What Does the Aramaic Inscription Found at Zerzevan Castle's Mithraeum Actually Say?

The Short Answer

An Old Aramaic inscription discovered in 2017 inside an underground Mithraic temple at Zerzevan Castle in southeastern Türkiye was deciphered in 2026 by a Syriac scholar at Mardin Artuklu University — and it describes the formal, ceremonial closing of the temple, making it the first known Aramaic text ever found to document such a ritual.

What Is Zerzevan Castle?

Zerzevan Castle is a Roman military fortress located in the Diyarbakır province of southeastern Türkiye. Built and occupied during the third and fourth centuries CE, it served as a significant garrison along Rome’s eastern frontier. Ongoing archaeological excavations at the site have steadily revealed how layered and complex life inside a Roman border fortress actually was — not just soldiers and weapons, but ritual, belief, and hidden spaces carved into the rock beneath.

The Underground Mithraeum

Beneath the castle, excavators uncovered a sealed underground chamber that turned out to be a Mithraeum — a temple dedicated to Mithras, the deity at the center of one of Rome’s most secretive and tightly controlled mystery cults. Worship of Mithras was practiced almost exclusively by men, often soldiers, in small underground or cave-like spaces designed to evoke the cosmic grotto where Mithras slew a sacred bull.

The Zerzevan Mithraeum is considered the easternmost Mithraic temple ever discovered, pushing the known boundaries of this cult’s geographic reach further than previously documented. Finding one this far east — and this well-preserved — was already a major archaeological event before the inscription entered the picture.

The Inscription No One Could Read

Carved into the interior of the hidden chamber, the inscription sat undeciphered for nearly nine years after its 2017 discovery. The reason it resisted translation wasn’t negligence — it was the script itself. The text was written not in Latin or Greek, the dominant languages of the Roman world, but in Old Aramaic, the ancient Semitic language of Mesopotamia that predates both.

The presence of Aramaic here is significant. It suggests the person or people who carved this inscription were not standard Roman military scribes operating in Latin, but individuals connected to an older, Eastern linguistic and cultural tradition — possibly local Aramaic-speaking populations who had absorbed or participated in the Mithraic cult as it spread through Rome’s eastern provinces.

What the 2026 Decipherment Revealed

In 2026, a scholar specializing in Syriac — a dialect of Aramaic — at Mardin Artuklu University succeeded in reading the inscription. The text, dated to the third or fourth century CE, describes the formal and ceremonial closing of the underground temple. This was not casual graffiti or a builder’s mark. It was a deliberate, structured record of a ritual act: the sealing of a sacred space.

No Aramaic inscription documenting the closure of an underground temple had ever been found before. This makes the Zerzevan text a first of its kind — a linguistic and religious artifact with no known parallel.

Why This Matters

The intersection of factors here is what makes this discovery so historically dense. A Roman fortress. An outlawed mystery cult. A language from an entirely different cultural tradition. A ritual closing that someone felt compelled to record in stone. And seventeen centuries of silence before anyone alive could understand what had been written.

It raises questions that archaeologists and historians will be working through for years: Who wrote this? Were they a priest, a soldier, a local? Why Aramaic and not Greek or Latin? Was the temple closed by choice, by order, or under threat of persecution as Christianity became Rome’s dominant religion in the fourth century?

The answers are not yet certain. But the inscription itself — finally readable — has already changed what we know about how Mithraism spread, who practiced it, and how it ended.