistically to the one found at NEC and I found out that a necklace could be strung with multiple pendants (be careful when you dig, team!) - still, not a lot of information about these types of pendants in general.  So, the search continued, and in the most random book, "Roman Glass in the Corning Museum of Glass," I discovered 15 different lion pendants AND a whole section about them in general.  Here is what I found:

 

 

 

Many pendants, like the one found at NEC, bear images of gods or apotropaic symbols (that means something frightening to ward off something even more frightening) to be worn either to bring good fortune or to scare away evil.  Almost all of these pendants come from the east of the Roman Empire, with a special concentration in the Syro-Palestinian region - that would be right where Hippos/Sussita is. 

 

Now, there is a scholar by the name of Barag who has done extensive research into this type of glass and divides how the pendant was made into three types and what it was stamped with into six categories.  According to Barag's findings, OUR pendant was made between 350 and 425 AD, and is considered a Type A, Category 5.  This means that it was fashioned with a flat loop for hanging and was stamped VERY carefully with the image of an animal.  Other images, for those curious, include classical themes (Medusa's head), biblical pictures (Daniel in the Lion's den), Jewish symbols (menorah) and Christian symbols (Good shepherd). 

 

 

The lion, however, was a VERY popular apotropaic symbol.  Here's an example:

   

 

On some of these pendants, words were added like, "EICΘEOC," which means "One God."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our pendant doesn't match any of these exactly, but is close enough to determine the above information.  For example, compare the two manes of the following (NEC's is first, the one from the book is second): 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notice how the mane hair is separate from the head.  Also compare the feet and the mouth.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now, compare a later pendant (from the sixth century) and notice how the mane is a part of the head:   

 

 

 

Also notice the feet, how they are separate in this later example.  

 

Anyway, here it is again: the rush of the find.  The "Ah hah" moment.  The reminder of why in the world I ever was interested in this.

 

And no bugs died in the process.