American Research Center in Egypt
October Meeting
Saturday, October 4, 2014
"Strangers in a Strange Land: Negotiating the Afterlife in Greek Tombs in Graeco-Roman Egypt"
Marjorie Venit, University of Maryland
After Alexander’s conquest of Egypt in 332 BCE and during the subsequent Greek and then Roman rule of the land, Egypt’s Greek population in two major cities, Alexandria on the northern edge of Egypt and Hermopolis Magna in the Egyptian countryside (the chora), reacted in diametrically opposite ways as they sought to visually negotiate the afterlife in the land they now inhabited.
Alexandria was founded as a Greek city, and it maintained a Classical patina through the period of Egypt’s rule by Rome. In contrast — and not unexpectedly — the Egyptian chora, though battered by Hellenistic culture, remained visually Egyptian. In the chora, tombs retain the Egyptian style and iconography that had endured for millennia. Quite astonishing, then, during the period of Roman rule, are a small number of mortuary monuments from the necropolis of Hermopolis Magna — Tuna el-Gebel — that articulate their vision of the afterlife relying entirely on Greek visual style and Greek mythological subject matter. This choice of subject matter and its representation is even more surprising, since both myth and a consistent Hellenic style are almost entirely absent from Alexandrian tombs. For in greatest contrast to these tombs at Tuna el-Gebel, Alexandrians strikingly and immediately incorporated Egyptian architectural and figural elements into their Hellenically-based fabric, and these Egyptianizing elements proliferated in Alexandrian tombs in succeeding centuries as their mortuary programs become more complex and nuanced.
Marjorie Venit is Professor Emerita in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. She received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Professor Venit specializes in the art and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean with a special interest in the intersection of cultures and ethnicities in the region. She has excavated at Tel Anafa, Israel and Mendes, Egypt. She is the author of many works including Monumental Tombs of Ancient Alexandria: The Theater of the Dead; Greek Painted Pottery from Naukratis in Egyptian Museums, andReferencing Isis in Tombs of Graeco-Roman Egypt:Tradition and Innovation. She has served on the Executive Committee and the Admissions and Fellowship Committee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
