Late antiquity could have retained its negative reputation as the ‘dark ages’, a period of crisis that led up to the fall of Rome,1 had it not been for the rich variety of late-antique artworks in European collections.2 Some of these objects, despite what were thought of as coarse forms and a lack of evident aesthetic appeal, nevertheless produced powerful effects on later viewers. A sequence of great discoveries related to late antiquity in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and deeper investigations into what was already known, contributed to a field initially built up primarily around available museum objects and fragmentary examples of visual culture.

The study of the ancient Mediterranean world has traditionally been a hotbed of ancestralist rivalries and competitive modern genealogies (nationalist and cosmopolitan, Christiano-centric and anti-Christian). This is especially true for what have been – from a European viewpoint – the privileged cultures of Greece and Rome. No account of Roman religion can be free of centuries of layered debate on these issues: consciously or unconsciously, the field is a tangle of constantly outdated ‘presentisms’ deriving their authority from accounts of a special, shared and collective past.1 But Roman religion has a very special place within these narratives: it is not Christianity – it represents the past before the continuing Christian present, which Western scholarship has either upheld or detested since the Enlightenment – and it is not Greece, wherein the highest cultural and philosophical ideals of Europe were always vested. In no other field with which this book is concerned are the self-contradictions of a long history of varieties of investments more directly manifest, than in the subject of visual and material culture in relation to Roman religion.

Let us begin – outside the scope of this volume – with a concept, a metaphor, coined in the fields of social psychology and behavioural economics. The idea of ‘anchoring’ was introduced as a result of the study of how poorly the majority of people perform as intuitive statisticians: human beings tend to use any random number that has been offered to us when we need to make an estimate, and then stay too close to that as an anchor when making revisions.1 If one applies this model to the exercise of historical understanding in dealing with a range of empirical data and with uncertainty in its interpretation, it is clear that scholarship must consistently rely on anchors – more or less random, usually in the form of a current communis opinio, inevitably grounded in initial premises, assumptions, prejudices or values – to establish the starting points for interpretation. And it is equally clear that interpretations inevitably are tied to the anchoring assumptions from which they are generated – a case of hugging close to the anchor. Obviously there are many respects in which such interpretive anchors are common-sense defences against potential rocks or shoals along the coast of scholarly travel (such as excess in speculation). But – especially when anchors are founded in starting points that may at a given time be collectively acceptable but are nonetheless fundamentally erroneous, wrongheaded, or immoral (such as that sound interpretations are possible only from scholars of certain races, a normative premise in Germany between 1933 and 1945) – then anchoring equally obviously prevents clear thought and restrains the scholarly boat from sailing the wide seas in search of truth, or in pursuit at least of new questions and answers.2

There is a very good case for supposing that not only the idea of late antique art, but indeed of late antiquity itself as a meaningful historical period, was invented in Vienna in the late nineteenth century. The ideological dynamics are significant, and help to explain the usual understanding of a temporal formulation (‘late antiquity’) to determine what is in fact a culturally and geographically specific designation – that is, a European-centred history and archaeology, as opposed to one that looks more globally towards Asia. Indeed, east of Iran, no one uses the term ‘late antique’ for the artistic innovations of the first few centuries AD which led to the rise of distinctive artistic production in the religious cultures that have come to be called Buddhist, Jain and Hindu.

If you believe that the past cannot be owned, you are simultaneously correct, idealistic, and naïve. Ownership of the past – both of the material things which survive from it and act as public signifiers for our reconstructions, and the right to tell stories about those things – is frequently contested, as different people seek to own that which cannot be owned. The range of participants and the distance between their positions in Indian, and by extension South Asian, history is perhaps greater than any other field, excepting perhaps the history of Judaism.

Januszczak saw the artefacts in the new gallery as the autochthonous expression of various ethnic groups – ‘tribes’ – who were naturally differentiated in their artistic styles as in other aspects of their identities. Notably, he attributes religious meaning only to the Byzantine heirs of the Roman Empire; the barbarian arts are typified as the gaudy, ostentatious display of weapons and wealth.

This chapter is concerned with the question of time, or rather the absence of it. The absence of time, the notion that something can be primordial or unchanging, is encountered in two very different sorts of textual strategies which impact our understanding of the religion(s) known as Hinduism and also the arts of South Asia in the first millennium. The first textual strategy is the frequent claim in South Asian religious texts that a particular teaching or text is of unprecedented antiquity, either primordial or at least so old as to be functionally primordial, and is therefore authoritative. The second is the thread in colonial historiography of South Asia which presents the history of the region as unchanging, or perhaps even stagnating, except under external pressures – the latter imagined as successive Greek, nomadic, Islamic, and British conquests.

Sybel obviously doubted that theologians had an interest in early Christian art and that they could react objectively to the argument about the pagan roots of Christianity that he was going to make.2 Sybel’s assumption appears to be well justified from the vantage point of the early twentieth century, since the vast majority of nineteenth-century theologians, prominently represented by the Protestant church historian Adolf von Harnack, had refrained from using Christian material culture alongside textual sources in their work.3 Predominant skepticism about the epistemic value of art and archaeology in writing the history of the Church is certainly not unique to nineteenth-century Protestant Germany. As has been argued by Michael Squire and Joseph Leo Koerner among others, Luther’s rejection of the image as “epistemologically empty and void” had significant long-term consequences for humanist scholarship.4 German Protestant aesthetics like those of Kant and Hegel perpetuated the Lutheran dichotomy between a true experience of God that is necessarily spiritual, non-visual and best mediated by words on the one hand, and a visual, art-based experience deemed to offer merely didactic insights into Christian doctrine on the other.5 In his Aesthetics, for instance, Hegel postulates: “… the Divine, explicitly regarded as unity and universality, is essentially present only to thinking and, as in itself imageless, is not susceptible of being imaged and shaped by imagination.”6 Protestant skepticism towards the image influenced generations of history-writing that ignored the autonomy of the image, but privileged instead the ideas behind the image, or, preferably, did not touch upon images at all.7 This is particularly true of Protestant church history.

A stark divide lingers between the themes and problems addressed by art historians and those explored in historical accounts of Zoroastrianism under the Sasanian Persian Empire (224–651). Although shaped by numerous intertwined investments and catalysts over the centuries, the divergence in the attentions of the two fields crystallized during imperial and anti-imperial movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, active both within Iran and without. Art has been framed as irrelevant for the history of Zoroastrianism, demonstrating the absence and avoidance of religious themes; at the other end of the scale, art has been seen as, containing innate sacred significance in its composition. Certain narratives central to the development of Sasanian studies - of continuity, exceptionalism, and eurocentricism, in particular - have shaped approaches to how iconography and art can be incorporated into discussions of Sasanian religion. Convergent interests have promoted the continuity of iconography’s sacred meanings from earlier in antiquity through the Sasanian period to the modern day, diminishing the contemporary contribution and context, and see the visual evidence as demonstrating the distinctiveness and exceptionalism of Zoroastrianism from other religions, and of Iranian culture from others.

The traditional view of late antique Jewish art is that there was none. Or, insofar as there was some, it ought not to have existed.1 This represents a deep cultural reflex about ‘Jewish aniconism’ whose origins in Judaic Scripture itself were replicated in ancient Graeco-Roman accounts of the Jews.2 In this sense both within antiquity and also in modernity, Judaism has been associated with a resistance to images by contrast with the aesthetically paradigmatic heritage of Hellenism. In terms of the complex of difficulties about, and reluctances to, images experienced by the religions which emerged in part in the wake of Judaism – namely Christianity and Islam – the idealized model of a prior Jewish aniconism and of simple worship, scripturally informed, by contrast with the risks of pagan idolatry that many Christians and Muslims long suspected to lie in art, has been a powerful factor in shaping religious ideology throughout late antiquity, the Middle Ages, the era of the Reformation and into modernity.3

If Roman religion has been constructed as something of a void, defined in opposition to the Christianity that succeeded it, and the religions of the Greeks that preceded it, an important part of how it has been shaped is through comparison to forms of religious practice that have been called the ‘mystery’ or ‘Oriental’ cults.1 For some, in harking back to the kinds of ecstatic religious experience of the Greek world framed, for example, by Euripides’ Bacchae, these cults evoke the Dionysian dynamism of a Nietzschean archaic;2 for others, in their creative invention during the imperial period, their momentum owing to adherents rather than the state hierarchy, their possible soteriology and their vibrant material culture, they have seemed the ancestors of Christianity.3 Mystery cults are only a subsection of religion in the Roman period, but they have been seen as forming a distinct and peculiar category of their own.4