Synopsis of Chapters
The chapters in this volume reflect the impact of these conversations, which are so widely diffused that they have become the necessary and implicit foundations for exploring the cultural functions material remains.
The case studies gathered here situate the conversation about materiality in the ancient Mediterranean world, ranging temporally from Iron Age Israel into the Christian Imperial period. The questions of the definition of religious objects, the fluidity of socially constructed meanings, the centrality of iconographic analysis, the role for the cultural habitus which shapes the understanding and perception of objects, and the potential to erode the divide between emic and etic perspectives, all emerge across the disciplinary and regional divides represented herein. The chapters are grouped into four sections based on their primary form of evidence: iconography, text, ritual objects, and sites and structures.In Section 1, three chapters take up the investigation from an iconographic perspective. They share a focus on the cultural productivity of the polysemicity attendant upon material evidence. Annewies van den Hoek's analysis of the Dioscuri builds on the principles of the social construction of materiality to demonstrate the polyvocality of the images of Castor and Pollux. Working back from their image on North African ceramics of the fourth and fifth century, she reconstructs their presence in the visual vocabularies of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Viewed as the points upon which multiple audiences converged, the twins emerge as responsive to the needs of both traditional and Christian religions. Sheramy Bundrick's study of Athenian iconography moves our focus from emic to etic. Here the multiple readers are the generations of scholars whose preference for rational models of Greek antiquity and purely narrative interpretations of ritual scenes blinded them to the cleromantic activities depicted on Athenian vases.
The same astragali which enabled games were also ritual implements. They would have been as recognizable by the users of the vases as the divine implements that Susan Blevins and Meghan Diluzio explore in the context of Imperial Rome. A focus on the material technologies for communication with the gods also informs the analysis of incense altars, votive tapers, and incubation practices in other chapters. Seung Ho Bang et al. argue that the distinctive material elements of these altars reflect the potential for each house in Tell Halif to have its own, individualized radio to god. Bert Lott demonstrates that the materiality of votive tapers, simultaneously appropriate for the imperial ghosts and for personal patrons, collapsed those two categories for the citizens of Pisa. Megan Nutzman demonstrates that the careful management of the bridge between Greco-Roman and Judaic ritual categories enabled multiple communities to benefit from the ability to invoke divine healing at Hammat Gader. The polysemnic potential of both the genre of the portrait, and the material of stone, comes to the fore in Eric Varner's study of Nero's theomorphic portraits. The materiality of the stone and the cultural category of the portrait transformed the viewing of Nero's statues into a hierophantic moment, without losing the political and aesthetic force of the experience. These three chapters suggest that material religion is characterized by a polysemnity that is both productive and problematic. The materiality of ritual objects may enable cultural convergence, scholarly obfuscation, or imperial messaging, and this is seen to function in two different rituals devoted to “seeing” the gods— hierophany and cleromancy.In Section 2, three chapters access the materiality ofreligion through primarily textual sources. The primacy of texts arises from different circumstances for each case study: the ephemeral nature of the objects themselves (Bert Lott), the coterminality between the production of a magical tablet and the ritual act (Jill Marshall), or because the ritualization of the object is a rhetorical achievement, carried out by Cicero in the context of legal debate (Isabel Koster).
The dynamics of gift-giving run as a thread throughout all three chapters. Bert Lott's analysis begins with a Pisan inscription detailing the annual offerings to be made as public commemoration for the ghost of Augustus's son Lucius. These offerings may not consist of more than one candle, torch or wreath. These cheap and ephemeral materials, assuming a role in socially, legally, and poetically distinct exchanges, penetrate the boundaries of private family and public rites, and tie the town of Pisa to the imperial capital. The function of tapers and torches in Saturnalia, moreover, where they are gifts to would-be patrons, means that these gifts to the dead were also exchanges between client and patron. The inscription simultaneously textualizes and textualizes the candles and their light, and would itself, as an object in public space, locate the generator of these ritually forged relationships in real geo-political space. Jill Marshall shares this focus on the act of giving, exploring the term “anathema” in curse tablets and in the writings of Paul. Anathema, the act of dedication, appears in curse tablets from Megara and Knidos to describe the delivery of a victim to the powers of the invisible world. The tablets, in their material form, offer life histories and user experiences that embody the complex sociology of knowledge in Paul's Corinth. The public display of tablets in Knidos moved anathema from the metaphoric to the physical sphere, a collapsing of symbol and action fundamental to magical practice. A palimpsest text from Megara, which simultaneously hides and reveals a divine message, makes visible the social functions of knowledge, access, distribution, and discretion. The creation of the text itself enables practitioners and purchasers to close the gap between language and artifact, physical manipulation and intellectual access. Isabel Koster explores how Cicero uses language to transform a piece of artwork into a ritual object in his invective against Verres. The sacrality of objects emerges as a social decision: it accrues to an object because of its physical location, aesthetic value, and the activities carried out around it. Verres's failure to understand these principles is articulated in terms of his absence of affect: he is devoid of the complex emotional, aesthetic, and social response that marks those for whom these finely crafted works are ritual objects. These failures render him as foreign to Rome as he was to the Sicily he plundered. The question of the gift emerges in this as in the other two chapters of this section. Verres's claim to have stolen a candelabra in order to dedicate it to Jupiter is false, as he did not understand that gifts to the gods demanded an audience.Section 3 focuses on individual objects which may be characterized as tools in ritual contexts—altars, figurines, and the implements of ritual practice. The first two chapters focus on Israelite objects with long histories of investigation as cultic paraphernalia. They share a reliance on petrographic analysis and a focus on the question of production, and yield fresh hypotheses for the social dynamics of production. Seung Ho Bang et al. position the incense altars from Tell Halif among the archaeologies of entanglement, foregrounding the complex life histories of these ritual implements (Der and Fernandini 2016). These histories encompass local geology, the travel itineraries of the raw materials, and the politic, ethnic, and professional groupings of those involved in procurement, production, transfer, and use. Distinctions in material and finish suggest the existence of multiple artisans with differing levels and styles of craftsmanship, belonging to different households. The inherent challenges of identifying ritual objects in domestic assemblages come to the fore in the movability of these objects, whose presence could turn any number of locations into ritual spaces. The analysis of the altars' materiality, achieved through scientific as well as stylistic means, foregrounds the affective, the familial, and the local realities of ritual at Tell Halif, as well as the potential for ritual objects to serve as the carriers of contemporary narratives.
Erin Darby focuses on Judean pillar figurines, traditionally interpreted as evidence for women's rituals in domestic contexts. Petrographic, stylistic, and distribution analysis offer life histories of the figurines. These were made of local soils by specialist craftsmen, reflecting the styles from different regions, but were not themselves exchanged across political divides. These factors suggest a new hypothesis for the figurines as regional signatures, and for their workshops as loci for the negotiation of identity as well as ritual technologies.Meghan Diluzio and Susan Blevins pursue the investigation of ritual instruments through their depiction on Roman imperial architecture. Both seek to recover the combination of memory, affect, and cultural context that would have enabled contemporary readers of these images to identify the agents missing in the depiction of the implements. Both also build on La Follette’s proposal that ritual implements were not a generic set, but tailored to respond to their ritual context (La Follette 2011-2012). Blevins uses an analysis of Quintilian’s rhetoric to produce an elegant reading of the frieze of the temple of the deified Titus and Vespasian, while Diluzio integrates images of Vestals in ritual action with textual evidence from Roman authors. Blevins argues that the frieze of the temple of the divine Vespasian and Titus, which consists of an array of sacred objects, invokes the Flamines, a priesthood occupied only by the senatorial elite. The depiction of implements only, without individual portraits, affirms the collective agency of their office without singling out any individual priest for honors. That priesthood’s role in constituting Rome was strengthened by the rhythm of the images. Their repetition and variation mimic patterns in music and bodily movement that Quintilian recommended for sublime and pleasing thoughts, while their cyclicality would evoke the calendrical regularity of civic time that ensured the performance of remembrance and religious obligation.
Meghan Diluzio uses iconographic evidence to counter the traditional arguments that the Vestals could not perform sacrifice, and that the flaminica Dialis was but a passive extension of her husband’s authority. The evidence consists of the ritual implements carried in the hands of women on the Ara Pacis, depicted on the entablature frieze of the temple of Vesta, and borne along in procession on sculptural reliefs of Roman temples and altars. The implements—translated from tools into metonymns for priestly action—transcend and dissolve the boundaries of gender that have played a disproportionate role in the scholarly reconstructions of the ritual lives of Roman women.Section 4 brings together three chapters focusing on the spatial and regional frameworks for material religion. Each of them foregrounds ritual spaces as loci for the meeting of cultures, reflecting the ethnic and geospatial reality of the polysemnity noted in the first section’s chapters. Eric Moore explores water sources as producers of civic identity in Corinth and in Samaria, two communities circumscribed by Rome. Water sources have a long-recognized role as locations for the meeting of human and divine. The narratives of these interactions, and the historical, geospatial, civic, and architectural locations of the fountain of Glauke in Corinth, and Jacob’s well in Samaria, link hierophantic tradition with civic identity. Historical shifts of ownership destabilize and refine the meaning of these narratives of interaction. Under Roman occupation, the ritual functions associated with Glauke's fountain shifted away from the apotropaia offered to Medea, the barbarian, baby-killing princess. The foreign princess became a token of successfully conquered barbarian nations, and the ritual sensibility transferred from personal and familial protection to the divinely approved protection of imperial boundaries. At Jacob's well, Jesus's encounter with the Samarian woman provides a narrative of the moment of transfer of mediating power from Gerezim and Jerusalem, geospatially limited locations, to Jesus himself. This is a shift in the geospatial realities of cult from the pre-Jesus world to emergent Christianity, in which the object of celebration is emphatically transnational. The narratives enacted, ritualized, and remembered at local water sources are not only themselves capable of transformation, but emerge as tools for the scalar shift from local identities to imperial and universal reach. Megan Nutzman explores the cultural accommodations attendant upon the convergence of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian identities and practices at another sacred spring, Hammat Gader. This was the most popular of the eight thermal springs in Palestine, and archaeological finds of hundreds of lamps, some seventy inscriptions, and an inscription detailing honors to fourteen different gods reflect robust engagement with the powers of the place by Greek, Roman, and Jewish individuals in search of healing. The evidence for incubation as the rite of healing seems to have been obscured by biblical writers who suppressed the evidence of this engagement in non-Jewish, traditionally Greek and Roman practices. The convergence of identities did not result in a hybrid ritual experience. While the procedures of incubation seem to have been followed by all seeking a cure, separate facilities (synagogue, church, and temple) would facilitate the preparations of purification and votive offerings consistent with the visitor's own faith traditions, and suggest the potential for each individual community to find the god or prophet of their choice in their healing dreams at the site—Asklepios for Greek and Roman, Elijah for Jews.
Lela Urquhart presents the evidence for an increase in materialized religion, both moveable finds and ritual spaces, when Greek, Sicilian, and Phoenician cultures intersect in the context of archaic Sicily. Traditional analyses of the island's cults suggested that religion was an aspect of culture that was especially slow to hellenize, and indeed that influenced the incoming Greeks, in contrast to the models of hellenization that uphold the political value of “civilizing” colonial enterprises. Urquhart uses material evidence to show the evidence for change in indigenous Sicilian religions, focusing on central western Sicily: physical correlates of ritual increased; ritual action shifted from graves to gods; and rituals changed from loosely to highly structured. The quantification of material correlates, a type of data distinctive to material studies, is critical in the argument. Extratextuality, as a framework for conceptualizing ritual as both text and discourse, provides a catalyst for opening up the implications of these data. Rituals as texts are part of the broader cultural discourses in which symbolic systems support and demand an act of interpretation. These interpretations move between fixed conventions and object-based interpretation carried out by both ancient participants and etic scholars. Each ritual, thus viewed, becomes one conversation conducted within the frame of the cultural language that enabled communication among gods, residents, and foreigners. Historical texts that reflect back on the context of these conversations emphasize ongoing cultural evolution, capable of both conflict and collaboration. Practice theorists underscore the engagement with both material devices and texts in the transformation of meaning, on the part of primary actors as well as scholarly interpreters. The arc drawn between historical texts, ancient context, and material evidence validates a model of cross-cultural engagement significantly worked out through the medium of material religion.