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Thomas bishop of Andida (tenth/eleventh century)

 
 

Obverse

Bust of St. Nicholas offering a blessing and holding the book. On either side, sigla: |ΝΙΚ|Ο|Λ: ὁ ἅ(γιος) Νικόλ(αος). Border of dots.

Reverse

Inscription of five lines, a decoration above. Line border.


Θ
ΜΑΣΕΠ
ΙΣΚΟΠΟ
ΑΝΤΙ
ΔΑ

Θωμᾶς επίσκοπο(ς) Ἀντίδα

Obverse

Bust of St. Nicholas offering a blessing and holding the book. On either side, sigla: |ΝΙΚ|Ο|Λ: ὁ ἅ(γιος) Νικόλ(αος). Border of dots.

Reverse

Inscription of five lines, a decoration above. Line border.


Θ
ΜΑΣΕΠ
ΙΣΚΟΠΟ
ΑΝΤΙ
ΔΑ

Θωμᾶς επίσκοπο(ς) Ἀντίδα

Accession number BZS.1951.31.5.773
Diameter 22.0 mm
Previous Editions

DO Seals 2, no. 62.1; and Laurent, Corpus V/2, no. 1583 (wrongly attributed, see commentary below).

Translation

Θωμᾶς ἐπίσκοπος Ἀντίδα.

Thomas, bishop of Andida.

Commentary

Line 3 (rev.): no abbreviation mark appears at the end of the line, but since the name appears in the nominative it is probably best that we read ἐπίσκοπος.

Line 5 (rev.): the letters ΔΑ are clearly imprinted. Thus the reading Ἀντιοχείας proposed by Laurent should be dismissed.

The specimen illustrated by Laurent in his plate volume under no. 1583 is not the Fogg specimen; it probably is the seal of the Sorlin-Dorigny collection, now kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris and published in Sig., 268 (Laurent, Corpus V/2, no. 1585, with a reproduction of Schlumberger's drawing) as a seal of bishop Thomas of Antioch. The last two letters are not legible on that specimen, but their remains closely resemble the two letters on our specimen. This seal is undoubtedly from the same boulloterion as the Fogg specimen. Consequently, nos. 1583 and 1585 of the Corpus are in fact two specimens coming from one boulloterion that belonged to Thomas, bishop of Andida, not of Antioch.

The present specimen, with its provincial style, also maintains the indeclinable form Ἄντιδα, which may echo a prehellenic name (Zgusta, 75), whereas the high quality "Constantinopolitan" specimen of bishop Nicholas, published by Laurent (Corpus V/1, no. 552), records the normalized form Ἀνδίδων. The same normalized form appears on the seal of another Nicholas of Andida (Speck, Bleisiegel, no. 97).

Andida or Sandida (modern Andia) was located some three miles to the south of Fugla (Çomaklı); a suffragan bishopric of Perge, it is mentioned in all the Byzantine notitiae from the 7th century onward and is still attested in the 13th century. One of its bishops attended the council of 787. See Laurent, Corpus V/1, 410.

Bibliography