The London Mithraeum was a small temple to Mithras built around AD 240–250 on the east bank of the Walbrook stream in Londinium, serving the city's mercantile and possibly military community. It was a typical mithraeum in form — a rectangular, semi-subterranean basilica roughly 18m long with a central nave flanked by raised aisles for ritual dining benches, terminating in an apse where the tauroctony would have stood. The cult use appears to have ended in the early 4th century, after which the building may have been rededicated to another deity, possibly Bacchus.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
It is the most famous mithraeum in Britain and one of the best-preserved Roman religious buildings from the province, providing key evidence for the practice of an eastern mystery cult in a commercial provincial capital. Its location near the Walbrook places it among a cluster of religious and commercial activity in the heart of Londinium.
Excavated by W.F. Grimes in 1954, the site yielded a remarkable assemblage of marble sculptures — including heads of Mithras, Minerva, and Serapis, and a Bacchic group — which had apparently been deliberately buried beneath the floor, likely to protect them from Christian iconoclasm or for ritual reasons. Further excavations by MOLA in 2010–2014 ahead of the Bloomberg headquarters recovered some 14,000 artefacts from the waterlogged Walbrook deposits, including the
The London Mithraeum was a small temple to Mithras built around AD 240–250 on the east bank of the Walbrook stream in Londinium, serving the city's mercantile and possibly military community. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a temple site from the Roman period in Britain.
London Mithraeum is classified as a Roman temple — a religious site in the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer. Roman Britain's archaeology encompasses thousands of sites ranging from legionary fortresses and marching camps to villas, temples and towns.
Several Roman sites lie within a short distance, including Londinium/Augusta (0.2 km), Roman governor's palace (site of) (0.2 km), Huggin Hill Roman bath house, 120m WNW of St James's Church (0.3 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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