Horned Crown – an Epigraphic Evidence

Author: Stefan Jakobielski | Pages: 325–337

Abstract

Amongst large collection of mural paintings from the famous excavations of Kazimierz Michałowski at Faras in the Sudan, there are several portraits of kings and high court dignitaries represented usually under the protection of saintly figures, complemented recently by numerous paintings of the same kind found in the Upper Church in Banganarti. The article concentrates on the problem of the identification of figures of local dignitaries, of which fifteen is represented as wearing horned helmet of various types. Most of these, in recent works is referred to as Nubian kings, while in the opinion of the author of the article, the evidence for it is lacking. There is a certain discrepancy between the multitude of pictorial records and the paucity of epigraphic material which would serve for the identification of rank of the depicted dignitaries with a horned headgear. Curiously enough there are only three cases in which a name of office is mentioned in an inscription accompanying a portrait, but only in one instance this information can be regarded as definite. These texts are discussed in the article and all of them seem to point out to the Eparch of Nobadia as the dignitary entitled to wear a horned headgear. There is no other written evidence hereto available so far, while all information in inscriptions concerning Nubian kings apply to figures represented with Byzantine types of crown, i.e. diadem with pinnae or kamelaukion variety, and, unfortunately, to figures with crowns not extant. On the other hand, an assumption that the horned crown might have been used also by Nubian kings of the Late Christian Period is worth considering even for a single reason: a similarity between king’s and eparch’s vestments and attributes appearing on paintings, but, for a time being this hypothesis seems to be a premature one and should wait until a bit of written evidence is found.

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