Hellenistic Period | American Journal of Archaeology

Syncretic Religious Practice at Dedoplis Gora (Caucasian Iberia) in the First Century CE

website — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 22:12:33 +0000

Monuments discovered through archaeological excavations provide information about the pre-Christian religion in Kartli (Caucasian Iberia, modern Georgia). Particularly remarkable is a grandiose temple complex discovered in central Georgia, where the kings of Kartli worshiped Iranian (Zoroastrian) gods merged with local Georgian astral deities. In the Dedoplis Gora palace, which is located 3 km south of the temple complex, three rooms (N10, N20, N26) yielded sanctuaries. The presence of three household sanctuaries in one building suggests that they had different users. In this article, I suggest that room N10 with an altar was a Zoroastrian-type domestic shrine where permanent residents of the palace of Dedoplis Gora offered daily sacrifices and prayed. Meanwhile, the noble owners of the palace prayed in room N20, based on the luxurious items found on the altar. It is likely that the Zoroastrian altar in room N20 was used to worship the Greek cult of Apollo, based on the statuettes found there. Room N26 may have been used for a ritual related to a local cult of fertility, agriculture, and harvest. Coexistence of different religions in the same household is not surprising in the kingdom of Kartli in the first century.

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The Myth of Hellenization: The Early to Middle Hellenistic Period (ca. 300–150 BCE) in Sagalassos and Pisidia (Southwest Anatolia)

website — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 20:27:15 +0000

The spread of Hellenic ideas, practices, and material culture has long been considered a major factor in the urbanization of Hellenistic Anatolia. While this assertion has been criticized and nuanced in recent decades, the importance of Hellenization in the urbanization of some regions remains an ongoing discussion. An example is Pisidia (southwest Anatolia), including the ancient city of Sagalassos. Mainly on the basis of architectural evidence, the Hellenization of Sagalassos began in the late third–early second century BCE. By the late second–early first century BCE, the process had resulted in a Greek-type polis comparable to those along the southern and western coasts of Anatolia. This article aims to reassess the Hellenization model of Sagalassos by comparing the stylistic architectural cross-dating underpinning its theoretical and methodological framework with recent stratigraphic datasets of Late Achaemenid and Early and Middle Hellenistic Sagalassos. Through this exercise, we look into the implications of this reassessment for the urbanization of Sagalassos and its potential impact on our understanding of Hellenistic Pisidia.

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Shipwreck Assemblages and Network Analysis: Reconstructing the Furniture Trade in the Mediterranean Using First-Century BCE Shipwrecks

website — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 19:54:34 +0000

Elite Romans residing in opulent villas in central Italy during the first century BCE are generally viewed as the main consumers driving the trade in luxury goods. However, evidence from shipwrecks shows this is not the full picture. This article utilizes assemblage theory and network analysis to examine relationships between luxury furniture and shipwreck assemblages in the Mediterranean in the first century BCE. It starts first with discussion of couches (klinai) and tables from five shipwrecks during this period and one from the first century CE to draw comparisons in furniture types and distribution networks. Then it examines the shared presence of objects and assemblages from other first-century BCE shipwrecks using network analysis. Viewing shipwrecks as nested sets of assemblages combines close analysis of singular wrecks with aggregate data from multiple shipwrecks in an interconnected interpretive framework. The resulting network serves as a starting point for understanding the circulation of objects and facilitating interpretation of shipwrecks, ultimately refining our view of the acquisition of luxury objects in the western Mediterranean during the first century BCE. Finding that luxury objects, such as klinai, were being shipped not only to Italy but also around the same time to the western Mediterranean shifts the focus of study from Italic consumers to wider integrated transportation networks.

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Entella: A Resilient Ancient Sicilian Community

website — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 16:10:50 +0000

The third-century BCE Sicilian inscribed bronze plaques collectively known as the Entella tablets constitute remarkable evidence of a community’s response to near destruction. The decrees inscribed on these bronze tablets attest to the experience of a small western Sicilian polis during the First Punic War (ca. 264–241 BCE). When the inhabitants of Entella were expelled from their city, they were able to survive both individually and as a community thanks to the intervention of benefactors who sheltered them, fed them, and eventually helped them return home. Although previous work on the inscriptions has discussed significant elements of the episode and noted the fact that the decrees strengthened diplomatic relations with their benefactors, this article sets the tablets in their full historical context, clarifies some remaining questions they raise, and reconstructs their overall program, with particular attention to group dynamics and social and political life. Drawing on theories of community and communal trauma, I show how the Entellinoi commemorated their disastrous dislocation and embraced interaction with communities across Sicily so that they would not suffer so much from an existential threat again.

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Tracking Color Through Time: Polychromy on Etruscan Urns from Ancient Creation to Modern Intervention

website — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 04:00:00 +0000

A comparative study of four Etruscan terracotta urns from Chiusi, Italy, investigates their ancient polychromy and the urns’ trajectories through changing modern-day art market practices and museum conservation policies. The objects’ shared moldmade motif of a specific scene from Sophocles’ play Antigone makes this group particularly suitable for illustrating differences and similarities in their past and present materiality, uncovered by multispectral imaging and chemical analyses. The analysis of the urns revealed some recurring patterns but also variations in the color scheme of the repeated scene. Moreover, the study underlines how scientific analysis of the polychromy is potentially a useful tool to assess the originality of archaeological artifacts, even in cases of excessive cleaning. The detection of the modern pigment Prussian blue hints at a now-lost chapter of modern overpaint and its later removal on one of the examined urns. This is used as point of departure for a discussion of the changing attitudes and approaches to restoration and conservation in archaeology and art history and their sometimes radical effects on the present-day appearance of museum artifacts.

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Colossus at the Crossroads: Reexamining a Hellenistic Cult Statue of Herakles from Kleonai

website — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 04:00:00 +0000

The small, second-century BCE temple of Herakles at Kleonai has long been a landmark in the southern Corinthia, visited by early travelers in Greece and thoroughly studied and published. Less attention, however, has been paid to the in situ fragmentary colossal cult statue of Herakles, and questions concerning its date, artist, and sculptural “type” remain unresolved. The fragmentary nature, colossal scale, and significant context of the fragment have made these interrelated issues difficult to study using traditional means of documentation. This article presents a novel reexamination of the cult statue in its architectural and archaeological contexts, employing methods drawn from both traditional sculptural study and recent innovations in digital object documentation. In September 2020, the authors undertook a complete restudy of the Kleonai torso, collecting detailed measurements and photographs. This data set was used to create a scaled 3D photogrammetric model that illuminates previously undocumented traces of facture and offers new evidence for the display context of the complete statue. These results resituate this fragmentary sculpture as one of the most notable examples of a Hellenistic sculptural type, the Herakles Epitrapezios, popular across the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean.

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Burying the Alabaster Goddess in Hellenistic Babylonia: Religious Power, Sexual Agency, and Accessing the Afterlife Through Ishtar-Aphrodite Figurines from Seleucid-Parthian Iraq

website — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 04:00:00 +0000

This article presents a new evaluation of alabaster figurines wearing crescent crowns, identified as the syncretized deity Ishtar-Aphrodite, from the Seleucid-Parthian period in Babylonia (ca. second century BCE–first century CE). Unlike previous studies, this article recontextualizes the alabaster goddesses as the most opulent and explicitly divine versions of two popular types in the broader, flourishing figurine tradition of Hellenistic Babylonia. Miniaturization theory, which elucidates the sensory and perceptual effects of small-scale objects, forms the methodological basis of this analysis, in dialogue with archaeological data and textual sources from Mesopotamia and the wider Hellenistic world. Using this approach, I argue that these figurines were open to identification as both goddesses and mortals so that a girl or woman could use them to construct her own sexual agency and facilitate her journey to the afterlife, even as she invoked the goddess’ assistance with both. The few unambiguous goddess figurines were depicted with crescent crowns to link their elite owners to the Babylonian temples and their prestigious astrological knowledge. This article makes the contribution of articulating the significant intertwining of Greek and Babylonian cultural values and religious beliefs that shaped these figurines, which were hybrid in more than just style.

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Archaeobotanical Research in Classical Archaeology

website — Sat, 01 Oct 2022 04:00:00 +0000

The recovery, identification, and analysis of archaeobotanical remains can help address a wide range of archaeological and historical research questions, from foodways, to the agricultural economy, to ritual practice and social identity. This state of the discipline article reviews the application of archaeobotanical techniques to classical archaeology from historical, regional, and thematic perspectives. It also highlights current challenges and limitations in the field of archaeobotany. The article concludes with some suggestions for future directions to improve the practice and outcomes of the discipline. Classicalperiod archaeobotanical research has not yet reached its full potential, and despite facing some internal and external issues, we envision a bright future for both archaeobotanical and classical archaeological research with a greater degree of communication and collaboration between the two fields.

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Repositioning the Sea on the Great Altar of Pergamon: A Demonstration of Hellenistic Boat Construction on the Telephos Frieze

website — Sat, 01 Oct 2022 04:00:00 +0000

The Telephos frieze of the Great Altar of Pergamon contains a rare testimony of boat construction in the Hellenistic period, portraying specialized tools and working practices in an ancient boatyard. The sculpture documents the building of a small boat, offering rare insight into ancient boatbuilding. The vessel of Auge, mother of the Trojan hero Telephos, is a symmetrical skiff with two rounded ends resembling a coffin, a typology barely evidenced archaeologically. This article notes iconographic idiosyncrasies on the frieze that depart from the principal sources of the Telephos myth in the depiction of the infant accompanying his mother Auge to her watery tomb. To build the boat-coffin shown on the frieze, the trained craftsmen use the bow saw, bow drill, two-handled adze, and mallet and chisel, tools known from shipwrecks but documented only rarely in visual representations. Beyond a close technical examination of these implements, our discussion considers relevant maritime funerary rituals and examines several different ship typologies in relation to the boat depicted on the Telephos frieze. From his mother’s tiny skiff to her son the mythical hero’s mighty warships, their careful portrayal on the altar symbolizes the expansion by Eumenes II (r. 197–159 BCE) of his kingdom into the Aegean.

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Hellenistic Landscapes and Seleucid Control in Mesopotamia: The View from the Erbil Plain in Northern Iraq

website — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 04:00:00 +0000

In this article we discuss the archaeological landscapes of the Erbil plain during the Hellenistic period (late fourth century BCE–mid second century BCE) based on the data collected during the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (EPAS) between 2012 and 2019. We use a landscape archaeology approach to trace patterns of habitation, migration, land exploitation, and water management from the Iron Age to the early first millennium CE. Over the course of the first millennium BCE, the Erbil plain was transformed from an urbanized core region to a rural area of the vast Seleucid world through a moment of depopulation in the post-Assyrian period. These transformation processes continued after the end of the Hellenistic period, but with a different pattern. Urbanization resumed, peaking during the Parthian (Arsacid) era, when the region was part of the kingdom of Adiabene. Ultimately, our analysis shows how the planned landscape of Assyria was transformed in the centuries that followed the collapse of the empire and how the proximity of political power was the critical variable in the settlement patterns of this part of northern Mesopotamia under the empires of the first millennium BCE.

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