Biblical Archaeology Review

Maarten J. Vermaseren, Cybele and Attis: The Myth and the Cult (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), p. 10.

Nahman Avigad, Beth She’arim III: Catacombs 12–13 (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1976), p. 188; and Crawford, Byzantine Shops, pp. 18, 79. A valuable discussion of Christian objects found in Jewish contexts (and vice versa) has appeared in Leonard V. Rutgers, The Jews in Late Ancient Rome: Evidence of Cultural Interaction in the Roman Diaspora (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), pp. 81–92.

The catacomb was begun in the second century, added to in the third. Burials continued until the fourth century.

Robert, Nouvelles inscriptions de Sardes, p. 58, pl. 111. See also Hanfmann, “The Fifth Campaign at Sardis (1962),” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 170 (April 1963), p. 51. I am grateful to Fr. Raissas of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Wilmington, Delaware, for the information about St. Sabbatios.

Louis Robert, Nouvelles inscriptions de Sardes (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1964), p. 57, pl. 2.

For the symbolism of the ivy see Biedermann, Dictionary of Symbolism, p. 187, and Hall, Symbols in Art, p. 163; for the symbolism of the dolphin, see George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), p. 15.

James Hall, Dictionary of Symbols in Art, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 105–106.

Crawford, Byzantine Shops at Sardis, p. 57.

The branches and leaves on the front of the flask mark the cross as the Tree of Life, a metaphor originating in apostolic times and elaborated in Byzantine sermons (Gerhard Podskalsky, “Cross,” in Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, vol. 1, p. 549).

This is especially true of the Temple of Artemis. See Foss, Ephesus after Antiquity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), p. 82, and Byzantine and Turkish Sardis, p. 49.