The Amphilochios Paten

A large, plain silver paten made in Syria in the third quarter of the sixth century to hold the Eucharistic bread, inscribed with the vow of an otherwise little-known archbishop named Amphilochios. It is one of twenty-three pieces of church silver that reached the Walters Art Museum together in 1929, part of a hoard clandestinely dug up around 1908-1910 near the village of Kurin and sold through at least two dealers before Henry Walters bought it.

For decades the group was catalogued under the vague label 'Hama Treasure', after the Syrian city where it surfaced on the market. Marlia Mundell Mango's 1986 catalogue argued, from an inscription naming the place on a companion chalice, that the vessels in fact belonged to the church of Saint Sergios in ancient Kaper Koraon, the Greek name for Kurin. That reattribution reframed a scattered group of art-market silver as the identifiable furnishings of one rural Syrian church, pieces of which are now held, and separately catalogued, by more than one museum.

This record treats the paten on its own evidence: a documented but undocumented-in-detail clandestine find, a firmly documented market and bequest history from 1913 onward, and an honestly incomplete picture of exactly how many vessels belonged to the original hoard and where all of them now are.

What it is

The paten is a shallow silver dish 41.4 centimetres across and only 4 centimetres deep, large enough to have held a substantial quantity of Eucharistic bread for distribution during the Divine Liturgy. Patens of this kind functioned as the plate on which the consecrated bread, understood in Christian doctrine as the body of Christ, was placed and presented to the congregation. Its size puts it among the largest surviving patens from the group of vessels associated with this find, and the Walters describes it as one of the heaviest, though no weight in grams or troy ounces is published in the sources consulted for this record.

Around the rim runs a Greek inscription giving the vow of the donor. Unlike some of the more elaborately decorated vessels associated with the same group, the museum's own description calls this paten one of the visually simpler pieces despite the donor's high ecclesiastical rank, a point the Walters itself draws out as noteworthy.

The donor's vow

The inscription reads, in the Walters' published translation: '+ Vow of the most saintly archbishop AMPHILOCHIOS.' No further biographical information about this Amphilochios is given in the sources consulted; he is identified only by the title he holds in his own dedication.

The word 'vow' is doing real work here. Votive giving, in which a donor pledges an object or its value to a church in fulfillment of a promise made to God, is a documented and ordinary feature of Late Antique Christian practice, and it recurs across the related vessels in this group. A companion chalice in the same Walters accession run, 57.642, is inscribed for 'the prayer and salvation of' three named individuals; another, 57.636, records a 'prayer' of two more donors. Read together, the inscriptions describe a community of individual donors, lay and clerical, giving silver plate to a single rural church in expectation of divine favor or in thanks for it. That this paten was a fulfilled vow, rather than a purchase or a gift with no stated religious motive, is a documented fact about what its donor believed and did, not an inference.

How Byzantine silver like this is dated

The Walters dates the paten to the third quarter of the sixth century primarily on stylistic and comparative grounds. A separate and more precise dating tool exists for Byzantine silver of this period: a system of five small stamps, applied by state control offices, that can be read against a reference sequence tied to specific emperors' reigns. The standard reference for this system is Erica Cruikshank Dodd's 'Byzantine Silver Stamps', published by Dumbarton Oaks in 1961; this record has not consulted Dodd's volume directly, and the claim is included here as background on method, not as a specific finding about this paten.

Several vessels associated with this group do carry such stamps: the Walters records five stamps inside the foot of chalice 57.642, for example, which is independently dated 602-610, a full generation later than this paten's stylistic date. That range, from the third quarter of the sixth century to the first decade of the seventh, indicates the church that owned this silver added to its plate over an extended period rather than receiving it all at once. Whether this specific paten carries control stamps of its own is not stated in the Walters record consulted for this entry, and is recorded here as an open question rather than assumed either way.

The excavation near Kurin

What is actually documented about the find is limited, and this record states that plainly rather than smoothing over it. Dumbarton Oaks' own annotation of the material describes the vessels as having been 'excavated in Syria sometime between 1908 and 1910 (when it was photographed in Hama)'. No excavation report, no named excavator, and no controlled archaeological record of the find survives in the sources consulted. The find is understood, as with a great deal of clandestinely dug material from this period and region, through the point at which it resurfaces in dealers' hands rather than through any record of the digging itself.

By around 1913 the material was in the possession of Tawfic Abucasem, a figure identified in the Walters' own provenance note as based in Hama and Port Said. How the silver passed from the ground, or from whoever first found it, into Abucasem's hands between about 1910 and 1913 is not documented in any source consulted for this record.

Through the market: Abucasem to Brummer to Walters

From Abucasem the silver passed to Joseph Brummer, the Hungarian-born dealer whose Paris and then New York galleries supplied major American collections, including those of Henry Walters, William Randolph Hearst, and the Metropolitan Museum. The Walters' own provenance note for this paten and its companion pieces gives the date of Brummer's acquisition as circa 1928, in Paris, and Henry Walters's purchase as 1929, in Baltimore. Dumbarton Oaks' annotation of the same material states instead that Brummer acquired the treasure by 1928 and 'sold it to Henry Walters that same year.' The two accounts of the Walters purchase disagree by roughly a year; this record has not been able to resolve the discrepancy and states it rather than picking one date silently.

No purchase price for any leg of this chain, Abucasem to Brummer or Brummer to Walters, is published in the sources consulted.

Henry Walters and the bequest

Henry Walters (1848-1931) inherited both a fortune and an art collection from his father, William T. Walters, on the latter's death in 1894. Henry had trained at Georgetown and at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School before moving into railroad management, eventually becoming president of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad after his father's death. He used the resulting wealth to expand the family collection enormously, buying in bulk from dealers across Europe and, by the account given by Dumbarton Oaks, once purchasing the contents of an entire Roman palace comprising over 1,700 objects.

He built a purpose-made palazzo-style museum building adjoining his father's Baltimore property, which opened to the public in 1909, and by his death in 1931 his personal holdings had grown to some 22,000 objects, this paten and its companion vessels among the more recent acquisitions of his final years. His will left the building, its contents and an endowment to the City of Baltimore. The institution opened to the public as a municipal museum on 3 November 1934, three years after his death; the Kaper Koraon vessels entered the collection with that 1931-34 transition, not at the moment of Walters's 1929 purchase.

Joseph Brummer, the dealer

Joseph Brummer (1883-1947) was born in what was then Hungary (Sombor, now in Serbia), studied sculpture in Paris under Rodin, and with his two brothers opened the Brummer Gallery there in 1906, dealing in Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance material alongside Egyptian, Greek, Roman and pre-Columbian antiquities. The brothers closed the Paris gallery at the outbreak of the First World War and relocated to New York; Joseph reopened independently in Manhattan in 1921. He is described in the secondary literature as a central figure in supplying early-twentieth-century American museum collections, moving in the same period between ancient and medieval material and the contemporary work of Picasso and Rousseau. His firm's sale of this Syrian silver to Henry Walters sits within that broader pattern of interwar dealer-to-museum transactions, though the specific correspondence or invoice for this transaction, if it survives, was not located for this record.

From 'Hama Treasure' to Kaper Koraon: Mango's reattribution

For most of the twentieth century the group was known in the literature by the name of the market city where it surfaced, the 'Hama Treasure', or, for some related pieces, by an even vaguer 'Antioch region' attribution. Marlia Mundell Mango's 1986 exhibition catalogue, 'Silver from Early Byzantium: The Kaper Koraon and Related Treasures', published by the Walters Art Gallery to accompany an exhibition timed to the 17th International Byzantine Congress at Dumbarton Oaks, argued for a more specific identification: that the church which owned this silver was dedicated to Saint Sergios in the village of Kaper Koraon, the Greek form of the name of the present-day Syrian village of Kurin, and that this, not the market city of Hama, was the plate's original home.

The identification rests on an inscription carried by one of the related vessels, a chalice that names 'the treasure of the Church of St. Sergios of the village of Kaper Koraon' outright. That single line of engraved Greek is the documentary anchor for renaming a dealer-labelled 'treasure' after the actual institution that once owned it. This record has not directly consulted Mango's 1986 catalogue itself; the claims attributed to it here are drawn from museum and reference sources that cite it, and the catalogue is flagged in the sources list below for direct consultation before this record is deepened further.

One treasure, several museums

The Walters holds twenty-three vessels from this find, by its own repeated description across the individual object records for the group. That is not, on the evidence available, the whole of what was found. Dumbarton Oaks in Washington holds a paten, chalice and fan that its own museum catalogue records as having 'been found together at Riha', a separate village south of Aleppo, and its published catalogue text raises, without asserting outright, the possibility that the Riha material and the nearby Stuma, Hama and Antioch-associated finds 'constituted one large group brought together for protective burial' before being divided into smaller market lots after being unearthed. That is an argued position, attributed in the sources consulted to secondary discussion of the material, not a claim made outright by Dumbarton Oaks' own object catalogue entries for its Riha pieces, which describe the Riha find on its own terms without asserting a direct link to the Walters' Kaper Koraon vessels.

Wikipedia's summary of the treasure states, more broadly and without a specific citable event, that pieces have 'dispersed into public and private collections throughout the world' beyond the Walters; that statement is treated here as tertiary and included because it matches the general pattern described by Mango's title itself, 'the Kaper Koraon and Related Treasures', which groups multiple find-labels under one umbrella rather than treating them as unrelated. What can be stated plainly is this: whatever the precise institutional map, this is a genuine, documented case of church silver from a single Syrian village being split by the market and reassembled only on paper, decades later, by a scholar working across more than one museum's holdings.

The Antioch Chalice question, and why it is not pictured here

Readers researching Late Antique Syrian silver will also encounter the so-called 'Antioch Chalice', now at the Metropolitan Museum's Cloisters (accession 50.4), a different and separately catalogued object covered by its own record in this archive. The two objects have a genuine, documented history of confusion with each other, and this record states the relationship carefully rather than either merging them or ignoring the connection.

The Antioch Chalice was reportedly found in 1910 in the Antioch region, initially published in 1916 with a first-century date under a claim, since abandoned even by its holding museum, that its plain inner cup was the Holy Grail. The Metropolitan Museum's own current catalogue entry hedges the piece's origin as 'Made in Antioch or Kaper Koraon (?)', and general reference sources describe recent scholarship as having argued that the Antioch Chalice could belong to the same church silver group as the Kaper Koraon material. That argued connection is not the same as a documented one, and the Antioch Chalice remains, at the level of accession record, catalogued as a separate object with its own findspot tradition, held by a different museum, under a different accession number, with its own history of misattribution (to the first century, and to the Holy Grail) that has nothing to do with this paten. No image of the Antioch Chalice appears in this record, precisely to avoid the kind of version confusion between related but distinct early Byzantine silver finds that this publication exists to prevent.

Ottoman law, and the claim this record did not find

Syria in 1908-1910 was Ottoman territory, governed for archaeological purposes by the empire's 1884 antiquities regulation (commonly cited in the secondary literature as the Asar-i Atika Nizamnamesi, associated with Osman Hamdi Bey's reforms of the Imperial Museum administration), which made finds of this kind state property and prohibited their export without official permission. No source consulted for this record documents that the excavation near Kurin was licensed, or that any export permit was sought or granted for the material that reached Abucasem, Brummer and ultimately Henry Walters. The specific legal-historical claim about the 1884 law is drawn from secondary academic discussion rather than from the text of the law itself, which this record has not consulted directly, and is flagged accordingly in the sources below.

What this record did not find, despite a specific search for it, is any documented modern claim, by a named Syrian governmental body or a named scholar, seeking the return of Kaper Koraon material from the Walters Art Museum or any other holding institution. General secondary discussion of the antiquities trade of this period and region raises the topic of source-country title in the abstract, but this record found no named party, no dated statement, and no specific claim addressed to this treasure or this object. Per this publication's standing rule, that absence is reported honestly rather than dressed up as a live dispute that the sources do not actually describe.

What is happening to it now

The paten remains catalogued in the Walters Art Museum's Byzantine holdings under accession 57.643. No conservation programme, loan, or exhibition specific to this individual piece was located in the sources consulted for this record. The wider group to which it belongs continues to be cited in the scholarly literature on Early Byzantine silver as the reference collection for the type, a role it has held since Mango's 1986 catalogue.