91Ö±²¥

"Rhyta and the Imperial Gryllus: Elite Identities and Material Intra-action between the post-Achaemenid Mediterranean and Iranian Worlds"

Luxury drinking vessels were not simply utensils nor can they be reduced to simply their precious materials: they were instruments of statecraft, ritual implements, and marks of distinction

 that articulated relationships of power, status, and identity. They played a special role within system of extraction and redistribution of wealth and symbolic capital in the entangled courts of the Iranian and Hellenistic worlds. Deployed in commensal liturgies, or as objects of display in palace and temple treasuries, or paraded with armies and weaponry in urban spectacles, they served as one of the premier loci of competition in inter-imperial rivalry. It is a commonplace in scholarship to observe that the material cultures of the Seleucid, Greco-Bactrian, Indo-Greek, Arsacid, or for that matter, Ptolemaic courts were entangled. The goals of this lecture are to explore how objects shaped political identities and the parallel processes by which these highly charismatic objects were created. With regards to the latter goal, with a few notable exceptions, most scholarship on Hellenistic Asian metalwork have repeated attributions to regions or workshops without systematically defining what they mean, let alone theorizing how these workshops were constituted and the processes by which individual or groups of artisans produced the material and encountered or shared ideas, a lacuna this study and the larger project from which it derives seeks to address.

Zoom registration :