This mosaic floor, one of the finest yet uncovered from the ancient world, has been found in the ruined city of Palmyra in the Syrian desert. It dates from about AD 260 and shows the hero Bellerophon, mounted on Pegasus, killing a chimera. He is wearing a widerimmed Roman helmet with a red streamer and is flanked by two eagles bearing wreaths of victory. Unusually, he has trousers and an embroidered tunic, the costume of Palmyra’s Sassanian Persian neighbours, and an opensleeved coat of the sort worn by Palmyrene aristocrats.

“Dozens of late Roman pavements representing Bellerophon are known from the western provinces, but this is the only one found in the Near East”, said the Polish archæologist Michel Gawlikowki in the magazine Current World Archaeology. “Soon the model would be borrowed by Christian painters to show St George slaying the dragon.” St George was allegedly a Roman soldier martyred in Palestine in about AD 303 and the Bellerophon design provided a ready-made image to illustrate his emerging legend.

Dr Gawlikowki suggested the chimera represented Palmyra’s Sassanian attackers, who were defeated by Odainat, a local ruler in AD 259 in an otherwise disastrous struggle. (After Odainat’s death in 267, his wife, the celebrated Zenobia, seized control of an area extending as far as Egypt, but was eventually captured by the Emperor Aurelian and imprisoned in a villa in Rome.) A second panel in the mosaic, which measures some 30ft (9m) by 18ft (5.4m) but occupies only part of a grand dining room in a house on Palmyra’s main colonnaded street, shows a mounted archer dressed like Bellerophon shooting a tiger, while another is trampled by his horse.
The pattern on the stripes identifies them as Hyrcanian tigers, which until recently lived on the Persian shores of the Caspian Sea. Dr Gawlikowki believes that they symbolise the defeated Sassanian enemy.