Sabazios

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Bronze hand used in the worship of Sabazios (British Museum).[1] Roman 1st–2nd century CE. Hands decorated with religious symbols were designed to stand in sanctuaries or, like this one, were attached to poles for processional use. Another similar bronze hand found in the 16th/17th century in Tournai, Belgium, is also in the British Museum.[2]

Sabazios (

romanized: Sabázios, modern pronunciation Savázios; alternatively, Sabadios[3]) is a deity originating in Asia Minor.[4] He is the horseman and sky father god of the Phrygians and Thracians.[citation needed
]

Sabazios gained prominence across the

Central Balkans due to Thracian influence. Scholarly debate has long debated Sabazios' origins, with current consensus leaning towards his Phrygian roots.[4]

Though the Greeks interpreted Phrygian Sabazios[5] as both Zeus and Dionysus,[6] representations of him, even into Roman times, show him always on horseback, wielding his characteristic staff of power.

Epigraphic evidence

According to scholars, the deity's name is variously written in epigraphy: Σεβάζιος, Σαβάζοις, Sabazius, Sabadius, Σαβασεἷος.[7]

Thracian/Phrygian Sabazios

It seems likely that the migrating Phrygians brought Sabazios with them when they settled in Anatolia in the early first millennium BCE, and that the god's origins are to be looked for in Macedonia and Thrace. The ancient sanctuary of Perperikon in modern-day Bulgaria, uncovered in 2000,[8] is believed to be that of Sabazios.[citation needed]

Possible early conflict between Sabazios and his followers and the indigenous mother goddess of Phrygia (Cybele) may be reflected in Homer's brief reference to the youthful feats of Priam, who aided the Phrygians in their battles with Amazons. An aspect of the compromise religious settlement, similar to the other such mythic adjustments throughout Aegean culture, can be read in the later Phrygian King Gordias' adoption "with Cybele"[9] of Midas.

One of the native religion's creatures was the

Boston Museum of Fine Arts.[10]
Though Roman in date, the iconic image appears to be much earlier.

This copper alloy Roman hand of Sabazios was used in ritual worship. Few hands remain in collections today. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

God on horseback

Further information: Thracian horseman
National Museum of Romanian History

More "rider god" steles are at the Burdur Museum, in

Celtic votive columns, and with the coming of Christianity it was easily transformed into the image of Saint George and the Dragon, whose earliest known depictions are from tenth- and eleventh-century Cappadocia and eleventh-century Georgia and Armenia.[12]

Iconography, depictions, and Hellenistic associations

View from various angles.

Among Roman inscriptions from Nicopolis ad Istrum, Sabazios is generally equated with

thyrsos, and the Mounted Heros.[13]

Sabazios in Athens

The ecstatic Eastern rites practiced largely by women in Athens were thrown together for rhetorical purposes by Demosthenes in undermining his opponent Aeschines for participating in his mother's cultic associations:

On attaining manhood you abetted your mother in her initiations and the other rituals, and read aloud from the cultic writings ... You rubbed the fat-cheeked snakes and swung them above your head, crying Euoi saboi and hues attes, attes hues.[15]

Transformation to Sabazius

Ivory figurine of Sabazios from the tomb of Alexander IV of Macedon, Museum of the Royal Tombs of Aegae.

Transference of Sabazios to the Roman world appears to have been mediated in large part through

serpent, a chthonic creature unconnected with the mounted skygod of Phrygia: "'God in the bosom' is a countersign of the mysteries of Sabazius to the adepts". Clement reports: "This is a snake, passed through the bosom of the initiates".[21]

Much later, the Byzantine Greek encyclopedia,

Bacchantes ... Demosthenes [in the speech] "On Behalf of Ktesiphon" [mentions them]. Some say that Saboi is the term for those who are dedicated to Sabazios, that is to Dionysos, just as those [dedicated] to Bakkhos [are] Bakkhoi. They say that Sabazios and Dionysos are the same. Thus some also say that the Greeks call the Bakkhoi Saboi.[22]

In Roman sites, though an inscription built into the wall of the abbey church of San Venanzio at Ceperana suggested to a Renaissance humanist[23] it had been built upon the foundations of a temple to Jupiter Sabazius, according to modern scholars not a single temple consecrated to Sabazius, the rider god of the open air, has been located.[20] Small votive hands, typically made of copper or bronze, are often associated with the cult of Sabazios. Many of these hands have a small perforation at the base which suggests they may have been attached to wooden poles and carried in processions. The symbolism of these objects is not well known.[20]

Jewish connection

The first Jews who settled in Rome were expelled in 139 BCE, along with Chaldaean astrologers by Cornelius Hispalus under a law which proscribed the propagation of the "corrupting" cult of "Jupiter Sabazius", according to the epitome of a lost book of Valerius Maximus:

Gnaeus Cornelius Hispalus,

praetor peregrinus in the year of the consulate of Marcus Popilius Laenas and Lucius Calpurnius, ordered the astrologers by an edict to leave Rome and Italy within ten days, since by a fallacious interpretation of the stars they perturbed fickle and silly minds, thereby making profit out of their lies. The same praetor compelled the Jews, who attempted to infect the Roman custom with the cult of Jupiter Sabazius, to return to their homes.[24]

By this it is conjectured that the Romans identified the Jewish

Jove
Sabazius.

This mistaken connection of Sabazios and Sabaot was often repeated. In a similar vein,

Hypsistarians
worshipped the Most High under this name, which may have been a form of the Jewish God.

References

  1. ^ "British Museum Collection". britishmuseum.org. Retrieved 2017-03-06.
  2. ^ "British Museum Collection". britishmuseum.org. Retrieved 2017-03-06.
  3. ISBN 978-3-11-085546-3
    .
  4. ^ a b Vitas, Nadežda Gavrilović (2021). Ex Asia et Syria: Oriental Religions in the Roman Central Balkans. Archaeopress. pp. 77–91.
  5. ^ Variant spellings, like Sawadios in inscriptions, may prove diagnostic in establishing origins, Ken Dowden suggested in reviewing E.N. Lane, Corpus Cultis Jovis Sabazii 1989 for The Classical Review, 1991:125.
  6. interpretatio Graeca
    .
  7. ^ Tacheva, Margarita. Eastern cults in Moesia Inferior and Thracia (5th century BC-4th century AD). Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1983. pp. 183-184.
  8. ^ "Bulgarian archaeologist shows off Perperikon finds". Novinite.com. October 18, 2010. Archived from the original on 2022-03-23.
  9. ^ Later Greek mythographers reduced Cybele's role to "wife" in this context; initially Gordias will have been ruling in the Goddess's name, as her visible representative.
  10. ^ "Zeus Sabazios at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston". mfa.org. Retrieved 2017-03-06.
  11. ^ "Sabazios on coins, illustrated in the M. Halkam collection". Gordian III Lycia. mihalkam.ancients.info. Retrieved 2017-03-06.
  12. ^ See Saint George and the Dragon
  13. ^
    ISBN 978-90-04-06884-1
    .
  14. ISBN 978-90-04-06951-0
    .
  15. cult
    , save in their foreignness in fifth-century Athens.
  16. ^ Lane 1989.[full citation needed]
  17. ^ Strabo, Geography, 10.3.15.
  18. ^ Diodorus Siculus, 4.4.1.
  19. doi:10.1163/156852780X00134
    .
  20. ^
    ISBN 978-90-04-06951-0
    .
  21. ^ Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus, 1, 2, 16.
  22. JSTOR 294253
    .
  23. ^ Antonio Ivani, writing to his fellow humanist Antonio Medusei, 15 July 1473; noted in Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, 1969:116.
  24. ^ (Valerius Maximus), epitome of Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings, i. 3, 2, see EXEMPLUM 3. [Par.]
  25. ^ Plutarch. Symposiacs, iv, 6.

Further reading

Sabazios and Judaism

External links

  • Media related to Sabazios at Wikimedia Commons
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