"The Temple of Isis is a Roman temple dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Isis. This small and almost intact temple was among one of the first discoveries during the excavation of Pompeii in 1764." (Wikipedia)
"... The preserved Pompeian temple is actually the second structure; the original building built during the reign of Augustus was damaged in an earlier earthquake of 62 AD. Seventeen years later with the massive volcanic eruption, the Iseum [Isis temple] alone was the sole temple to be completely rebuilt—ahead even of the Capitolium."
Next video shows the standing ruins of the temple as they appeared in 2009. All of its wall paintings and statues were apparently moved to the Archaeological Museum at Naples.
"The worship of Isis was [originally] treated with suspicion in official circles because of its associations with Ptolemaic Egypt," according to Pompeii: The Last Day by Paul Wilkinson (p.47). "After the annexation of Egypt by Augustus in 30 BC, however, attitudes relaxed and by AD 38 Rome itself had a Temple of Isis. The cult of Isis had its own full-time priests, whereas the more official Roman religions did not."
More views of the temple (including the entrance to an underground ritual purification chamber) can be seen in the next video. Turn up the volume.
According to Pompeii: The Last Day (pp. 176-177), "The sanctuary around the Temple of Isis is enclosed by walls on its east and north sides. It adjoins the Samnite Gymnasium [1] to the west and the theaters to the south. Very little is left of the original temple because it had been almost completely destroyed by the earthquake of AD 62. It was completely rebuilt in interesting circumstances by Numerius Popidius Celsinus. He was a six-year-old child who was admitted into the ruling body of Pompeii, the collegium decurionum, as a reward for his generosity (his father having actually provided the finances)." [2]
[1] "In the 5th century BC, the Samnites conquered [Pompeii] (and all the other towns of Campania); the new rulers imposed their architecture and enlarged the town. After the Samnite Wars (4th century BC), Pompeii was forced to accept the status of socium of Rome, maintaining, however, linguistic and administrative autonomy. In the 4th century BC, it was fortified. Pompeii remained faithful to Rome during the Second Punic War." (Wikipedia)
[2] According to Wilkinson, Numerius Popidius Celsinus was the name of the six-year-old child, but other sources give this as the father's name. It's possible that they both had the same name, however. One of the temple inscriptions reads "'Numerius Popidius Celsinus, son of Numerius, rebuilt at his own expense from its foundations, the Temple of Isis, which had collapsed in an earthquake; because of his generosity, although he was only six years old, the town councilors nominated him into their number free of charge.'" Source: The Post Hole. The Latin and an English translation of the inscription can be found here.
Note: The video above is part of a longer lecture series on a variety of ancient history topics.
Isis was an important deity in Pompeii, probably because of the goddess's association with water:
"Because this temple served the Isis cult and was not a public civil space, the Temple of Isis, or Iseum, and Isis herself must have held special meaning and value for the city of Pompeii. Pompeii’s seafaring economy and the rise of personal religion in the Roman world may explain this high value. Since Pompeii relied on commercial seafaring to support its economy, Isis’s emphasis on stable and life-giving water defeating the often treacherous, unpredictable, and sometimes-deadly water of the sea, strengthened the local cult. The confluence of architecture, art, and rituals implies why the Pompeiians so highly valued a cult sanctuary – gentle Isis, offering resurrection and regulated water, provided a comforting counterbalance to unpredictable Neptune." (The Post Hole).
Related: The Temples of Pompeii
Paleolithic Cave Art & Shamanism
The El Castillo Cave art -- the oldest of which is thought to be around 40,800 years old -- could be "the oldest known well-dated cave paintings in the world—a title previously held by France's Chauvet cave paintings, believed to be at least 37,000 years old," according to National Geographic (2012). Very ancient cave paintings have also been discovered in Indonesia, but they seem to date to around the same period as the Chauvet paintings:
"Paintings of wild animals and hand markings left by adults and children on cave walls in Indonesia are at least 35,000 years old, making them some of the oldest artworks known." Source: The Guardian (2014). (See next video.)
What does all of this cave art mean? Why was it created in the first place? No one really knows and archaeologists have tended to focus on technical issues like dating the art rather than speculate about its purpose:
"Ever since the beginning of the 20th century, several attempts have been made to find the meaning(s) of Paleolithic rock art. Art for art’s sake, totemism, the Abbe Breuil’s hunting magic and Leroi-Gourhan’s and Laming-Emperaires’s structuralist theories were proposed and then abandoned one after the other .... Since then, most specialists have made up their minds that it would be hopeless to look for the meanings behind the art. They prefer to spend their time and efforts recording it, describing it and dating it, to endeavor to answer the questions 'what?', 'how?' and 'when?', thus carefully avoiding the fundamental question 'why?'." Source: Bradshaw Foundation.
The South African scholar David Lewis-Williams has proposed that Paleolithic cave art provides evidence for Stone Age shamanism. (Next video is from an interview with Graham Hancock.)
"Considering the fact that shamanism is so widespread among hunter-gatherers and that Upper Paleolithic people were admittedly hunter-gatherers, looking to shamanism as a likely religion for them should have been the first logical step whenever the question of meaning arose." (Bradshaw Foundation).
"... shamanic religions evidence several characteristics which can make us understand cave art better. The first one is their concept of a complex cosmos in which at least two worlds - or more - coexist, be they side by side or one above the other. Those worlds interact with one another and in our own world most events are believed to be the consequence of an influence from the other-world(s). The second one is the belief of the group in the ability for certain persons to have at will a direct controlled relationship with the other-world. This is done for very practical purposes : to cure the sick, to maintain a good relationship with the powers in the other-world, to restore an upset harmony, to reclaim a lost soul, to make good hunting possible, to forecast the future, to cast spells, etc." (Bradshaw foundation.)
Stone Age cave paintings are very similar around the world, a striking fact in itself. If Lewis-William's theory is correct, it means that some form of shamanism was the original religion - the primal religion - of the human race. It also suggests that religion may have a pre-human or pre-Homo Sapiens origin since some experts have conjectured that the art discovered in the El Castillo Cave may have been created by Neanderthals.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Art, Commentary, Hidden History, Prehistory, Religion, Videos | Permalink