Event time:
Monday, January 29, 2024 - 5:00pm
Event description:
Please join the Archaeological Institute of America’s New Haven Chapter on MONDAY, 29 JANUARY 2024, from 5:00-6:00 PM on ZOOM,
for a REMOTE lecture by Lindsey Mazurek (Indiana University), titled
“Self-Fashioning in a Roman Province: Gender, Dress, and Difference in the Isiac Funerary Reliefs from Athens”, sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America and Yale’s Dept. of Classics, (New Haven Chapter of the AIA)
Topic: Lindsey Mazurek, AIA New Haven Lecture
Time: Jan 29, 2022, 5:00 PM Eastern Time (the US and Canada)
Modality: REMOTE, ZOOM
Link: Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://yale.zoom.us/j/98778940708
Lecture summary:
“There are 111 Roman-period grave reliefs from Athens that depict a woman dressed in the Egyptian goddess Isis’ costume, which comprises about one-fifth of all the Roman grave reliefs found in Athens. The unusual costume, which employed the goddess’ signature mantle knotted between the breasts, tightly curled hairstyle, and ritual attributes, deviated from the poses and dresses used in other female portraits in the Greek world. While funerary reliefs depicting women in Isis’s dress do appear on occasion at other sites around the Mediterranean, no other group seems to have used this dress in such high numbers and frequency. At the same time, no other Athenian cult group regularly depicted its adherents in the guise of their gods or goddesses. Why, then, was this type of self-representation so popular at Athens?
By comparing these examples with funerary portraits from Palmyra in Syria and Flavia Solva in Noricum, I argue that these reliefs are best understood as a local response to Roman imperialism. But previous work has treated them only in the context of the cults, not as a broader part of culture in Roman Athens or the Roman Empire as a whole. Scholars studying the Empire’s provinces have suggested that people used funerary monuments to navigate competing social and cultural needs, to mark themselves as participants in both local and Mediterranean wide social hierarchies. In particular, the dress used in these reliefs marked belonging and helped define who the subject was by embedding them in meaningful groups, networks, and narratives. In the case of Isis devotees at Athens, I argue that their funerary reliefs follow Empire wide patterns of gender and dress while also referencing ritual practices that functioned within a local religious landscape.”
Zoom link: https://yale.zoom.us/j/98778940708