The Menas Flasks

The terracotta pilgrim ampullae of St Menas — the Menasampullen, “Menas flasks” — are small mould-made clay vessels manufactured at and around Abu Mena from roughly the fifth through the seventh century, stamped on one or both faces with the saint shown as an orant standing frontally between two crouching camels, often with crosses, a Greek inscription naming the “blessing of St Menas” (eulogia tou hagiou Mēna), and sometimes a pilgrim’s name. Filled with holy water from the shrine’s sacred spring or with sanctified oil, they were carried home as portable blessings; and because they survive in enormous numbers and have been excavated from Egypt across to the Levant, Asia Minor, North Africa, Italy, the Rhineland, Gaul, and Britain, they are the most widely distributed early-Christian pilgrim eulogiae known, and the single firmest proof of the Mediterranean-wide reach of the Menas cult. This file treats their manufacture, typology, dating, inscriptions, and distribution, and what that distribution proves.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Coptic (Great Martyr; Wonderworker)

What a Menas Flask Is

The object is modest and unmistakable. A Menas flask (German Menasampulle, plural Menasampullen; the generic term in the scholarship is ampulla, a small two-handled flask) is a flattened, roughly disc-shaped or lentoid clay vessel, commonly between about five and fifteen centimetres in height, with a short narrow neck, a small mouth, and a pair of tiny vestigial handles on the shoulders by which it could be strung and worn or hung (Kaufmann, Zur Ikonographie der Menas-Ampullen, 1910; Grossmann, “Ampulla,” in Atiya, Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991). The two broad faces are the point of the thing: each was pressed in a mould carved in relief, so that the finished, fired flask carries a stamped image. On the typical and defining type the central image is the saint himself — a frontal standing figure, arms raised in the orant (praying) gesture, wearing the short military tunic and cloak of the soldier-martyr — flanked on either side by a camel, the two beasts shown couched, crouching, or kneeling with heads turned inward toward the saint (Kaufmann 1910; Vikan, Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art, 2010). Crosses commonly fill the field above or beside the figure, and a circular legend frequently runs around the rim.

The flask is therefore a stamped picture turned into a container. Its purpose was to hold and carry the eulogia — literally the “blessing” or “good gift,” the technical late-antique term for a sanctified take-home substance from a holy place. In the case of Menas the eulogia was the holy water of the shrine’s sacred spring, drawn at Abu Mena where the saint’s healing was sought, or, on the evidence of the inscriptions and the wider eulogia-practice, sanctified oil that had been brought into contact with the relics or the holy site (Kaufmann 1910; Vikan 2010; Frankfurter, Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, 1998). The pilgrim filled the flask at the shrine, sealed or stoppered it, and bore it home, where its contents could be drunk, applied to the sick, or kept as a blessing. The image on the flask identified the source of the blessing and made the saint present to it: the orant Menas between his camels is at once the trademark of the Abu Mena workshops and the icon by which the eulogia’s holy origin was guaranteed.

The Orant Between Two Camels

The defining iconographic formula — the praying saint flanked by two crouching camels — is the mark by which a Menas flask is recognized in the ground anywhere from Carthage to Cologne. Its origin lies in the founding and translation legend of the shrine, in which the camels bearing the saint’s relics back toward Egypt halted at a certain place in the Mareotis desert and would go no further, kneeling and refusing to rise, so that the spot was taken as the saint’s chosen burial place and the shrine was raised there (see The Camel and the Founding Legend; the iconography proper is treated in The Saint Between Two Camels). On the flasks the legend is compressed into a heraldic emblem: the saint stands in the orant posture of the praying, interceding figure, and the two beasts couch symmetrically at his feet. The formula is remarkably stable across the whole production — it is what makes the corpus instantly identifiable — though the modelling varies widely in quality, from crisp, well-cut early dies to blurred, degraded later impressions taken from worn or copied moulds (Kaufmann, Zur Ikonographie der Menas-Ampullen, 1910).

Not every flask carries the full formula. Some show the saint alone, or with a single camel, or with the camels reduced to barely legible lumps; some carry a cross, a standing figure of a different cast, or a secondary saint on the reverse; and the relation of the two faces (saint on one, inscription or cross on the other; or the saint on both) varies (Kaufmann 1910; Grossmann, “Ampulla,” 1991). This variation is itself useful, because the modelling and the legibility of the dies are among the criteria by which the flasks have been seriated and dated. But the orant-between-camels remains the type-fossil of the class, and where it appears the object’s origin at the Menas shrine is not in doubt.

The Inscriptions

A large proportion of the flasks carry a Greek inscription, usually running as a circular legend around the figure or the rim. The commonest and most characteristic formula is ΕΥΛΟΓΙΑ ΤΟΥ ΑΓΙΟΥ ΜΗΝΑ — eulogia tou hagiou Mēna, “the blessing (eulogia) of St Menas” — which names the object for exactly what it is, the sanctified take-home gift of the saint (Kaufmann, Zur Ikonographie der Menas-Ampullen, 1910; Vikan, Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art, 2010). Variants and abbreviations are frequent, as are simple invocations and acclamations, and on some flasks a personal name appears — taken to be the name of the pilgrim for whom, or by whom, the flask was filled (Kaufmann 1910; Grossmann, “Ampulla,” 1991). The inscriptions are in Greek, the language of the Christian Mediterranean and of the Alexandrian church under which the shrine lay, which is itself a small fact about the cult’s reach: the flasks speak the international language of the eastern Mediterranean, not Coptic, and were legible to pilgrims from across that world.

The word eulogia is the conceptual key to the whole class of object. In late-antique usage a eulogia was any blessing-substance carried away from a holy place — oil from a lamp at a martyr’s tomb, water from a sacred spring, dust or earth from a holy site, bread blessed at the shrine — understood to carry something of the holiness, and the healing power, of its source (Vikan 2010; Frankfurter 1998; Hahn, “Loca Sancta Souvenirs,” and Strange Beauty, 2012). The Menas flask is the eulogia-container par excellence: mass-produced, stamped with the guaranteeing image, and made precisely to hold and transport the blessing. The inscription does not advertise a relic or a fragment of the body; it names a blessing, a transferable holy gift, and that is what made the cult portable.

Manufacture and the Workshops

The flasks were made by pressing clay into two-part moulds carved in relief, joining the halves, forming the neck and handles, and firing the result — a fast, cheap, repeatable industrial process suited to mass production for a stream of pilgrims (Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910; Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989). They are made of fired terracotta — the local Nile-derived or Mareotic clays — and the fabric, where it has been examined, points to manufacture at or very near Abu Mena itself, where kiln sites and the debris of production have been identified in the archaeology of the pilgrimage city (Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989; Grossmann, “Abu Mina,” in Atiya, Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991). The shrine, in other words, ran a flask-industry: a manufacturing operation turning out stamped eulogia-containers by the thousand to be filled at the spring and sold or given to pilgrims. The enormous numbers in which the flasks survive — they are among the most common single class of early-Christian small find across the Mediterranean — are the trace of that industry, and the scale of the industry is itself evidence of the scale of the pilgrimage that supported it.

The moulds wore out, were re-cut, and were copied, and the resulting degradation of the image is visible across the corpus; flasks of demonstrably late date often carry blurred, simplified, or garbled versions of the orant-and-camels taken at several removes from a sharp original (Kaufmann, Zur Ikonographie der Menas-Ampullen, 1910). This is the raw material of the dating problem, to which the typology was addressed.

Typology and Dating

The foundational ordering of the material was the work of Carl Maria Kaufmann, who excavated at Abu Mena with the Frankfurt expedition of 1905–1907 and whose Die Menasstadt (1910) and Zur Ikonographie der Menas-Ampullen (1910) remain the starting point for all later study. Kaufmann assembled and classified the known flasks, related them to the stratigraphy and building-phases of the shrine, and proposed a chronology running across the floruit of the pilgrimage city — broadly the fifth through the seventh century — in which the development of the iconographic types and the decline in the quality of the moulding tracked the rise and fall of the cult (Kaufmann 1910). His seriation, keyed to the archaeology of the site, set the terms in which the flasks have been dated ever since.

Later work has refined rather than overturned this framework. The long campaigns of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut under Peter Grossmann placed the flask-production within a much more precisely excavated and phased site, allowing the rise of the industry to be tied to the great fifth- and sixth-century expansion of the shrine and its decline to the disruptions of the seventh — the Persian invasion of 619 and the Arab conquest of Egypt completed in 642, after which the great pilgrimage waned and the flask-industry with it (Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989; Grossmann, “Abu Mina,” 1991). The broad scholarly estimate places the main production of the stamped Menas ampullae across roughly the fifth through the seventh century, with a peak in the sixth, and a decline through the seventh that effectively ends the great phase of production after the Arab conquest. This range is a scholarly estimate built on the site-stratigraphy and the typological seriation, presented as such, citing Kaufmann and Grossmann; the precise opening and closing dates, and the dating of individual sub-types, remain matters of continuing refinement rather than fixed points.

The Distribution — and What It Proves

The flasks’ chief historical importance lies not in any one of them but in where they have been found. They have been excavated and recovered far beyond Egypt: across the Levant and Palestine, in Asia Minor, at Carthage and elsewhere in North Africa, in Italy and at Rome, in the Rhineland (notably at Cologne), in Gaul, and — at the far edge of the distribution — in Britain, with finds reported in and around London and at the coastal site of Meols on the Wirral (Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910; Vikan, Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art, 2010; Grossmann, “Ampulla,” in Atiya, Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991). No other early-Christian pilgrim eulogia is so widely distributed; the Menas flask is, by the spread of its findspots, the most far-travelled pilgrim souvenir of the late-antique world (Vikan 2010).

What this proves is the reach of the cult — and it proves it on the firmest possible evidentiary footing, independent of any text. A flask found at Cologne or near London is a physical object that was filled at a spring in the Mareotis desert and carried, by some route and some hand, across the entire breadth of the Mediterranean and beyond. The distribution maps the lines along which the cult and its blessing travelled: with merchants, pilgrims, soldiers, and clergy moving along the sea-routes and the rivers of the late-Roman and early-Byzantine world. Where the Passio is a legendary text of uncertain date and the Miracles a hagiographic collection, the flasks are mute and incontrovertible: the cult of Menas was real, it was vast, and it touched three continents. This is why the present collection treats the flasks, with the excavated city, as the firm ground of the whole case (see Archaeology versus Passio), and why the diffusion they map is the spine of the cult’s history (see The Spread of the Cult).

Two cautions belong with the distribution. First, a findspot is not by itself proof of a living local cult: a flask reached its destination as a portable object, and its presence shows that something of the Menas cult travelled there, not necessarily that Menas was venerated at the findspot in the way he was at Abu Mena. The flasks attest the reach of the blessing more securely than they attest the depth of devotion at each point of arrival. Second, the most distant finds carry a question of provenance and route. [Disputed: the Menas-flask finds reported from Britain — in and around London and at Meols — are accepted by some scholars as genuine late-antique imports attesting the cult's reach to the edge of the former Roman West, while others raise questions about the secure archaeological provenance of particular pieces and about whether they arrived in antiquity or through later (including modern collectors') movement; the British finds are therefore treated as evidence of the cult's western reach but with their provenance and route noted as debated (Vikan, *Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art*, 2010; and the British find-reports).] The general picture — a Mediterranean-wide distribution with outliers into the north and west — is not in doubt; the security of the very furthest individual findspots is the proper place for scholarly caution.

The Flasks Among the Pilgrim Eulogiae

The Menas flask is the best-known but not the only late-antique pilgrim eulogia, and it is illuminated by the wider class. Comparable stamped or moulded eulogia-objects survive from other great shrines — the lead-tin ampullae of the Holy Land (the Monza and Bobbio flasks, carrying scenes of the holy places), eulogia-tokens of stamped clay or dust from Symeon the Stylite’s shrine at Qal’at Sim’an and from other pilgrimage centres — and the whole class has been studied as the material residue of late-antique pilgrimage and the “blessing economy” that surrounded it (Vikan, Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art, 2010; Hahn, “Loca Sancta Souvenirs,” and Strange Beauty, 2012). Within this class the Menas flask stands out for the scale of its production, the standardization and recognizability of its image, and above all the breadth of its distribution: where the Holy Land ampullae cluster, the Menas flasks scatter across the whole map. The object is thus doubly significant — as the trademark of one of the greatest early-Christian healing shrines, and as the type-specimen of the mass-produced pilgrim eulogia in general.

References

Kaufmann, Carl Maria. Die Menasstadt und das Nationalheiligtum der altchristlichen Aegypter. Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1910. (The foundational excavation report on Abu Mena and the ampullae, with the first major treatment of their distribution.)
Kaufmann, Carl Maria. Zur Ikonographie der Menas-Ampullen. Cairo: Finck, 1910. (The foundational typological and iconographic study of the flasks; the orant-between-camels formula, the eulogia tou hagiou Mēna inscription, and the seriation of the dies.)
Grossmann, Peter. Abû Mînâ I: Die Gruftkirche und die Gruft. Mainz: von Zabern, 1989. (The modern archaeology of the shrine and the context of flask-production and its decline.)
Grossmann, Peter. “Abu Mina” and “Ampulla.” In The Coptic Encyclopedia, ed. Aziz S. Atiya, 8 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1991. (The site, the flask-industry, and the typology and distribution of the ampullae.)
Vikan, Gary. Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art. Rev. ed. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2010. (The standard study of pilgrim eulogiae and ampullae; the Menas flask among the wider class and the breadth of its distribution.)
Hahn, Cynthia. “Loca Sancta Souvenirs: Sealing the Pilgrim’s Experience”; and Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–circa 1204. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012. (The eulogia and the pilgrim-art context; the sealing and meaning of the blessing-object.)
Frankfurter, David, ed. Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt. Leiden: Brill, 1998. (The pilgrimage and eulogia context of Egyptian saints’ shrines.)