The subject of the study – the phenomenon of cultural appropriation of Ancient pagan iconography by Early Christian art – is approached through the funerary art of Ptolemaic Egypt. The study aims at tracing back the origin of an important Early Christian scene – Jonah under the Gourd Vine – by methods of semiotic analysis and historical contextualization. In the 3rd–4th centuries AD it used to be the most popular Biblical subject throughout the Roman Empire. Some scholars argue that a mythological scene of Endimion’s dream, often carved on Late Antique sarcophagi, served as a model for visualization of the story of the prophet. However, this hypothesis does not explain the origin of the gourd vine motif, which is yet another iconographic sine qua non detail of the Jonah resting scene. Before the ‘birth’ of Early Christian art the motif had appeared just once – in Wardian necropolis of Alexandria. The gourd was first mentioned in Septuagint – the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made by Alexandrian Jews in the 3rd century BC. It substituted another plant originally mentioned in the Hebrew text. Both the Bible translators and Alexandrian painters had been well familiar with the gourd that was seemingly largely cultivated in Alexandrian suburbs. At some point of the city history Alexandrian painters adopted the pagan visual cliché for visualization of the Old Testament episode, and the new iconographic cliché was lately imported by Roman and provincial Christian milieu.

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This study attempts to trace back iconographic origins of an Early Christian scene depicting a procession of women moving towards a temple. The scene makes part of the pictorial program of the so-called Chapel of Exodus-a Coptic mausoleum from Kharga Oasis in Egypt. Never being among the most popular subjects of the Early Christian art, the images of the female processions are found in the monuments throughout the Late Roman Empire, from Roman catacombs to a small house-church at the Eastern border of the Pax Romana (Dura Europos, Syria).The extant scenes are dated back to different periods and belong to the different cultural milieu. The iconographic ambiguity of the procession scene from the Exodus Chapel triggered an intense scholar discussion and gave way to multiple interpretations. Still, the meaning of the episode and the reasons for its inclusion into the pictorial ensemble concept is not quite clear. The study aims to fill these particular gaps in the previous works. The semiotic and contextual analysis allows examining the scene in its relationship with juxtaposed compositions, to compare its iconographic features with descriptions of contemporary religious practices, and clarify the function of the image in the iconographic program of the Chapel of Exodus.

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While the Ethiopian Christian iconography relies on two major artistic traditions—Byzantine and Western European, the iconography of infernal demons was inspired specifically by Western European art. The Ethiopian tradition has developed four basic iconographic types of demons, each going back to different artistic schools, both in terms of place of origin and timing. Unexpected though evocative parallels between Ethiopian and Mozarabic depictions of Hell, Satan and other infernal beasts prompt to look for historic opportunities that could have introduced the very specific Spanish pre-Romanesque art of the 10–11th centuries to Ethiopian artists. The studies of Aragonese-Ethiopian and Portuguese- Ethiopian contacts of the 15–16th centuries support the hypothesis of Ethiopian acquaintance with illuminated Mozarabic manuscripts.