Dura-Europos synagogue

The city of Dura-Europos was founded around 300 BC by Seleucus I as a fortress on the route between Antioch and Seleucia on the Tigris. The Parthians took it in 113 BC; from 165 AD it was a Roman frontier stronghold until the Sasanian king Shapur I captured it after a siege in 256, or 256–257. Its population was deported and the city was never permanently resettled.

The synagogue developed from a private house in block L7. The German Wikipedia states that it was probably used for worship from the late second century, while the chronology after Clark Hopkins in the English article on the city dates the conversion to c. 165–200. The building was remodelled in 244/245, as an Aramaic inscription and inscribed ceiling tiles show; one Greek tile names Samuel son of Yedaya, elder of the Jews, as founder in 245.

Before the Sasanian assault the Roman garrison filled the buildings along the western wall with earth and rubble to reinforce it, burying most of the synagogue. A Yale and French team led by Clark Hopkins uncovered it in 1932. Moving the entire building to Yale was not permitted, and the paintings went to Damascus.[1][2][3][4][5]

The house measured about 15 by 8 m, with an annex of about 10 by 8 m; rooms were grouped around a courtyard, and the annex contained a peristyle forecourt and the assembly hall. The hall measured 13.65 by 7.68 m with a ceiling about 7 m high; its western wall, facing Jerusalem, held the Torah shrine. The ceiling was lined with painted terracotta tiles, 234 of which were recovered, showing flowers, fruit, animals, female faces and zodiac signs, or Greek and Aramaic inscriptions.

The paintings run in three registers above a dado, reaching about 7 m. Technically they are tempera on plaster rather than true fresco. Because of the slope of the fill, the west wall survived almost entire, the north and south walls about halfway, and the east wall only as a narrow strip.[1][2]

The building served the Jewish community of a multilingual garrison town and through successive enlargements became the core of a small Jewish quarter. Inscriptions and graffiti from the synagogue are in Aramaic, Greek, Middle Persian and Parthian; most of the Persian ones were written on the paintings and record the appreciation of visitors from elsewhere. Its use ended with the burial of 256.

Today, according to the English Wikipedia, the painted hall is installed in the National Museum of Damascus in its original arrangement; the German Wikipedia speaks of a dedicated room. In 2025, after the fall of the Assad government, a delegation of scholars from abroad was able to see the paintings for the first time in decades.[1][2][3]

The 58 surviving scenes, probably about 60% of the original programme, draw on the Hebrew Bible: the binding of Isaac, Moses at the burning bush and leading the Israelites through the Red Sea, Ezekiel's vision, Mordecai and Esther, Samuel anointing David. The Hand of God marks divine intervention; the Israelites appear as an armed force with Roman-style shields and standards, the Tabernacle as a Roman temple and Aaron in Persian dress. The find challenged narrow readings of a Jewish prohibition of images. The UNESCO Tentative List entry, on which Dura-Europos has stood since 1999, counts the synagogue paintings among the city's most famous.[1][2][3][5]

City level: Dura-Europos was looted and largely destroyed between 2011 and 2014 under IS; satellite imagery from 2015 showed more than 70% of the site devastated by looters. Building level: according to the English Wikipedia, what remained of the synagogue on site appears to have been destroyed, possibly in 2014. The paintings and the reassembled hall are in the National Museum of Damascus; their present state of preservation is not described in the sources.[1][3][4]