03-14-2014, 02:12 PM
To Emilio:
The "Strategos" figure is in my opinion rather blowing a horn than drinking from a rhyton cup. All the rhytons I've seen have their mouth in the wide end, and the mosaic also shows a hole in the upper part of the horn, and the figure is holding the narrow bottom end of the piece on his mouth. So it's most probably a horn, not a drinking cup.
To Graham:
I noticed that you have taken the emblem of the rightmost shield in the pile of arms for the shield of Marcus Agrippa in your illustration in the book Imperial Roman Naval Forces.
The Ptolemaic soldiers hypothesis seems more convincing to me than Roman praetorians. If the Nilotic Mosaic is from between 250 and 200 BCE, those scorpion emblems cannot suggest praetorians, since the Scorpio became their symbol only much later, at the time (14-27 CE) of emperor Tiberius (the "second founder" of the guard), when the guard honored him as adopting his astrological sign as theri symbol.
The "Strategos" figure is in my opinion rather blowing a horn than drinking from a rhyton cup. All the rhytons I've seen have their mouth in the wide end, and the mosaic also shows a hole in the upper part of the horn, and the figure is holding the narrow bottom end of the piece on his mouth. So it's most probably a horn, not a drinking cup.
To Graham:
I noticed that you have taken the emblem of the rightmost shield in the pile of arms for the shield of Marcus Agrippa in your illustration in the book Imperial Roman Naval Forces.
The Ptolemaic soldiers hypothesis seems more convincing to me than Roman praetorians. If the Nilotic Mosaic is from between 250 and 200 BCE, those scorpion emblems cannot suggest praetorians, since the Scorpio became their symbol only much later, at the time (14-27 CE) of emperor Tiberius (the "second founder" of the guard), when the guard honored him as adopting his astrological sign as theri symbol.
Antonius Insulae (Sakari)
