The Egyptian and Egyptianizing Monuments of Imperial Rome


Book Description

Preliminary material -- HISTORICAL CONDITIONS -- TYPE AND STYLE OF THE EGYPTIAN AND EGYPTIANIZING MONUMENTS OF IMPERIAL ROME -- THE SETTING OF THE EGYPTIAN AND EGYPTIANIZING MONUMENTS IN IMPERIAL ROME -- CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ -- APPENDIX I -- APPENDIX II -- APPENDIX III -- APPENDIX IV -- ADDENDA -- CAPTIONS TO THE FIGURES -- INDEX OF PROPER NAMES -- INDEX OF MUSEUMS -- Plates I-CCXXX and Plans.




The Triumph and Trade of Egyptian Objects in Rome


Book Description

From gleaming hardstone statues to bright frescoes, the unexpected and often spectacular Egyptian objects discovered in Roman Italy have long presented an interpretive challenge. How they shaped and were shaped by religion, politics, and identity formation has now been well researched. But one crucial function of these objects remains to be explored: their role as precious goods in a collector’s economy. The Romans imported and recreated Egyptian goods in the most opulent materials available – gold, gems, expensive wood, ivory, luxurious textiles – and displayed them like true treasures. This is due in part to the way Romans encountered these items, as argued in this book: first as dazzling spolia from the war against Cleopatra, then as costly wares exchanged over the expanding Roman trade routes. In this respect, Romans treated Egyptian art surprisingly similarly to Greek art. By examining the concrete mechanisms through which Egyptian objects were acquired and displayed in Rome, this book offers a new understanding of this impressive material at the crossroads of Hellenistic, Roman, and Egyptian culture.




The Afterlives of Egyptian History


Book Description

An examination of the myriad lifetimes lived by ancient Egyptian artifacts Egypt has a particular longue durée, a continuity of preservation in deep time, not seen in other parts of the world. Over the centuries, ancient buildings have been adopted for purposes that differed from the original. Temple sites have been transformed into places of worship for new deities or turned into houses and tombs. Tombs, in turn, have been adapted to function as human dwellings already in the Late Antique Period. The Afterlives of Egyptian History expands on the traditional academic approach of studying the original function and sociopolitical circumstances of ancient Egyptian objects, texts, and sites to examine their secondary lives by exploring their reuse, modification, and reinterpretation. Written in honor of the Egyptologist, Edward Bleiberg, this volume brings together a group of luminous scholars from a wide range of fields, including Egyptian archaeology, philology, conservation, and art, to explore the historical circumstances, as well as political and economic situations, of people who have come into contact with ancient Egypt, both in antiquity and in more recent times. Contributor Affiliations: Yekaterina Barbash, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY USA Lisa Bruno, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY USA Simon Connor, F.R.S.–FNRS, Brussels, Belgium and University of Liege, Liege, Belgium Kathlyn (Kara) Cooney, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA USA Richard Fazzini, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY USA Peter Lacovara, Ancient Egyptian Archaeology and Heritage Fund, Albany, NY USA Ronald J. Leprohon, University of Toronto, Canada Mary McKercher, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY USA Edmund Meltzer, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, California USA Joachim Friedrich Quack, Heidelberg University, Tiffin, Ohio USA Paul Edmund Stanwick, independent scholar, New York, NY USA Emily Teeter, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL USA Kathy Zurek-Doule, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY USA




The Egyptian Revival


Book Description

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived




Cleopatra and Rome


Book Description

In this beautifully illustrated book, we experience the synthesis of Cleopatra's and Rome's defining moments through surviving works of art and other remnants of what was once an opulent material culture. This culture best chronicles Cleopatra's legend and suggests her subtle but indelible mark on the art of imperial Rome at the critical moment of its inception.




Domesticating Empire


Book Description

Domesticating Empire is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlín Barrett draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roman household space: the domestic garden. Through paintings and mosaics portraying the Nile, canals that turned the garden itself into a miniature "Nilescape," and statuary depicting Egyptian themes, many gardens in Pompeii offered ancient visitors evocations of a Roman vision of Egypt. Simultaneously faraway and familiar, these imagined landscapes made the unfathomable breadth of empire compatible with the familiarity of home. In contrast to older interpretations that connect Roman "Aegyptiaca" to the worship of Egyptian gods or the problematic concept of "Egyptomania," a contextual analysis of these garden assemblages suggests new possibilities for meaning. In Pompeian houses, Egyptian and Egyptian-looking objects and images interacted with their settings to construct complex entanglements of "foreign" and "familiar," "self" and "other." Representations of Egyptian landscapes in domestic gardens enabled individuals to present themselves as sophisticated citizens of empire. Yet at the same time, household material culture also exerted an agency of its own: domesticizing, familiarizing, and "Romanizing" once-foreign images and objects. That which was once imagined as alien and potentially dangerous was now part of the domus itself, increasingly incorporated into cultural constructions of what it meant to be "Roman." Featuring brilliant illustrations in both color and black and white, Domesticating Empire reveals the importance of material culture in transforming household space into a microcosm of empire.




Corresponding Sense


Book Description

Corresponding Sense represents a turning point in the application of ‘hermeneutics’ to New Testament texts. Following the example of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics’, Pearson treats several different problems in New Testament interpretation centred around the figure of Paul. In so doing, he demonstrates how a dialogical approach to the interpretation of ancient texts functions pragmatically to allow for a deeper understanding not only of individual texts, but also of their siting with the larger dialectical web of the texts and contexts of the ancient world. This approach, developed here in connection with the New Testament, also has relevance to other literature. In Corresponding Sense, Pearson outlines what he calls a ‘dialectical topography’—the tracing of connections and disjunctions between texts and their subject matter both within and outside of the New Testament. He uses both theoretical and practical discussion to demonstrate this approach, showing how it functions as a new way of approaching a Paul who is a member of a much larger community than simply the Judaism of his fathers—a Paul who participates in cultural narratives which extend throughout not only earliest Christianity, but also into the wider thought-world of the Roman Empire.




Columbarium Tombs and Collective Identity in Augustan Rome


Book Description

Columbarium tombs are among the most recognizable forms of Roman architecture and also among the most enigmatic. The subterranean collective burial chambers have repeatedly sparked the imagination of modern commentators, but their origins and function remain obscure. Columbarium Tombs and Collective Identity in Augustan Rome situates columbaria within the development of Roman funerary architecture and the historical context of the early Imperial period. Contrary to earlier scholarship that often interprets columbaria primarily as economic burial solutions, Dorian Borbonus shows that they defined a community of people who were buried and commemorated collectively. Many of the tomb occupants were slaves and freed slaves, for whom collective burial was one strategy of community building that counterbalanced their exclusion in Roman society. Columbarium tombs were thus sites of social interaction that provided their occupants with a group identity that, this book shows, was especially relevant during the social and cultural transformation of the Augustan era.




Egyptian Things


Book Description

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. After the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Rome finally took control of Egypt. This occupation simultaneously facilitated and circumscribed the exchange of goods, people, and ideas along the paths carved across Rome's burgeoning empire. In this book, Edward Kelting sets out to recapture one of these systems of exchange: the vibrant literary tradition known as Aegyptiaca--or "Egyptian things"--in which culturally mixed authors wrote about Egypt for a Greek and Roman audience. These authors have been dismissed as not really "Egyptian," and their contemporary popularity has been ignored. But as Kelting powerfully argues, this genre in fact constitutes a vibrant intellectual tradition, developed from heterogeneous influences but deeply engaged with Egypt's pharaonic past. In contrast to usual narratives of Roman domination, Kelting uncovers a complex project of political engagement and cultural translation in which Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all participated.