Seminar on Ancient Art and Archaeology

This talk will tell the story of a decades-long antiquities investment scheme orchestrated by a very well-known Manhattan dealer and an insurance salesman based in Detroit. By the end, it involved nearly a hundred investors, three hundred ancient artworks, and seven university museums. The story did not end well for most of the participants. The talk will examine the risks and ethics of the financialization of antiquities, and also raise questions about the relationship of museums to the art market.

Elizabeth Marlowe is Professor of Art History, Chair of the Art Department, and Director of the Program in Museum Studies at Colgate University. She earned her Ph.D in Roman art history at Columbia University, and has published widely in both scholarly and popular venues on Roman imperial art, museum ethics, and cultural property. Recent publications have focused on the Benin Bronzes, the Elgin Marbles/Parthenon Sculptures, museum labels, and an ongoing case concerning a group of Roman bronze statues looted from Turkey.

Description: Dr. Andrea Achi holds a BA from Barnard College and a PhD from New York University. Trained as a Byzantinist, Dr. Achi’s scholarship and curatorial practice focus on late antique and Byzantine art of the Mediterranean Basin and Northeast Africa. She has a particular interest in manuscripts and archaeological objects from Christian Egypt and Nubia, and she has brought this expertise to bear on exhibitions like Art and Peoples of the Kharga Oasis (2017), Crossroads: Power and Piety (2020), The Good Life (2021), Africa & Byzantium (2023) and Afterlives (2024) at The Met and in presentations and publications.

Dr. Andrea Achi, curator of Africa & Byzantium at the Metropolitan Museum, will discuss creating this exhibition, which was highly praised by many including Peter Brown of the New York Review of Books and Holland Cotter of The New York Times. Starting at the museum almost a decade ago as an intern in The Medieval Department at The Met, Dr. Achi has expanded on her earlier exhibitions related to archaeology in Africa and the global medieval ages to explore connections between northern Africa and Byzantium over the centuries. Dr. Achi will end with a preview of her upcoming projects and her aspirations overall for Byzantium at The Met.

The recent fieldwork at Tell Edfu has focused on two excavations areas, one dating to the later Old Kingdom (Zone 2) and the other to the early New Kingdom (Zone 1). Zone 2 consists of open courtyards and the two large, official buildings (the southern and the northern) that can now be linked based on the associated finds excavated in the courtyards, to a royal domain which would be the first example attested archaeologically. It is closely linked to royal expeditions into the Eastern Desert for the extraction of raw materials, in particular copper ore. The associated clay sealings and ceramics date this activity to the end of the 5th Dynasty and the reign of Djedkare - Isesi. Excavations in Zone 1 comprise several buildings of an elite town quarter dating to the early New Kingdom. A large urban villa measuring more than 500 square meters has been discovered here which includes a small shrine in the corner of the main columned hall that was dedicated to the worship of the ancestors. Several cult objects have been found in and around the shrine, which had been left there when the building was abandoned. This discovery is a unique opportunity to investigate private religious practices through the various cult objects that were found in situ as well as their archaeological context and the architectural elements of the shrine. It also sheds new light on the provenance and function of similar objects that can be seen in many museum collections and for which the archaeological context is frequently missing.

Nadine Moeller is currently Professor of Egyptology at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale. After receiving her D.Phil., she held the Lady Wallis Budge Junior Research Fellowship at University College, Oxford (2004-2007). Before coming to Yale, she was Associate Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at the Oriental Institute (now called Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures) and the Department of NELC at the University of Chicago (2007-2020).

Her main research interests include settlement archaeology and urbanism in ancient Egypt, household archaeology and climate change in antiquity. She is author of The Archaeology of Urbanism in Ancient Egypt (Cambridge 2016), and co-editor together with Karen Radner (LMU Munich) and Dan Potts (NYU/ISAW) of the Oxford History of the Ancient Near East (Oxford 2020-), a five-volume project to replace the ‘Cambridge Ancient History.’

In Egypt she has been directing the ongoing excavations at Tell Edfu together with Gregory Marouard since 2010, and she has also participated in numerous excavations and fieldwork projects at other sites in Egypt such as Abu Rawash, Memphis, Dendara, Theban West Bank, Valley of the Kings, and Elephantine.

Description: How did the Fora—the great piazzas of the Roman world—come into existence? We still know relatively little about this central element of Italian urbanism, which slowly developed over the course of the entire first millennium BCE. Greek colonial agorai, by comparison, evolved much faster and became monumentalized much sooner than their central Italian counterparts. New discoveries at various urban centers in Latium and Etruria are casting a new light on this complex issue. The lecture reports on recent work at Gabii and in Rome, to retrace the siting of these piazzas, as well as the emergence of distinctive elements of later fora. Pavements, colonnades, basilicas and shops all appeared slowly and tentatively, often much later than generally assumed. These new developments have broader implications for the history of Roman architecture.

Nicola Terrenato is the Esther B. Van Deman Collegiate Professor of Roman Studies at the University of Michigan. Since 2020, he also directs the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. He studied at Rome and Pisa. He specializes in first millennium BCE Italy, in particular early Rome, northern Etruria and the Roman conquest. He directs the Gabii Project and the Sant’Omobono Project. Other interests include theories of state and empire formation, field survey and history of archaeology. He recently published The Early Roman Expansion into Italy, Cambridge 2019, which was awarded the 2021 Wiseman Book Award by the Archaeological Institute of America.

Description: Few, if any, artworks from Hellenistic Iraq are as famous today as the alabaster goddess figurines, whose bright ruby eyes and golden crescent headdresses have advertised blockbuster exhibitions and graced book covers in recent years. In addition to their fine craftsmanship, economic value, and aesthetic appeal, these captivating statuettes – which almost certainly represent Ishtar-Aphrodite – have primarily been discussed as evidence for broader religious syncretism and multicultural negotiation between Greeks and Babylonians living in the post-Alexander period of southern Iraq. Yet, these alabaster goddesses were as anomalous as they are spectacular. Embedded within a diverse and flourishing Hellenistic Babylonian figurine tradition, they were nevertheless nearly unique not just in their visual splendor but also in their unambiguous presentation of a (partially) Mesopotamian deity in three-dimensional form and at hand-held scale.

In order to understand the significance of this exceptional group of miniature goddesses, this talk investigates them through the lens of miniaturization itself. Miniaturization was not incidental to these objects; rather, I will argue that it was a fundamental part of how the figurines expressed and embodied religious beliefs particular to Babylonia during the Seleucid and Parthian periods. The ambiguity inherent in scalar compression facilitated the elision of divine identity required for successful syncretism. The small-scale portability of figurines echoed the astral movements of the gods, while also imposing a burden of care upon the human user that served as a microcosm of temple-based religious practice. The erotic powers of the goddess Ishtar-Aphrodite were made particularly potent in miniaturized form, which could compel tactile manipulation and caresses. This reconstruction of the embodied practice of using the alabaster figurines will culminate with a discussion of their performative role in funerals, where I argue that the movement of the figurine’s body formed both a parallel to, and a hopeful contrast with, the seeming immobility of the corpse. Overall, by integrating this examination of miniaturized scale into the study of the materiality of Hellenistic Babylonian religion, I argue that we can better understand the complexity of practice and belief in which these figurines participated.

Stephanie Langin-Hooper is an Associate Professor and the Karl Kilinski II Endowed Chair in Hellenic Visual Culture, in the Department of Art History at Southern Methodist University. Her research focuses on the agency of miniature objects in identity construction and social negotiation in Hellenistic Babylonia. She is the author of Figurines in Hellenistic Babylonia: Miniaturization and Cultural Hybridity (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and the co-editor of The Tiny and the Fragmented: Miniature, Broken, or Otherwise Incomplete Objects in the Ancient World (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Please join us for the keynote talk of the New York Workshop of Etruscan Art given by Maurizio Harari.

The New York Workshop of Etruscan Art is an initiative promoted jointly by Columbia University and New York University. The ambition of the workshop is to advance our understanding of the artistic and visual dimensions of pre-Roman Italy by promoting discussion and sustained reflection on their role within the field of Etruscan studies, but it does not prescribe a specific intellectual agenda. This year, the workshop will: advance discussion of buildings, their roofs and decoration and the avenues they provide to investigate production processes, networks of interaction and creation, the sacred image and the porousness of Italic arts; reflect on the impact of 3D-modeling and reconstructions on our understanding of Etruscan aesthetics; present new findings from the Corpus Speculorum Etruscorum; present unpublished bronze figurines of subordinate characters; explore the relation with comedy of the imagery of Praenestine cistae. The keynote talk will investigate the ideological history of the discipline of Etruscology vis-à-vis modern European perceptions of the past. The full program and details are available online.

Since the late rise of Humanism and through a real crescendo in the 18th to 20th centuries, the Etruscans, an ancient people of pre-Roman Italy, became (and remain) a subject of lively discussions among scholars, as they saw a wide popularity in pseudo-scientific exploration and publication. This lecture aims to explore the ideological features of the foundation process of a highly specialized, but often self-referential discipline, so-called "Etruscology,” which only saw its real scholarly development in the first half of the 20th century. In that context, this major branch of scholarship was created with its roots in the rather complicated connections between the Italian territorial situation of Etruscan civilization and the European dimension of its reception and popularization.

Maurizio Harari is Professor of Etruscan and Italic Archaeology and Director of the Archaeological Museum at the University of Pavia, Italy. Author of over 200 publications, his reach focuses on Etruscan and Italic art and archaeology, especially issues of image making and meaning, wall painting, Etruscans of the Po-River region, and the sacred and political institutions of Etruscan cities. Co-Director of excavations at the Italian site of Verucchio since 2011, he is also a specialist in the historiography of Etruscology and its situation within the archaeological disciplines of Europe and the Mediterranean. He has collaborated widely across Europe, including with the European Research Council and on publication of the Enciclopedia dell’arte antica classica e orientale and the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, and he is fellow and member of multiple institutions, including the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Etruschi ed Italici.

Description: In the 1920s and ‘30s the Danish archaeologist Harald Ingholt undertook archaeological work in Palmyra and investigated more than 100 graves. Ingholt’s interest in Palmyra was originally spurred by his knowledge of the collection of Palmyrene funerary portraits in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, an institution where he also worked for five years as a curator. In 1928, he published his higher doctoral dissertation Studier over Palmyrensk Skulptur, where he presented a typological and chronological study of more than 500 funerary portraits. This work – published in Danish – has remained a standard work since then. Taking its point of departure in Ingholt’s work and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek’s collection, the Palmyra Portrait Project team has since 2012 been collecting all known funerary portraiture from the city in order to create a comprehensive corpus. The corpus holds more than 4,000 portraits at present, making it the largest group of funerary portraits from the Roman world stemming from one place. This lecture takes the corpus as its point of departure and focusses on giving an insight into this unique material and its significance for our understanding of trends and traditions in local portrait representations in Roman Palmyra. Furthermore, the lecture draws in new research done on Ingholt’s excavation diaries and connects this to objects in the corpus, showing the importance of considering archival material and fieldwork notes when reevaluating earlier studies.

Rubina Raja is a Professor of Classical Archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark and director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s centre of excellence Centre for Urban Network Evolutions. She heads the Palmyra Portrait Project, Archive Archaeology and Circular Economy and Urban Sustainability projects – all collective research projects focusing on the archaeology, history and cultural heritage of Palmyra in Syria. She directs fieldwork projects in Rome and the Middle East. Raja’s research focusses on societal and urban developments and networks from the Hellenistic to the medieval periods, iconography, religion and religious life in Antiquity. While being a classical archaeologist, she also works in the fields intersecting archaeology and natural sciences bringing high definition studies of the past to the forefront. Her most recent books include a translation and edited version of Ingholt’s Studier over Palmyrensk Skulptur from 1928 (Brepols, 2021) and the new collection catalogue of the Palmyra collection in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, 2019).

Description: In the wake of recent events in which alt-right and neo-Nazi groups have mobilized the ancient past as justification for white supremacy, it is more important than ever to critically examine the popular idea that the ancient world was a homogeneous place. Prof. Roland Betancourt (UC Irvine) and Prof. Stuart Tyson Smith (UCSB) will join the Institute’s Profs. Thelma K. Thomas and Kathryn Howley for a panel discussion on new scholarly approaches to diversity in antiquity, exploring how we might research different types of diversity in the ancient world and the ethical and methodological challenges that accompany such an endeavor.

Roland Betancourt is Professor of Art History and Chancellor's Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. He is also the Director of the Visual Studies Program. In the 2016-2017 academic year, he was the Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is also the author of Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020), as well as Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Performing the Gospels in Byzantium: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Stuart Tyson Smith is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Director of the UCSB Institute for Social, Behavioral and Economic Research. Since 2000 he has been co-director of the UCSB-Purdue Tombos Excavations in Sudan, which investigate an Egyptian colonial site of the late second-early first millennium BCE at the third cataract of the Nile. He is author of Wretched Kush (Routledge, 2003) and numerous articles on ethnicity, imperialism, and cultural entanglement in the ancient world.

Description: Discovered in the desert cemeteries west of Cairo around 1860, an ancient Egyptian statue known as the ‘Sheikh el-Beled’ was a sensation at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1867 and merited more photographs than any other object in the landmark 1872 Album du Musée de Boulaq. By the end of the 19th century, reproductions of it were circulating globally in the form of plaster casts, postcards, stereographs, and book illustrations. The ‘Sheikh’ owed its name, and fame, to the legend of its discovery. According to this poorly documented tale, when workmen digging on behalf of Auguste Mariette first uncovered the 112cm-high statue, they cried out with immediate recognition. There was their village chief – their sheikh el-beled – carved in wood around the time the pyramids were built. Mixing the bewitching lifelikeness of the statue with the trope of credulous ‘Orientals’, the legend has featured in histories of Egyptian art ever since.

This lecture takes the Sheikh as an entry point for a historiographic re-evaluation of ancient Egyptian art. How did the translation of ancient objects into other media shape methods, priorities, and disciplinary praxis in the field of Egyptology – and why do colonial inscriptions (such as the gullible ‘Oriental’) still speak?

Christina Riggs is Professor of the History of Visual Culture in the Department of History at Durham University. She is a historian of photography and archaeology with a particular interest in North Africa and the Middle East, and has written extensively on the reception of the culture we know as “ancient Egypt”. Archives and museum collections form a primary source for much of her work, which interrogates how the fields of archaeology, art history, and Egyptology developed in tandem with colonial and imperial expansion. Her most recent books include Photographing Tutankhamun (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Unwrapping Ancient Egypt (Bloomsbury, 2014).

While architecture was fundamental to Roman culture - a culture which was essentially urban in nature and which found expression in the built environment - the act of building was almost entirely the privilege of the political and economic elite. By the height of empire in the second to early third centuries CE, however, many cities in Italy and around the empire already had the standard complement of public buildings. The main choices left to ambitious benefactors were to build more bath buildings, to embellish the existing theatre with a new, elaborate scaenae frons, or to adorn the city with new display monuments such as nymphaea, which often used the same architectural language of the columnar façade as the scaenae frons. This paper aims to throw some light on the economics of such choices in a comparative sense across the empire.

Janet DeLaine is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and Director of its Ancient World Research Cluster, having previously been Associate Professor in Roman Archaeology at Oxford. Her research covers the built environment of the Roman world, particularly in the Mediterranean, with a focus on the Roman building industry, Roman baths, and the urban development of Ostia. Her major study on the Baths of Caracalla in Rome (1997), won the Archaeological Institute of America’s James R. Wiseman Award, and has been fundamental in establishing the archaeology of construction as a new discipline within the field of classical archaeology. She is the author of many articles and edited volumes, and has just completed a short book on Roman architecture for OUP. Dr DeLaine is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and a Corresponding Member of the Archaeological Institute of America.

Lead was ubiquitous in the Roman world, employed in quantities unknown before, and it remained in heavy use through the late Roman period. The environmental record is clear that by around CE 400 an age of mining and smelting, of industry and pollution, of long-distance shipping and large-scale building of infrastructure, had ended. This age, the Roman age, has left signals across northern Europe and the northern Atlantic world, including in Ireland, Sweden, Iceland, and Greenland, as well as in peat bogs and lake beds, salt marshes and glaciers closer to centres of Roman metal production, notably Spain, the Balkans, and Britain. As the production and exportation of lead declined in fourth-century Britain, where lead sulphide ores and mines were peculiarly abundant, lead and put to many uses, in the manufacture of brine pans and sieves, more decorated lead coffins even than those known from the Levant, in circular tanks often interpreted as fonts, and in a group of rectangular caskets discovered across the East Midlands of England, focussed on the Roman city of Lincoln.

Paul Stephenson is currently Andrew W. Mellon fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he is exploring early Byzantine culture through human responses to and interactions with things fashioned from natural materials, elements and alloys: lead and silver, copper and bronze, wood, soil, sand and clay, stone, water and air, flesh and bone. He is author or editor of nine books, most recently The Serpent Column: a cultural biography (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Fountains and Water Culture in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2016), edited with Brooke Shilling. He has held chairs at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, Durham University (UK), and Radboud Univerity Nijmegen (Netherlands). His research has been supported by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, the Onassis Foundation, The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the British Academy, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Met.

The Admonitions of Ipuwer, an ancient Egyptian text penned in the late New Kingdom (c. 1300-1200 BCE), is often maligned for its seemingly histrionic tone and strident insistence that in the period of chaos it depicted, the poor became rich and the rich poor. Drawing upon archaeological, art historical, liturgical, and ethnohistoric evidence, it will be argued in this talk that this papyrus sheds valuable light both on social history during and in the aftermath of famine and plague and also on the surprisingly ludic process of encoding memories of potentially recurrent trauma into societal practice.

Ellen Morris is an assistant professor in the Classics and Ancient Studies Department at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has excavated in Dakhleh Oasis, Abydos, and Mendes and is currently involved in a collaborative multidisciplinary effort aimed at exploring the transition from the Late Bronze to the Early Iron Age in the Southern Levant. Her work focuses on ancient Egyptian imperialism, sacred sexuality and performance, retainer sacrifice, divine kingship, landscape theory, and life in “interesting” times.

Description: Traditionally, to visualize the Greco-Roman gods has been to focus primarily upon their bodies: their degree of anthropomorphism, the beguiling power of naturalism, and the subtle means of iconographic differentiation by which individual deities might be defined and recognized. But to ‘imagine the divine’ in antiquity was to engage with a far broader and more complex set of visual strategies.

Focusing on representations of Athena on the Athenian Acropolis, this paper focuses on those elements of divine depiction that might be considered ‘parergonal’ – the panoply of ‘columns, drapery and frames’ that post-Kantian art history deemed superfluous to the work (that is, the deity itself). Together, Greco-Roman bodies and frames worked to construct a notion of interiority that served to make the gods present for their worshippers – to give their images agency. Yet this concentric system of frames also extended to the surfaces of cult statues themselves – to the colors, materials, attributes and clothing that defined the gods’ external appearances. To view sacred images in this way not only decenters the role of the body in the Greco-Roman religious imagination, but also recognizes the inherent flexibility and improvisatory nature of a visual system that would have abiding influence over the great religions that superseded it.