RT Article
T1 An Arabian Trinity
JF Harvard theological review
VO 79
IS 1/3
SP 17
OP 21
A1 Bowersock, G. W.
LA English
PB Cambridge Univ. Press
YR 1986
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1784648108
AB In 1875 the collector and scholar Wilhelm Froehner published a short text incised on a gem of red jasper that had been offered to him in Nazareth for possible purchase. Of the six lines of this text only the first three have been much cited because they consist of three gods’ names, and reference has customarily been not to Froehner's original publication but to Louis Robert's quotation from it in his Collection Froehner of 1936. In making an apposite allusion to the Froehner gem in her excellent study of the cults of the Hawran in the Roman period, Dominique Sourdel was under the impression that the great nineteenth-century collector had actually acquired the piece; but Froehner himself reports unambiguously that he refused to pay the dealer's price. The object has therefore been lost to the world of scholarship. Nonetheless Froehner's transcription, entirely baffling to him in its second half, is worth resurrecting in the light of more recent discoveries in the Roman Near East. It bears upon several important cults among the inhabitants of provincia Arabia.
DO 10.1017/S0017816000020307