<p>“Globalizing the Sculptural Landscape of Isis and Sarapis Cults in Roman Greece,” asks questions of cross-cultural exchange and viewership of sculptural assemblages set up in sanctuaries to the Egyptian gods. Focusing on cognitive dissonance, cultural imagining, and manipulations of time and space, I theorize ancient globalization as a set of loosely related processes that shifted a community's connections with place. My case studies range from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, including sanctuaries at Rhodes, Thessaloniki, Dion, Marathon, Gortyna, and Delos. At these sites, devotees combined mainstream Greco-Roman sculptures, Egyptian imports, and locally produced imitations of Egyptian artifacts. In the last case, local sculptors represented Egyptian subjects with Greco-Roman naturalistic styles, creating an exoticized visual ideal that had both local and global resonance. My dissertation argues that the sculptural assemblages set up in Egyptian sanctuaries allowed each community to construct complex narratives about the nature of the Egyptian gods. Further, these images participated in a form of globalization that motivated local communities to adopt foreign gods and reinterpret them to suit local needs. </p><p> I begin my dissertation by examining how Isis and Sarapis were represented in Greece. My first chapter focuses on single statues of Egyptian gods, describing their iconographies and stylistic tendencies through examples from Corinth and Gortyna. By comparing Greek examples with images of Sarapis, Isis, and Harpokrates from around the Mediterranean, I demonstrate that Greek communities relied on globally available visual tropes rather than creating site or region-specific interpretations. In the next section, I examine what other sources viewers drew upon to inform their experiences of Egyptian sculpture. In Chapter 3, I survey the textual evidence for Isiac cult practice in Greece as a way to reconstruct devotees’ expectations of sculptures in sanctuary contexts. At the core of this analysis are Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, which offer a Greek perspective on the cult’s theology. These literary works rely on a tradition of aretalogical inscriptions—long hymns produced from roughly the late 4th century B.C.E. into the 4th century C.E. that describe the expansive syncretistic powers of Isis, Sarapis, and Harpokrates. This chapter argues that the textual evidence suggests that devotees may have expected their images to be especially miraculous and likely to intervene on their behalf, particularly when involved in ritual activity inside the sanctuary.</p><p> In the final two chapters, I consider sculptural programs and ritual activity in concert with sanctuary architecture. My fourth chapter focuses on sanctuaries where large amounts of sculpture were found in underground water crypts: Thessaloniki and Rhodes. These groups of statues can be connected to a particular sanctuary space, but their precise display contexts are not known. By reading these images together, I argue that local communities used these globally available images to construct new interpretations of these gods, ones that explored the complex intersections of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman identities in a globalized Mediterranean. My final chapter explores the Egyptian sanctuary at Marathon, a site where exceptional preservation allows us to study how viewers would have experienced images in architectural space. Using the Isiac visuality established in Chapter 3, I reconstruct the viewer's experience, arguing that the patron, Herodes Atticus, intended his viewer to inform his experience with the complex theology of Middle Platonism and prevailing elite attitudes about Roman imperialism.</p><p> Throughout my dissertation, I diverge from traditional approaches to culture change that center on the concepts of Romanization and identity. In order to access local experiences of globalization, I examine viewership on a micro-scale. I argue that viewers brought their concerns about culture change into dialogue with elements of cult, social status, art, and text to create new interpretations of Roman sculpture sensitive to the challenges of a highly connected Mediterranean world. In turn, these transcultural perspectives motivated Isiac devotees to create assemblages that combined elements from multiple cultures. These expansive attitudes also inspired Isiac devotees to commission exoticized images that brought together disparate cultures and styles in an eclectic manner that mirrored the haphazard way that travel brought change to the Mediterranean world. My dissertation thus offers a more theoretically rigorous way of modeling culture change in antiquity that recognizes local communities’ agency in producing their cultural landscapes, reconciling some of the problems of scale that have plagued earlier approaches to provincial Roman art.</p><p> These case studies demonstrate that cultural anxieties played a key role in how viewers experienced artistic imagery in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean. This dissertation thus offers a new component in our understanding of ancient visuality, and, in turn, a better way to analyze how local communities dealt with the rise of connectivity and globalization.</p> / Dissertation

Les cultes isiaques se répandent autour du bassin méditerranéen entre le IVe s. av. et la fin du IVe s. apr. J.-C., arrivant à Rome au Ier siècle av. notre ère et y disparaissant conjointement aux cultes païens traditionnels avec ou peu après le coup porté par Théodose. Leur diffusion romaine s’étale donc sur une grande partie de l’histoire de l’Empire d’Occident, et ils vont ainsi se retrouver face à l’homme désormais considéré comme primus inter pares, grâce à l’accumulation de ses pouvoirs. L’empereur est pontifex maximus, c’est-à-dire maitre des cultes publics et du droit religieux, et il est ainsi l’agent du pouvoir qui a le potentiel religieux et législatif pour avoir un discours varié sur les autres traditions religieuses. Il semble donc inévitable que la sphère cultuelle isiaque rencontre et interagisse avec la sphère religieuse traditionnelle romaine, et que certains empereurs interfèrent, par renforcement ou au contraire par opposition, avec les cultes isiaques arrivés peu de temps avant l’avènement du pouvoir impérial. Cette thèse se propose non seulement d’étudier la dialectique entre institué romain (la force d’inertie) et instituant isiaque (la force de changements) dans la direction d’une potentielle altérité incluse (soit le dialogue évolutif du Nous par rapport à l’Autre), mais notamment par les liens publics romains et évolutifs entre l’empereur et les divinités isiaques. Nous effectuons cette recherche grâce à quatre types de sources antiques : la littérature pour le point de vue de l’élite littéraire gréco-romaine ; les inscriptions isiaques pour une définition surtout populaire de l’identité évolutive de l’instituant isiaque ; les monnaies et les oeuvres monumentales pour le point de vue public (et parfois plus personnel) impérial. Nous concentrons notre étude à partir de la dynastie sévérienne, qui laisse supposer que les cultes romano-orientaux profitent de la nouvelle configuration impériale avec des empereurs originaires d’Afrique et d’Orient, dans un phénomène d’« impérialisation » isiaque intensifié par un engagement tant impérial que populaire. En outre, nous nuancerons les conséquences sur la diffusion isiaque des troubles qui surviennent dans la deuxième moitié du IIIe siècle. Enfin, le IVe siècle, avec la christianisation de l’Empire et donc un christianisme devenant institué, ouvre sur une analyse des débats entre les défenseurs actifs du paganisme et les auteurs chrétiens, et de là, vers des interrogations sur l’intervention de la sphère isiaque dans ce face-à-face. / Isiac worship spread around the mediterranean basin between IVth c. BC and late IVth century AD, arriving to Rome at Ist century BC and disappearing there at the same time as traditional pagan worship, with or soon after Theodosius’policy. So, their Italian distribution spreads during a large part of the history of Western Empire, and thus, they’re going to meet the man henceforth considered as primus inter pares, thanks to the accumulation of his powers. The emperor is pontifex maximus that is master of the public worship and the religious right, thus he is the powerful agent who possesses the religious and legislative potential to have a varied discourse on other religious traditions. It seems inevitable that the sphere of isiac worship meets and interacts with Roman traditional religious sphere, and that some emperors interfere, by reinforcement or opposition, with the isiac cults arrived not enough time before the advent of the imperial power. This thesis studies non only the dialectic between Roman institué (inertial force) and isiac instituant (force of changes) in the direction of a potential included otherness (that to say the evolving dialogue of Us in relation to the Other), but especially by Roman publics links (and processing) between the isiac worship and the emperors. We do this research with four types of antique sources : literature for the views of the Greco-Roman literary elite ; the isiac inscriptions for (popular) definition of the identity of the isiac instituant ; the coins and the monumental works for the public (and sometimes more personal) imperial point of view. We focus our study from the Severan dynasty, what can let suppose that these romano-oriental worship take advantage of this new imperial configuration with emperors from Africa and the East, in a phenomenon of isiac " imperialization " intensified by both imperial and popular involvement. Moreover, we soften the consequences on isiac spread of disorders that arise in the second half of the IIIth century. Finally, the IVth century, with the christianization of the Empire and so christianity becoming institué, brings to an analysis of the debates between the active defenders of the paganism and the christian writers, and from there, on questions over the intervention of the isiac group in this face to face.

Die im Oktober 2011 verteidigte und mit der Note "summa cum laude" bewertete Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Auswertung aller bis 2011 bekannt gewordener Zeugnisse, die im Nahen Osten auf eine Kenntnisnahme und Verehrung der ägyptischen Götter Isis, Sarapis, Apis, Harpokrates etc. hindeuten. Eine grundlegende Materialaufnahme mithilfe eines DAAD-Stipendiums erfolgte 2003 bis 2004 in allen Levanteländern. Die im Zuge dieser Recherchen allerdings ausufernde Materialbasis führte dazu, den Fokus der Dissertation auf die südliche Levante zu richten. Zeitlich wurden vor allem die Jahrhunderte der hellenistischen und römischen Beherrschung des Gebiets näher untersucht. / This thesis, defended in October 2011 and rated "summa cum laude", evaluates testimonies that became known until 2011, which in the Middle East point to a recognition and worship of the Egyptian gods Isis, Sarapis, Apis, Harpocrates, etc. , Basic material was collected with the help of a DAAD scholarship in 2003-2004 in all Levant countries. However, in the course of these researches, a sprawling material base led to the focus of the dissertation on the southern Levant. In particular, the centuries of Hellenistic and Roman domination of the area were examined more closely.

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