The fresco reproduced above — three white-robed priests, one wearing a tall conical hat, another holding a ceremonial vessel beside a bronze incense stand — comes from Dura-Europos, the Hellenistic-Parthian-Roman frontier city on the west bank of the Euphrates in present-day Syria. Dura-Europos is famous as the “Pompeii of the Desert” because its sudden abandonment in the 250s CE froze an extraordinary mix of temples, synagogue paintings, and multilingual graffiti in place (Wikipedia: Dura-Europos). While Dura itself lies far from the Armenian highlands, the city’s history is bound to Armenia through three threads worth tracing in detail: the Roman military road that ran through Armenia on its way to Dura, the city’s documented multilingual and multi-religious population, and the shared Iranian-derived religious world — centered on Mithra — that linked Dura’s priesthoods to the pre-Christian temples of Armenia.
In 113–117 CE, the emperor Trajan launched a major eastern war against the Parthian Empire. Crucially, this campaign did not begin in Mesopotamia — it began in Armenia. In 114 CE, Trajan put in motion an eastern campaign that started in Armenia, crossed Mesopotamia, and finally defeated the Parthians at Ctesiphon by the beginning of 116 CE, as recorded by Cassius Dio.
That Armenian phase was not a minor detour. Trajan marched from Antioch in Syria into Armenia and conquered the Armenian capital Artaxata, deposed the Armenian king Parthamasiris, and ordered Armenia’s annexation as a new Roman province, one that stretched all the way to the shores of the Caspian Sea. Rome even struck commemorative coinage proclaiming the conquest of both lands together — “ARMENIA ET MESOPOTAMIA IN POTESTATEM POPULI ROMANI.” (Wikipedia: Roman Armenia)
It was the same army, fresh from subduing Armenia, that pushed down the Euphrates and took Dura-Europos. Dura was retaken by Roman forces under Trajan in this period, and a triumphal arch was erected at the city in his honor as Trajan sailed down the Euphrates from Dura toward Mesopotamia. Epigraphic evidence at Dura confirms the brief Roman occupancy and its abrupt end: a Greek inscription dated to 117 CE records a local priest restoring a temple’s doors because the originals had been “taken away by the Romans,” who had since departed the city — a departure that modern historians link directly to the unraveling of Trajan’s Armenian-Mesopotamian settlement after his death in 117 CE (Judaism and Rome: Roman Soldiers and a Local Temple in Dura-Europos; Smarthistory: Dura-Europos).
In short, Dura-Europos’s first Roman occupation and Rome’s annexation of Armenia were two acts of the same campaign — fought by the same legions, commemorated in the same years, undone by the same withdrawal after Trajan’s death. Upon Trajan’s death in 117, Rome relinquished Mesopotamia to the Parthians, and Dura was only retaken permanently by Lucius Verus’s army during the Roman-Parthian War of 161–166.
Dura-Europos is renowned among historians for the sheer linguistic diversity recorded on its walls. Surviving parchment, papyri, and carved inscriptions attest to the numerous languages spoken and understood at Dura-Europos, including Greek, Latin, Palmyrenean, Hebrew, Hatrian, Safaitic, and Pahlavi (Middle Persian). This was a garrison whose soldiers were drawn from across the Roman East. Archaeological evidence indicates the garrison at Dura-Europos was a mixed force composed of the Cohors XX Palmyrenorum along with vexillations from Legio IV Scythica, Legio III Cyrenaica, and Legio XVI Flavia Firma, among other units.
Legions and auxiliary cohorts recruited and rotated across the eastern frontier provinces — including Cappadocia, which administered Roman Armenia, and the Armenian highlands themselves once annexed — moved along the same network of roads and forts that linked the Caucasus to the Euphrates. The presence of Iranian-language Pahlavi graffiti alongside Greek, Latin, and Aramaic dialects at Dura is itself a textbook example of the cultural layering — Hellenistic, Parthian, and Roman — that also defined Armenia in the same centuries, a kingdom that was simultaneously a Hellenistic monarchy, an Arsacid (Parthian-dynasty) state, and, intermittently, a Roman client or province.
The image at the top of this article shows priests in long white robes; the central figure wears a tall, peaked white hat and pours a libation beside a tall bronze stand. This composition matches the celebrated Sacrifice of Konon fresco from the so-called Temple of Bel (Temple of the Palmyrene Gods) at Dura-Europos — one of the best-preserved cult paintings to survive from the ancient Near East. This Parthian-era fresco, located in the temple’s Holy of Holies and dated to the late first century BC or early first century AD, depicts the priest Konon and his multi-generational family participating in a sacrificial offering, with priests performing rituals such as dipping branches into water and burning incense on an altar. The clergy are shown barefoot, in keeping with the priesthood of Ishtar-type cults, and the painting blends Hellenistic style with Oriental and Parthian influences — frontal, two-dimensional figures with fixed gazes, characteristic of Parthian-period religious art. The panel was later removed to the National Museum of Damascus while a related painting from the same temple, the Sacrifice of Julius Terentius, was sent to the Yale University Art Gallery.
This style of priestly dress and ritual — the conical white headgear, the frontal sacrificial pose, the incense stand — belongs to a broader Parthian-era religious culture rooted in Iranian (Zoroastrian-derived) priestly tradition, which spread with the Arsacid political order from Iran across Mesopotamia, Syria, and the Caucasus, Armenia included.
Dura-Europos’s own dedicated shrine to Mithras makes this connection explicit. The Mithraeum of Dura-Europos, excavated in 1934, is considered one of the best-preserved and best-documented cult buildings of Mithraism anywhere; it began as a small cult room and was twice expanded by Roman soldiers, eventually receiving rich wall paintings including depictions of Mithras as a hunter. The cult relief found there shows the standard tauroctony scene of Mithras slaying the bull, with the god dressed in the “oriental” costume of trousers, boots, and a pointed cap — the same Iranian-style peaked headgear visible on the priest in the fresco discussed above. Worshippers from Palmyra prayed at this Mithraeum and at other religious buildings in Dura, as recorded in inscriptions giving their names and the names of their gods, often written in Palmyrene Aramaic.
This is where Dura’s religious world meets Armenia’s most directly. Long before Rome or Parthia fought over the Euphrates, the Armenian Highlands had absorbed the same Iranian Mazdean religious system that produced Dura’s Mithraeum. Zoroastrianism had been practiced in Armenia since the fifth century BC, reaching the country during the Achaemenid and Parthian periods; prior to its Christianization, Armenia was predominantly a Zoroastrian land, and the yazatas Mithra (known in Armenian as Mihr) and Verethragna (Vahagn) were held in especially high reverence.
Six of the eight divinities whose cult centers are named by the fifth-century Armenian historian Agathangelos clearly represent Zoroastrian yazatas worshipped in Armenia. Aramazd (the Iranian Ahura Mazda) headed the Armenian pantheon, with his main cult center at Ani-Kamakh and Bagavan; the cult of Mihr — directly cognate with Mithra — was centered chiefly at Bagayarich and played a major role in Armenian religious tradition. Armenia’s most famous standing pre-Christian monument embodies this directly: the temple of Garni, a Hellenistic-style temple, was dedicated to the sun god Mithra, known in Armenian as Mihr.
Scholars of Armenian-Iranian relations have noted that this was not superficial borrowing but a centuries-long, lived religious bond. Iran and Armenia maintained extensive political, historical, and cultural relations, with Armenia having come under Iranian rule since the Median period; the religious influence of Iran on Armenia persisted into the third century CE, until Gregory the Illuminator brought about Armenia’s conversion to Christianity. The Encyclopaedia Iranica notes that Mihr had his own temple at Bagayarich, that his name occupied the seventh month and the eighth day of the Armenian calendar, and that scholars have drawn comparisons between the Mithraic tauroctony imagery — the very scene carved in Dura’s Mithraeum — and later Armenian Christian iconography of St. George.
It is worth noting one important nuance: Armenian Mithra-worship was not simply an import of Sassanian fire-worship. As the nineteenth/twentieth-century historian Vahan Kurkjian observed, there was no real identity between the old Armenian pagan cult and later Sassanian Mazdeism, since Armenia had no Magi priesthood and no fire-worship in the strict Zoroastrian sense — idols, by contrast, were introduced into Armenia through Hellenistic influence, with Greek-style statues and even temple-priests brought in by kings Artashes and Tigran the Great. In other words, Armenia’s Mihr cult — like Dura’s hybrid Mithraeum, built by Roman soldiers but decorated in Parthian-Iranian visual language — was itself a local synthesis of Iranian theology and Hellenistic artistic and institutional forms. That is precisely the kind of religious hybridity the Konon fresco captures: an Iranian-style priesthood, Parthian ritual gestures, executed in a city that was simultaneously Greek, Aramaic, and (after Trajan and Lucius Verus) Roman.
The priests in white robes and conical caps pictured at Dura-Europos are not an Armenian artifact, but they sit inside the same historical current that shaped pre-Christian Armenia: the Parthian-Iranian religious world centered on Mithra/Mihr, propagated along the same roads and by the same Arsacid political order that ruled Armenia for centuries; the same Roman military campaigns — Trajan’s invasion of Armenia followed immediately by his capture of Dura — that briefly fused Armenia and Mesopotamia into a single Roman sphere; and the same culture of religious and linguistic layering, in which a frontier garrison city on the Euphrates and a mountain kingdom in the Caucasus both produced syncretic pantheons combining Iranian yazatas, Greek gods, and, eventually, Christian saints.
Note: this article presents historical and art-historical information drawn from the cited sources for educational purposes; readers interested in primary scholarship on Dura-Europos’s excavation reports or on Agathangelos’s and Movses Khorenatsi’s original Armenian texts should consult the linked sources directly.
Idea and source of illustration by Sukias Torosyan
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