ABSTRACT
In his seminal work, The World of Late Antiquity, published in 1971, Peter Brown characterizes the difference between late Roman polytheism and the earliest Christianity as a difference between things and people. Christian pilgrimage, which originated in late antiquity, was popular until 638, when the Holy Land was incorporated into the vast Umayyad Empire. Once collections of relics, such as the Sancta Sanctorum box and its contents, were transported to the West, they brought Jerusalem with them. The mnemonic function of the box – for the original collector and later viewers familiar with its landscape of origin and the stories set therein – plays out in multifold ways. The centrality of the resurrection eulogia is echoed in the prominence of its inscription: it is the only one – at least the only extant one – that describes the locus sanctus from which it comes, offering a characterization of the place it comes from as "life-giving".
