Images of Religion
The various ways in which religion was made visible in ancient Egypt and Rome were entirely different but both approaches achieved surprisingly similar results. While in ancient Rome the display of statues of gods and mythical figures took place in the open and small shrines like luci and sacelli took firm stands in living quarters, Egyptian cities lacked such an open display of the divine.
Excavations in settlements such as the one on Elephantine Island at the southern border of ancient Egypt, unearthing an archaeology that spans from the late fourth millennium to the Arab Conquest in ad 641, revealed almost no allusion to religious life in public spaces, nor in the homes of their inhabitants. Although cities like Tell el-Amarna seem to paint a somewhat different picture (Stevens 2006), religious practice was usually confined to state-run temples, processions and festivals and a small number of privaterun sanctuaries. Due to this restriction and the need to keep the sacred in a safe and controllable environment, religious monuments such as statues were never erected in squares or crossroads in business centres or living quarters. This approach did not change until Ptolemaic times when suddenly facades of family homes began to contain niches in which busts of Serapis were installed. Before the arrival of the Ptolemies, the only images that rose within Egyptian cities and were visible from far away were the ones depicting pharaoh on or before the pylons of the main temples as heroically smiting his enemies while in company with protecting gods (Luiselli 2011).By way of contrast, the presence of images of deities in ancient Rome was generally regarded as an ideal way to influence citizens' thoughts in a particular direction, and therefore they were considered as quintessential requisites of civic life. They contained ‘visual messages' (Giuliani 1986) which the ancient observer knew how to interpret and understand.
Until a few years ago, ancient monuments were largely regarded as historical monuments that were to be named, classified and dated. More recently, their function(s) and meaning became a focal point of research, often without, sadly, addressing the methodologies that can be applied to reveal their meaning - apparently known to the ancient observer but lost over the years since. Research before the 1990s concentrated mostly on political monuments while religious monuments in ancient Rome have been less intensively discussed and reconstructed according to their original meaning. In his ground-breaking study Augustus und die Macht der Bilder, Paul Zanker has convincingly proven that during the era of Augustus, images played an increasingly important role in the creation of a new state myth (Zanker 2004). Here, originally separate political myths were intrinsically tied to each other: the myth of Troy melted into the myth of Romulus, thus linking Mars (the father of Romulus and Remus) with Venus, mother of Aeneas and founder of the Julian line as protector gods of new Rome, both culminating in the centre of the pediment of the temple of Mars Ultor.