We made an unusual discovery on one of our visits to the Petrie just before Christmas. It seems as though we have found the first evidence for the presence of dinosaurs in Roman Egypt!
Okay, so it’s impossible that this animal is supposed to be a dinosaur, despite its remarkable similarity to the dinosaur shaped breaded turkey pieces from childhood. This small copper alloy pendant is more likely to represent a camel, a creature that that is much easier to imagine in Roman Egypt. It is probably also a camel that adorns a string of later Roman beads, also in the Petrie Museum.
It’s interesting that both these camels adorn pieces of personal jewellery – the pendant would likely have been attached to a necklace or bracelet and worn on the body. Camels in particular became a motif associated with one of the early Christian saints in the later Roman period. Saint Menas was a Roman soldier who was martyred in the third century AD. A popular figure in Egypt, a huge pilgrimage centre grew around his burial site, with Menas flasks taken as souvenirs by Christian pilgrims visiting Menas’s shrine. These flasks feature standardised decoration of the saint flanked by two camels.
The story goes that after his death, the body of Menas was carried back to Egypt from Phrygia (now Anatolia, in Turkey) for burial by these animals. When the camels reached Lake Mareotis outside Alexandria, they laid down and refused to move, thus marking Menas’ chosen place for burial, and the site of the subsequent shrine that was built over his tomb. These flasks have been found in archeological contexts across Egypt and the Roman Empire as a whole and would originally have contained water or oil blessed through contact with the shrine. They would then be worn by Christian followers of Menas around the neck, or displayed within the home. Perhaps the dinosaur-like pendants in the Petrie were also worn by admirers of this saint as a sign of devotion?