Faces of the Encounter: Greco-Egyptian Interaction in the Royal Sculpture of the Ptolemaic Period

• Autor(a) principal: Miranda, Catarina Bernardes Neves
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/99796
• topic: Ptolemaic Egypt; Royal Ptolemaic stone sculpture in the round; Greco- Egyptian statues; Material Culture; Culture Contact; Intericonicity; Consumption studies; Egipto ptolemaico; Escultura real ptolemaica em pedra; Estátuas greco-egípcias; Cultura material; Contacto cultural; Intericonicidade; Estudos sobre consumo; Domínio/Área Científica::Humanidades::História e Arqueologia

Postcolonial studies have been interested and especially productive in the study of material culture. Postcolonial theory remained, nevertheless, an inadequate explanatory framework for cases where change was neither in its nature nor structure necessarily promoted by the configurations of power relations (colonial or others). This is possibly the case of the change that occurred in royal statuary during the Ptolemaic period. Around the time the postcolonial paradigm was establishing in the Humanities, so too was the Ptolemaic period receiving growing attention. Scholars studying this chronology, during the second half of the twentieth century, however, understood Egypt’s society and culture as a set of impermeable communities/ traditions, coexisting with one another. This interpretation caused a radical turn in the historiography of the period, and left material culture that did not belong exclusively to neither one of the main cultural sets (Greek or Egyptian) largely overlooked, and, later on, underestimated in the debates about interaction. This dissertation takes as a case study the Greco-Egyptian stone sculpture in the round of the male Ptolemaic rulers, looking to further understand these previously underestimated objects. They were not underestimated, however, in the sense that their existence was not acknowledged or analysed, but in the sense that the explanation put forward was not complex enough, nor representative. The authors formulated their interpretations mainly from the point of view of state and elites, outshadowing, thus, other possible realms of agency. The present investigation seeks to propose a different theoretical framework to interpret the existence of Greco-Egyptian statuary of Ptolemaic rulers. Although Ptolemaic Egypt is not understood today as a colonial case, postcolonial studies contributed to this alternative line of interpretation by inspiring a decentralization of the analysis, from the state to other groups. Nevertheless, the major contribution will come from an operational concept – “intericonicity” – and a theory of consumption - taken from material culture studies -, which decentralize the approach, from issues of power to other processes (also) underlying change and interaction.