The "Little Refugee": A Hooded Boy from Nysa

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

A small marble statuette in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens carries an emotional weight far greater than its modest 63-centimeter height would suggest. Catalogued simply as a boy with a dog, it is known to visitors and staff alike by an unofficial name: the "Little Refugee" (Prosfygaki).

Hooded child holding a puppy from ancient Nysa in Asia Mintor 1st century CE.

The figure shows a chubby, barefoot child wrapped in a hooded traveling cloak, arms wrapped tightly around a puppy held against the chest. The carving is unpretentious; this was never intended to be a great public monument. Yet its appeal is immediate: a barefoot child clutching a puppy for comfort. Most catalogue entries date it to the 1st century BCE, though at least one specialist account describes it as a Roman-period copy of an earlier, 3rd-century BCE Hellenistic type, which would place the invention of the image itself a good deal earlier than the surviving carving.

Its modern nickname, however, comes not from what it depicts but from its own extraordinary journey. It was found at Gerontikon, a locality within the ancient city of Nysa on the Maeander in Asia Minor (near modern Sultanhisar, Turkey), and was brought to Athens by Greek refugees in 1922 — the year of the catastrophic Greek exodus from Anatolia that followed the Greco-Turkish War.

A small carved child, lifted from the earth where it had rested for nearly two millennia and carried across the Aegean by people fleeing their own homes, became itself a quiet refugee.

It has understandably become a quiet emblem of displacement for many who encounter it today.

Telesphorus and the Hooded-Child Type

The hooded-cloak type to which this statuette belongs has a longer and more intriguing history than that of a simple "boy with pet." Related hooded-child figures across the Roman world invite comparison with Telesphorus, the hooded son of the healing god Asclepius, whose cult spread outward from the great Asclepieion at Pergamon during the Roman period—not far, geographically or culturally, from Nysa itself. Whether this particular figure was intended as a devotional image tied to that healing tradition, a garden or funerary ornament in the well-established Hellenistic genre of children with animal companions, or simply a beloved decorative piece with no deeper cultic charge, remains genuinely open. Sometimes, the hooded cloak of a small, chubby-cheeked marble child conceals more than a single tidy label.

The enveloping hood is the defining iconographic feature of Telesphorus

While some representations include secondary attributes, the hood—not any accompanying object—identifies the figure. His origins remain debated: some scholars place them in the Pergamene Asclepieion of the Hellenistic period, from which both his cult and iconography spread through Asia Minor and eventually into the wider Roman world; others argue that the Roman image reflects an older, non-Greek religious tradition that was later incorporated into the Asclepian cult.

The type had real staying power and real geographic reach. In the Celtic provinces of Roman Gaul, Britain, and the Danube lands, hooded child or dwarf figures known to modern scholarship as the Genii Cucullati ("Hooded Spirits") appear from the 1st century CE onward, sometimes singly (as on the Continent) and sometimes in triads (as is characteristic in Britain). 

Bronze sculpture of a child wearing a hooded cloak possibly a furniture terminal, Champagne, circa 1st century CE. - National Archaeological Museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye courtesy of Wikimedia Commons contributor Siren-Com.

Genii Cuculatti and Goddess, Roman relief sculpture, Corinium Museum, Cirencester courtesy of Wikimedia Commons contributor Tony Grist.

Their exact relationship to Telesphorus is unresolved — some scholars treat the Genii Cucullati as a localized, Celtic-inflected descendant or parallel development of the Pergamene type, associated broadly with fertility, healing, and protection; others argue for an independent native origin onto which the hood motif was later mapped. No ancient text names or explains either figure directly, so both identifications rest on the images themselves and a small body of votive inscriptions.

Date												Example																						Attribute
Hellenistic												Nysa																						Hood and Puppy
1st century CE                     2nd century												Gallic bronze terminal Pautalia coins																						Hood with No Additional object Hood with Variable object or none
2nd–3rd century												Aquae Iasae																						Hood with No Additional Attribute
Roman Britain												Genii Cucullati																						Triplicate with Hood and variable Eggs, fruit, etc.
Early 5th century												Liverpool ivory diptych																						Hood with Scroll

For the Nysa statuette specifically, the case for a Telesphorus connection is suggestive rather than demonstrated. The dog is an unusual attribute not generally associated with the canonical Telesphorus type. Dogs carry their own healing associations in Asclepian cult practice (temple dogs at Asclepieion were credited with therapeutic licking of wounds, and dogs appear elsewhere in Asclepian iconography and votive relief). A hooded child with a dog, from a region within the broader cultural orbit of the Pergamene healing cult, is plausible as a loosely Telesphorus-adjacent image — but the museum's own cataloguing treats it primarily as a genre statuette of a boy with a pet, and that more cautious reading deserves equal weight until better evidence is revealed.

From Hellenistic Nysa to Late Antiquity: The Transformation of a Type

The Nysa statuette is unusual in pairing the hooded child with a puppy. Later representations of Telesphorus from Asia Minor, the Danube provinces, and beyond increasingly emphasize the hooded figure itself while secondary attributes become optional or disappear altogether. A second-century relief from the thermal sanctuary at Iasae, for example, depicts the familiar healing triad of Asclepius, Hygeia, and Telesphorus without any accompanying animal. 

Telesphorus with Asclepius and Hygeia from Aquae Iasae courtesy of Archaeo Press.

Provincial coinage likewise often reduces Telesphorus to his characteristic hooded silhouette, although occasional issues depict him carrying other objects. The evidence therefore suggests that the hood—not the dog, scroll, or any other accessory—served as the essential identifier of the deity.

Coin issued by Commodus with Telesphorus clutching a votive object on the reverse dated to the 2nd century CE courtesy of Roman Provincial Coinage Online.

By the early fifth century CE, however, one remarkable ivory diptych from Liverpool depicts Telesphorus carrying a scroll while accompanying Asclepius. Produced within the Neoplatonic intellectual milieu of Late Antiquity, this image may represent a new interpretation of the deity rather than the preservation of an earlier canonical attribute.

Fifth century CE (400-430 CE) ivory diptych showing Telesphorus holding a scroll courtesy of National Museums Liverpool.

Conclusion

The evolution of the hooded figure's attributes reveals how flexible ancient religious imagery could be. The hood remained the essential marker of identity, while accompanying elements—puppy, objects, offerings, or scroll—shifted according to region, period, and context. The Nysa statuette therefore occupies an intriguing place within this long tradition: it preserves an unusually intimate image of a hooded child with an animal companion at a moment before the type became more standardized.

Perhaps that is why the "Little Refugee" continues to resonate. It is not only a survivor of antiquity or a witness to twentieth-century displacement; it is also a reminder that objects, like people, can carry histories far beyond the circumstances of their creation.

 

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From Four Jars to One Shrine: The Last Chapter in the History of Canopic Equipment

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

Most of us picture canopic equipment as four jars, each crowned with the head of one of the Four Sons of Horus, standing guard over the liver, lungs, stomach, and intestines of the deceased. That image is essentially a New Kingdom snapshot. By the time we reach the Ptolemaic Period, canopic equipment had quietly become something else entirely — and this small painted wood box, excavated by George Reisner's expedition at Naga ed-Deir and now in the collections of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, is a good specimen for showing exactly how.

A Ptolemaic Canopic Box from Naga ed-Deir (Hearst Museum of Anthropology, 6-17149ab) photographed by Mary Harrsch

Naga ed-Deir sits on the east bank of the Nile, roughly 160 km north of Luxor, opposite Girga. What makes it valuable to Egyptology is less any single spectacular find than its extraordinary continuity: the necropolis was used almost without interruption from the Predynastic period through the Coptic era, a span of some four thousand years. Phoebe Hearst sponsored George Reisner's excavations there across several seasons between 1901 and 1904, with fieldwork directed on the ground by Arthur C. Mace. The resulting material — divided between Berkeley and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — has become one of the more heavily used comparative datasets for Egyptian mortuary archaeology.

From jars to shrine-box: a millennium of symbolic drift

The object in question is not, strictly speaking, a canopic chest in the Old or New Kingdom sense — a container built to hold four functioning jars. It belongs to a much later, terminal stage in the evolution of canopic equipment.

Through the New Kingdom, canopic jars were genuinely hollowed vessels, each assigned to a specific organ and protected by one of the Four Sons of Horus, whose differentiated heads (human, baboon, jackal, falcon) appear on the lids from the 19th Dynasty on. The first real break comes in the Third Intermediate Period (21st–25th Dynasties), when embalmers began returning the mummified viscera to the body cavity itself. Canopic jars didn't disappear — they became dummies: solid, uninscribed-cavity vessels retained purely as ritual markers.

The 26th Dynasty saw a brief functional revival, with genuine (if empty) jars reappearing, sometimes divided between two half-size chests flanking the mummy — a practice that faded again by the end of the Late Period.

By the Ptolemaic Period, the whole apparatus had condensed into a single object type: a small, tall, naos-form wooden chest built to resemble a shrine or sanctuary entrance, standing in for what had once required four separate containers and four attendant deities. This form disappears entirely by the early Roman period, when canopic equipment of any kind drops out of Egyptian burial practice altogether.

Our box is a clear example of that final consolidation. Rather than crowning four jars with four gods, the entire program is compressed onto one small structure: a false-door/shrine facade on the principal face carries the words of Anubis himself — split across the two long sides, with the god addressed by different embalming epithets on each ("lord of the sacred land" on one, "who is before the divine booth" on the other) — while a recumbent Sokar-falcon perches on the lid, echoing both the old falcon-headed Qebehsenuef convention and the broader Sokar-Osiris funerary complex.

The side registers carry rows of standing genii and blue-wigged, human-headed figures who likely stand in for the Sons of Horus and their four protective goddesses (Isis, Nephthys, Neith, Serqet) — the whole cast of characters that once occupied four independent vessels, now gathered onto a single reliquary through decoration rather than through physically separate containers.

By the Ptolemaic Period, canopic equipment had been evolving away from its original practical role for centuries. Although burial practices varied, the organs were increasingly returned to the mummy after embalming. The canopic assemblage therefore functioned primarily as a symbolic invocation of traditional divine protection.

The transformation reflects more than changing burial customs. By the Late and Ptolemaic Periods, Egyptian funerary religion increasingly emphasized symbolic representation over functional duplication. Once the embalmed organs were normally returned to the mummy, there was little practical reason to maintain four separate vessels. Rather than abandoning the ancient tradition, priests condensed it into a single shrine-like object whose painted decoration invoked the Four Sons of Horus, their protective goddesses, and the safeguarding powers once embodied in individual jars. The box became not a cheaper replacement for canopic equipment but its accepted symbolic equivalent.

What we're looking at, then, is not a container that once held something and now doesn't; it's the very last iteration of an object category whose entire late history is one of increasing abstraction — from four working vessels, to four empty ones, to a single miniature building evoking the whole apparatus in paint and relief.

Seen in isolation, this painted wooden box might appear to be a simplified substitute for the more familiar canopic jars. In reality, it records a profound shift in Egyptian religious practice. Rather than abandoning ancient traditions, Egyptian priests preserved their meaning while adapting their form to changing beliefs about mummification and the afterlife. The result is an object that stands at the end of a tradition stretching back nearly two millennia—still invoking the protection of the Four Sons of Horus, but doing so through symbolism rather than physical vessels.

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A Remnant of Sulla's Sack: A Bronze Eros, the Mahdia Shipwreck, and Rome's Appetite for Greek Cultural Capital

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

Among the Dallas Museum of Art's most striking objects that I photographed there is a small bronze lamp holder depicting Eros as an ephebe attributed to a Greek workshop, perhaps in the eastern Mediterranean, dating to the late 2nd or early 1st century BCE. Depicted as a winged youth leaning dynamically forward in flight, the figure once functioned as a luxury fixture, its outstretched arm terminating in a bronze tendril that would have cradled an oil lamp. Desire, quite literally, provided the light.

Eros as a Lamp Bearer (late 2nd–early 1st century BCE). Desire providing the light. This bronze figure once supported an oil lamp in an elite Mediterranean household and belongs to the same workshop tradition as luxury bronzes associated with the Mahdia shipwreck. Photographed at the Dallas Museum of Art by Mary Harrsch.

Iconography and the Question of Identity

The museum notes that this Eros is rendered with both male and female characteristics — a theologically deliberate androgyny reflecting late Hellenistic conceptions of desire as a force transcending gendered boundaries. Although writing centuries later, Philostratus the Elder's 3rd century CE Imagines describes Eros in precisely these terms, suggesting that the blurring of masculine and feminine traits in luxury representations of the god may already have been understood within elite 1st century BCE Greek cultural discourse as a sophisticated reflection of desire's inherently boundary-crossing nature.

A closer examination of the figure raises an additional iconographic question. The hairstyle—tight, layered curls swept back from the forehead with pronounced volume at the crown—bears comparison to the krobylos, the arrangement historically associated with Apollo and with aristocratic Athenian men in the Archaic and early Classical periods. The boundary between Apollo and Eros typologies in Hellenistic decorative bronze production was not always rigidly maintained, and workshops frequently drew upon a shared repertoire of idealized youthful forms. Rather than signaling a deliberate conflation of the two deities, the borrowing of Apolline coiffure may have served as a subtle acknowledgment of their familial relationship within the Olympian pantheon or, more broadly, of their participation in a common visual tradition of divine youthfulness.

Whether the DMA figure represents a deliberate conflation — invoking Apollo Phoebus, the light-bringer, in a piece literally designed to carry light — or simply reflects the eclectic workshop practices of late Hellenistic luxury production remains an open interpretive question, but one the object invites seriously.

The Classicizing Gesture

The figure's lean musculature, serious facial expression, absence of the exaggerated baroque emotionalism characteristic of Pergamene or Alexandrian Hellenistic work — is best understood in precisely this commercial and cultural context. Late Hellenistic Athenian workshops producing for Roman buyers deliberately invoked Classical Athenian aesthetic traditions as a form of prestige signaling, marketing their objects' cultural pedigree to patrons who associated Athens with the pinnacle of Greek achievement. The ephebic quality of this Eros is not a dating anomaly but an ideological choice: Athenian craftsmanship performing its own heritage for consumption by Rome's philhellenic elite.

Eros Before the Cherub

The DMA lamp holder also captures Eros at a historically specific moment in his long iconographic devolution. In Hesiod's Theogony he is a primordial cosmological force, one of the first entities to emerge from Chaos. By the Hellenistic period he had multiplied into flocks of decorative erotes populating luxury objects across the Mediterranean world. Roman taste would complete his transformation to the pudgy infant Cupid of sarcophagi and frescos depicting mischievous erotes coaxing goat-driven chariots across the walls in elite Roman homes such as the House of the Vettii. This figure stands between those poles: still muscular, still serious, still theologically complex — but already a lamp stand in a wealthy Roman dining room. The cosmic force that Hesiod placed at the origin of creation had become, by the early 1st century BCE, a very beautiful, very sophisticated piece of interior decoration. That trajectory is itself a kind of cultural history of the ancient world in miniature.

The Mahdia Connection

The museum's description notes that this bronze "has been associated with a trove of Greek luxury goods recovered from an ancient shipwreck near the town of Mahdia off the coast of Tunisia."

The Mahdia wreck, discovered by Greek sponge divers in 1907 and dated to approximately 80–60 BCE, yielded one of the most important assemblages of Hellenistic luxury goods ever recovered from the ancient Mediterranean. Marble sculptures, bronze furnishings, architectural elements, and decorative bronzes recovered from the site have been linked by scholars, most notably Günter Hellenkemper Salies, to Athenian workshops producing for Roman patrons in the aftermath of Sulla's sack of Athens in 86 BCE. The Dallas Museum of Art's Eros was not part of the wreck's cargo, but technical and stylistic similarities suggest that it emerged from the same broader workshop tradition.

The DMA Eros entered the art market independently and was acquired by the museum in 2005 with no documented ancient findspot. Its association with the Mahdia finds rests on technical and stylistic correspondences that place it within the same workshop tradition, though not among the shipwreck's recovered cargo. Even so, that connection situates the piece within a specific, historically identifiable moment of Athenian luxury bronze production serving Roman appetites for Greek cultural capital.

That the figure survives detached from its original lamp fixture assembly is itself historically telling. This condition is consistent with the broader pattern of Hellenistic bronze luxury goods entering the Roman market as individual pieces stripped from their original domestic contexts — whether through military plunder, forced sale, or the deliberate disassembly of Greek household assemblages for easier transport and resale. The DMA Eros, separated from the composite fixture of which it was once a functioning part, embodies in its very incompleteness the extractive processes that drove the late Hellenistic luxury trade.

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The Fierce and the Fine: Boar Imagery and Warrior Identity on an Etruscan helmet

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

For some strange reason I have always been particularly drawn to metalwork and found this beautifully decorated Corinithin-style Etruscan helmet incised with images of boars really spectacular when I photographed it at the Dallas Art Museum.

Corinthian-style Etruscan helmet incised with images of boars, Bronze, 5th century BCE, photographed at the Dallas Museum of Art by Mary Harrsch.

Further research revealed the Corinthian helmet type was developed in Greece around the 7th century BCE and became the dominant helmet form across the Mediterranean world. The Etruscans adopted it enthusiastically, but — as was characteristically Etruscan — they didn't simply copy it. By the 5th century BCE, Etruscan craftsmen were producing what scholars sometimes distinguish as the Italo-Corinthian or pseudo-Corinthian variant: the helmet was increasingly worn pushed back on the head as a status display rather than pulled down over the face in combat, which meant the nasal guard and cheekpieces became more decorative than functional. The extraordinary incised imagery on this example fits squarely within that tradition of transforming martial equipment into prestige objects.

The quality of bronze-working visible here — the crisp, fine-line incision, the decorative border registers around the eye openings with their dotted and chevron banding — reflects the very high technical standard of Etruscan toreutics (metalwork). Etruria had direct access to copper and tin deposits, and Etruscan bronzework was prized across the ancient Mediterranean. Greek authors noted this explicitly.

The boar carried extraordinarily dense symbolic weight in Etruscan thought, operating simultaneously on martial, religious, and social registers:

Martial valor. The wild boar was the supreme emblem of ferocious, untamed fighting spirit. Unlike the lion — a more "royal" symbol often borrowed from Near Eastern and Greek iconographic traditions — the boar was native to the Italian landscape and carried an authentically local charge. Boar hunts in Etruria, as across the ancient world, were understood as training grounds for warfare: the animal was genuinely dangerous, requiring coordinated group effort, courage, and skill. Depicting boars on a helmet was thus not merely decorative; it was an assertion about the warrior's character.

Chthonic and liminal associations. Etruscan religious thought associated the boar with the boundary between the living and the dead. The animal appears on funerary objects and tomb paintings in contexts that suggest a role as a psychopomp or protective figure in the underworld journey. This gave boar imagery on armor a doubled meaning — protective in life, and perhaps efficacious for the passage into death that combat might bring.

The hunt as elite ritual. Boar hunting scenes appear extensively in Etruscan art from the Orientalizing period onward, and participation in the communal boar hunt was a marker of aristocratic status. Displaying the boar on prestige military equipment signaled membership in this warrior-hunting elite.

Possible divine connections. Some scholars have suggested links between the boar and Etruscan chthonic deities, though the syncretic nature of Etruscan religion makes precise identification difficult. The boar's tusks appear as apotropaic amulets in Etruscan contexts, suggesting a prophylactic function as well.

The combination of the Corinthian form with dense figural incision is distinctively Etruscan — Greek Corinthian helmets were typically plain or had relatively restrained decoration. An Etruscan warrior wearing this helmet was doing something quite sophisticated: appropriating Greek prestige military form while asserting a specifically Etruscan iconographic vocabulary. It speaks to the confident cultural synthesis that characterizes the best Etruscan art of the 5th century BCE.

I understand I was especially fortunate to photograph this piece as Corinithian style helmets of this quality are rare in American museums.

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Fecunditas, Castitas, Gravitas: The Herculaneum Woman as a Visual Formula for Roman Female Virtue (2nd Century CE)

 by Mary Harrsch © 2026

Another beautiful piece I photographed at the Dallas Art Museum includes this Roman marble portrait of a veiled woman (Dallas Museum of Art, 1973.11), dated to the mid-2nd century CE. She exemplifies a central paradox of Roman sculptural production: the use of mass-produced, standardized body types to represent elite individual identity. This statue is a product of a visual system that prioritized legible social messaging over unique artistic invention.

Heavily draped figure of a 2nd century CE Roman woman articulating fecunditas (fertility), castitas (chastity), and gravitas (dignity). Photographed at the Dallas Art Museum by Mary Harrsch. 

My research revealed the DMA portrait draws upon what is formally classified in archaeological literature as the "Small Herculaneum Woman" type, one of two canonical draped female forms (alongside the "Large Herculaneum Woman") identified from finds in the Theater at Herculaneum . Originating from Greek Late Classical models of the 4th century BCE associated with the Praxitelean tradition, these types were systematically replicated across the Roman Empire from the Augustan period through the 3rd century CE . Jennifer Trimble’s foundational study reframes this phenomenon not as mere copying but as visual replication—a deliberate strategy where workshops produced standardized, "off-the-rack" bodies (often in Pentelic or Proconnesian marble) onto which separately carved, individualized portrait heads were attached .

The choice of the Herculaneum type was a conscious performance of ornatus and pudicitia (propriety and modesty). Rather than a portrait likeness in the modern sense, the body functioned as a carrier of established social virtues. The heavy drapery and the capite velato (veiled head) signal the subject’s role in religious ritual, frequently associated with priesthoods of the imperial cult . Current scholarship has moved decisively away from 19th-century interpretations that read these figures as generic personifications (Muses or Demeter). Instead, as Annetta Alexandridis argues, these statues articulated the "canon of Roman female virtues"—fecunditas (fertility), castitas (chastity), and gravitas (dignity)—for real, historically situated women .

A significant methodological challenge for the DMA example, however, is its lack of archaeological provenance. The gift of Mr. and Mrs. Cecil H. Green provides no data on findspot or pre-1973 collection history. Such gaps are critical: without a secure context, analysis is limited to stylistic attribution and typological comparison (i.e., the Small Herculaneum type), preventing the spatial and epigraphic analysis that has enriched studies of statues found in situ at sites like Perge or the Athenian Agora .

Further Academic Reading:

Trimble, Jennifer. Women and Visual Replication in Roman Imperial Art and Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Daehner, Jens, ed. The Herculaneum Women: History, Context, Identities. Getty Publications, 2007.

Alexandridis, Annetta. "Neutral Bodies? Female Portrait Statue Types from the Late Republic to the Second Century CE." In Paradoxa, 2010.

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From Petra to Rome: A Nabataean Gold Necklace in the Roman World, Luxury, movement, and identity in the 2nd–3rd century CE

by Mary Harrsch, © 2026

Photographed at the Dallas Museum of Art (Accession No. 1995.26), this elegant gold necklace illustrates the sophisticated jewelry traditions that flourished in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire during the 2nd and early 3rd centuries CE. The museum attributes the piece to Nabataea, the former kingdom centered on Petra that was incorporated into the Roman Empire in 106 CE.

The necklace consists of a series of gold settings containing polished garnet cabochons, a gemstone particularly favored by Roman jewelers. Garnets were imported through long-distance trade networks extending to India and Sri Lanka, making them both fashionable decorative elements and indicators of access to the empire's extensive commercial connections. Nabatea served as a crossroads between Roman, Hellenistic, Arabian, and Near Eastern artistic traditions. That cultural blending helps explain why the design feels somewhat different from jewelry typically excavated in Italy itself.

Roman Gold Necklace with Garnet Cabochons (2nd–3rd Century CE), Photo by Mary Harrsch, Dallas Museum of Art,

Particularly striking is the elaborate central pendant, composed of multiple garnet settings surrounded by suspended chains terminating in small gold drops. My research revealed these dangling ornaments, known as pendilia, were designed to move with the wearer, creating a dynamic display of reflected light. Roman jewelry was intended not only to be seen but also to animate the body in motion.

The smaller decorative elements distributed around the necklace appear to represent stylized leaves or floral motifs. Such vegetal ornament was common throughout Roman decorative arts, appearing in wall paintings, mosaics, metalwork, and jewelry. The combination of floral forms, richly colored garnets, and intricate goldwork reflects the blending of Hellenistic, Near Eastern, and Roman artistic traditions characteristic of the eastern Mediterranean provinces.

Unlike the more restrained jewelry often associated with early Imperial Rome, eastern Roman luxury jewelry frequently emphasized color, movement, and visual complexity. Pieces such as this one foreshadow the increasingly elaborate aesthetic that would later characterize Byzantine jewelry.

As both a personal adornment and a portable store of wealth, a necklace of this quality would almost certainly have belonged to a woman of considerable means. Today it offers a fascinating glimpse into the craftsmanship, trade networks, and cultural diversity of the Roman Empire at its height.

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From Ningishzida to Hermes: The Near Eastern Roots of the Kerykeion

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

This is one of the finest surviving examples of a Greek kerykeion — the iconic staff of Hermes, messenger of the Olympians and guide of souls between the worlds of the living and the dead that I photographed at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Bronze kerykeion (caduceus), Greek, early 5th century BCE. Dallas Museum of Art. In Greek art, this staff identifies Hermes—herald, traveler's patron, and guide of souls. But its central motif—two serpents twisting around a rod—appears on Mesopotamian cylinder seals and ritual objects more than a millennium earlier, carried by the Sumerian snake-god Ningishzida. Is this visual inheritance or independent invention? The question remains open, but the parallel is impossible to ignore. Photograph by the Author.

Beneath the head of each serpent, the bronze-smith has rendered a distinct wattle or beard—a stylized, fleshy protrusion. This is not a naturalistic detail. No snake native to Greece (not the adder, the rat snake, nor the Aesculapian snake venerated in the healing cults of Asclepius) possesses a beard. Greek artists were perfectly capable of naturalistic rendering when they chose to be. The presence of this artificial feature therefore signals something else: the artist was following an iconographic convention, not observing nature.

That convention—marking a serpent as divine, powerful, or chthonic by giving it a beard or human-like head—originated not in Greece but in Mesopotamia, where the underworld god Ningishzida was depicted as a human-headed serpent or as the horned, bearded Bašmu dragon. The beard on this Hermes staff is a fossil of that forgotten hybrid form, a small but telling clue that the kerykeion's visual language traveled westward across centuries and cultures before a Greek bronze-caster shaped this staff in the early 5th century BCE.

The kerykeion (its Latin equivalent being caduceus) appears in Greek art from the Early Archaic period, carried most often by Hermes, though it is occasionally held by Iris — the messenger of Hera — and by Nike in her role as herald of victory. Its origins remain debated; the staff's source may ultimately lie in the ancient Near East.

The cylinder seal evidence

The most concrete argument comes from material culture. William Hayes Ward (1910) discovered that symbols closely resembling the classical caduceus appear on Mesopotamian cylinder seals, and suggested the symbol originated somewhere in the 3rd millennium BCE, proposing it as a plausible source for the Greek form. These seals predate the earliest Greek representations by millennia, which gives the diffusionist argument its chronological backbone.

Ningishzida and the divine prototype

The more ambitious theoretical claim involves the Sumerian underworld deity Ningishzida. Ningishzida was a messenger god who dwelled in the Underworld for part of the year, and the symbol for this underworld messenger was two entwined serpents on a staff — the same configuration as the kerykeion. Some scholars have proposed that the Greeks adopted this symbol from the Near Eastern context for their own messenger god Hermes, who shares the same chthonic, psychopomp functions.

Ningishzida makes his first appearance in the Fara god list from the Early Dynastic III period, dated to approximately 2600–2350 BCE. This is our earliest documented evidence of the deity by name, though of course the absence of earlier written records doesn't mean the cult didn't predate that.

His origins as a tree god

Although Ningishzida was a power of the netherworld, he appears to have originally been a tree god — his name apparently meaning "Lord Productive Tree," and he was probably the god of winding tree roots, since he was originally represented in serpent form. The snake-and-staff iconography thus likely grew organically out of this root-as-serpent conceptualization of an arboreal deity, rather than being a purely abstract symbol from the outset.

His nature and cult spread

His primary cult center was Gishbanda, a settlement situated between Lagash and Ur in southern Mesopotamia. Ningishzida, like his father Ninazu, is a chthonic deity associated with vegetation, growth and decay, snakes and demons. Associated with his role in agriculture, he was said to travel to the underworld at the time of the death of vegetation — in Mesopotamia, mid-summer to mid-winter.

The Gudea connection and the key visual evidence

A.L. Frothingham extended Ward's argument in 1916, proposing that the Greek god Hermes himself derived from an "Oriental deity of Babylonian extraction"—specifically, the snake god Ningishzida, whose earliest form was as a "messenger" deity.

Ningishzida as "a messenger god" is a slight oversimplification. His primary roles were as a chthonic vegetation deity and "chair-bearer of the underworld." The messenger-god parallel to Hermes is an inference drawn from his appearance as a doorkeeper in the Adapa myth, not a core title.

The long tail of the cult

Ningishzida's worship persisted all the way into the reign of the Persian king Darius I at Uruk, indicating that his cult endured through multiple historical periods.

Walter Burkert, one of the 20th century's leading scholars of Greek religion, characterized the entwined copulating serpents as not just a borrowed symbol but reference to a specific visual concept — paired serpents in a sexual or entwined posture. Burkert privileges cuneiform literature as a source of literary transmission in light of the continuous routes of contact between Mesopotamia and Greek speakers, with these contacts reaching an apogee in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE. He tracks the migrant craftsmen who brought the Greeks new techniques and designs, the wandering seers and healers teaching magic and medicine, and the important Greek borrowings from Near Eastern poetry.

So from roughly 2600 BCE to at least the late 6th century BCE, this deity with his entwined-serpent iconography was continuously present in Mesopotamian religious life — a timeframe that comfortably predates and overlaps with the period of intensifying Greek contact with the Near East in the Archaic period.

The upshot for the kerykeion question: the deity and his snake-staff symbolism were circulating in Mesopotamia for well over a millennium before the Greek kerykeion crystallizes in the Archaic period, which is why the iconographic parallel carries real weight.

The pre-anthropomorphic argument

There is also a more structural argument about how divine symbolism evolves. It has been argued that the staff or wand entwined by two snakes was itself representing a god in the pre-anthropomorphic era — meaning the staff was Hermes, before the Greeks developed a fully human-figured deity. Like the herm or Priapus, it would thus be a precursor to the anthropomorphic Hermes of the classical period.

The dissenting view

It's worth noting this isn't a closed question. Lewis Richard Farnell (1909) argued that the two snakes simply developed out of ribbon ornaments on a herald's shepherd's crook, with no need for Near Eastern derivation at all. This purely Hellenic-origin view has fallen out of favor, but it reminds us that the Near Eastern connection, while widely accepted, rests largely on iconographic analogy and functional parallel rather than a documented transmission route.

The case rests on the very early Mesopotamian parallels, the striking similarities to Ningishzida's symbolism and role, the serpent's deep roots in Near Eastern religious iconography more broadly, and the prestige of Burkert's endorsement — but it remains an inference rather than a proven chain of transmission.

The development of this object reflects close trading relationships between Greece and the ancient Near East.

The Orientalizing Period

The critical window is what art historians call the Orientalizing Period, roughly 750–580 BCE. This is the period when art of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Ancient Near East heavily influenced nearby Mediterranean cultures, most notably Archaic Greece. The main sources of influence were Egypt, Phoenicia, Syria, and Assyria. The DMA kerykeion, dated to the early 5th century BCE, sits at the tail end of this intensive exchange period, which gives the transmission hypothesis real chronological plausibility.

Al Mina as a key conduit

One of the most important physical nodes in this network was the trading settlement of Al Mina on the Syrian coast. Modern research has shown that Al Mina was a significant eastern trading settlement with strong Greek connections dating back to around 825 BCE, and later work has considered it key to understanding the role of early Greeks in the east at the outset of the Orientalizing period. This gave Greeks direct, sustained access to a Levantine milieu that was itself deeply embedded in Mesopotamian cultural traditions.

The Phoenician intermediary problem

One important nuance is that the transmission was rarely direct. The Phoenicians were the great middlemen of the ancient Mediterranean, and much of what the Greeks received as "Near Eastern" came filtered through Phoenician commercial and cultural networks. This means the kerykeion iconography need not have traveled directly from a Sumerian temple context to a Greek bronze-caster — it could have passed through several layers of transmission, accumulating new associations along the way, which also makes it harder to prove a clean line of descent.

The mercenary connection

There's also a less discussed but significant human channel: during this period, the Assyrians advanced along the Mediterranean coast accompanied by Greek and Carian mercenaries, who were also active in the armies of Psamtik I in Egypt. Greek soldiers serving in Near Eastern armies would have had direct exposure to Mesopotamian religious iconography in ways that pure trade alone couldn't replicate.

So, the development of the kerykeion fits neatly within a much broader pattern of sustained, multi-channel contact between the Greek world and Mesopotamia across the 9th through 6th centuries BCE. The staff was made right at the moment when that exchange was at its most intensive.

However, amicable trade relations did not prevent political conflict. Prior to the 5th century, Greek elites spent money imitating eastern / Lydian dress and buying Persian art and goods. That commercial relationship didn't dissolve — it coexisted with, and was eventually overshadowed by, political confrontation driven by entirely different forces.

The structural trigger: Cyrus and the Ionian Greeks

The animosity didn't arise from trade grievances. It arose from imperial expansion colliding with Greek political autonomy. When Cyrus overthrew the Lydian kingdom of Croesus in 546 BCE, the Greek cities of Asia Minor found themselves under the rule of the Great King — a monarch absolute in religion, politics, and war, and the antithesis of city-state liberalism. This is the key structural fault line: Persian imperial governance was fundamentally incompatible with the Greek polis model of civic self-rule.

After the resulting Ionian Revolt and Persian Wars, Greek writers like Aeschylus and Herodotus actively forged a civilizational contrast between Greek freedom and Persian despotism that served Athenian political purposes. Unfortunately, this schism between East and West has continued into modern times.

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