Franz Cumont's Biography(Books)(Photos)

Franz-Valery-Marie Cumont (Aalst, Belgium, January 3, 1868
– Brussels, August 25, 1947) was a Belgian archaeologist

Francqui Prize on Human Sciences. In 1947, Franz Cumont
donated his library and papers to the Academia Belgica in

and historian, a philologist and student of epigraphy, who
brought these often isolated specialties to bear on the

Rome, where they are accessible to researchers.

syncretic mystery religions of Late Antiquity, notably
Mithraism. Cumont was a graduate of the University of Ghent

(PhD, 1887). after receiving royal travelling fellowships,
he undertook archaeology in Pontus and Armenia (published in

in 1903) is the study that made his international
reputation, by its originality and massive documentation.

Mithraism, on the Roman Empire. Cumont's international
credentials were brilliant, but his public circumspection

* Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain
(1906, widely translated)

was not enough. In 1910, Baron Edouard Descamps, the
Catholic Minister of Sciences and Arts at the University of

* After-Life in Roman Paganism, lectures delivered at
Yale University, published in 1922, was cautiously

Ghent, refused to approve the faculty's unanimous
recommendation of Cumont for the chair in Roman History,

expressed, but it corrected many false impressions of pagan
rite that Christian apologists had made.

Cumont having been a professor there since 1906. There was a
vigorous press campaign and student agitation in Cumont's

* Astrology and Religion Among the Greeks and Romans
(available in a Dover reprint)

favor, because the refusal was seen as blatant religious
interference in the University's life. When another

After his death, critics of his interpretation of Mithras as

candidate was named, in 1912, Cumont resigned his positions
at the University and at the Royal Museum in Brussels, left

the descendant of the Iranian deity Mithra began to be
heard, and surfaced at the First International Congress of

Belgium and henceforth divided his time between Paris and
Rome.

Mithraic Studies in Manchester England, 1971. Modern
interpretation of Mithras as the astronomical bull-slayer

He contributed to many standard encyclopedias, published

have continued to move away from Cumont's interpretations,
though his documentation remains valuable.

voluminously and in 1922, under stressful political
conditions, conducted digs on the shore of the Euphrates at

In 1997 the Royal Library, Brussels, observed the fiftieth

the previously unknown site of Dura-Europos; he published
his research there in 1926. He was a member of most of the

anniversary of Cumont's death appropriately, with a
colloquium on syncretism in the Mediterranean world of