Rome, Commagene and the cult of Mithras Underestimated factors in Kushan royal self-esteem

When in the first century AD Kujula Kadphises united the power of five nomadic tribes under his sovereignty, he created a major world power of his times, known as the Kushan empire, which had its centre in Bactria. Emperor Augustus had achieved something similar a few decades earlier and Kujula shows his indebtedness to this Roman example in more than one respect.

the first century BC, a synthesis of gods from the Iranian and Greek pantheons had been brought about by Antiochus, a Hellenistic ruler in Commagene (south-east Turkey ), which had been facilitated by the fact that his pedigree allegedly went back to Ahuramazda on the side of his father and to Zeus on that of his mother. The fervent religious activities of this king were visible to everyone in his kingdom; stelae erected by him show how he was being received amongst the gods as one of their own. His identification of different gods under one label was unprecedented but set an example worthy of imitation. The first five Kushan kings expressed a very similar idea on their coinage: the coalescence of various gods into one and the identity of the king with this synthesized deity.

In Commagene a new cult around the sun-god Mithras originated in the same first century BC, without clear relations to the Mithras depicted in stone by the above-mentioned Antiochus. Although better known in its Roman form, as exemplified by the many mithraea throughout Europe, we soon find Mithras on the coinage of Indo-Greek Bactrian kings as well and also on the coins of their successors, the Kushans. The spiritual attitude of the Kushans towards Mithraic ideas from the West will be demonstrated on the basis of well published but newly interpreted material.

Professor Falk will address questions such as these in a lecture which takes all three factors together. The creation of a world empire, the synthesis of gods of different pantheons into a divine kingly prototype, and the rise of the cult of the sun-god Mithras. A picture of the Kushan kings emerges which shows them as actively attempting to unite the disparate religious systems in their vast realm, and in addition, attempting to present themselves as the highest religious authority for all groups of people under their rule.

About Harry Falk

Harry Falk is professor of Indology at the Freie Universität Berlin, working on South-Asian cultures 'between the empires' of the Mauryas and the Guptas, from the 3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD. This was the period in which the mythology and iconography of the religions were beginning to take shape that we subsume today under the general title of Hinduism. Among the sources explored in his research epigraphical texts play a major role, but also numismatic and sigillographic material is taken into account. Developments in the histories of religion, culture and economy of the subcontinent are, as far as possible, compared to contemporary cultures in the Western world.

Chronologies of ancient South Asia have been a special topic of his research, which has yielded new dates for the so-called eras of Azes and Kani'ka. Falk’s teaching in Berlin in recent years also focuses on birch-bark manuscripts from the first century AD, which provide early texts from Buddhist monasteries in North Pakistan and shed new light on the emergence of the so-called Mahāyāna form of Buddhism.

His books include: Bruderschaft und Würfelspiel. Untersuchungen zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des vedischen Opfers (1986), Schrift im Alten Indien (1993), and Aśokan Sites and Artefacts. A sourcebook with bibliography (2006). A computer program called Indoskript was designed in the 1990s and released in 2006. It provides an interactive database for the palaeography of the scripts of ancient India.

Admission to the lecture is free, but please register in advance by submitting the online registration form at www.knaw.nl (section: Agenda, 21 November 2011) or by sending an e-mail to bernadette.peeters@bureau.knaw.nl