Transverse oval, both faces flat (Shape 8). Purchased on the Antiquities market (Mariaud de Serres, Paris, c. 1987).

Side A: Mithras, draped and wearing a Phrygian cap, riding a horse that advances towards the left on a ground line. Before him, next to a small, flaming altar, Cautes stands towards the left, wearing a Phrygian cap and holding a lit torch that is angled upwards. A small figure raising his arms appears in the field, at the level of Mithras’s face. Behind the god, another figure standing towards the right and also wearing a Phrygian cap, with his arms lowered, must correspond to Cautopates, despite the absence of a torch. Beside him to the right, there stands a leafy tree, in which is perched a raven turned towards the left.
Side B: Undecorated.

Selected bibliography
• Bricault–Veymiers–Amoroso 2021 >>, 210–211, Cat. II.14

L. Bricault – R. Veymiers
w/ Phoinix-team, 2025

✓

Commentary
• L. Bricault – R. Veymiers 2025. This unusual scene, very rare in ancient glyptic art (several gems found in modern Georgia feature a similar composition), was in fact inspired by a coin type belonging to the civic mint at Trapezus, in the Roman province of Pontus, on the south coast of the Black Sea. This type, which seems to borrow at the same time from Roman Mithras and the Thraco-Anatolian rider-gods, is attested under multiple combinations between 194/195 and 244/245, from the reign of Septimius Severus to that of Philip the Arab. Certain variants, struck under the reigns of Caracalla and Elagabalus, show Mithras as a rider beside a tree and an altar, flanked by Cautes and Cautopates, composing an image quite close to the one on the intaglio.