University of Heidelberg

An Asia for Asians? Attalid and Seleukid Visual Acculturation in Anatolia and the Mid-East

Ann Kuttner
(University of Pennsylvania)

The dynasties of the Hellenistic Macedonian diaspora willingly engaged with the often highly cultured visual and monumental environments of the non-Greek communities among whom they inserted themselves. Alexander’s potent legacy, this ‘Asianism’  – in the arts of cult and belief, politics and self-display – was as marked as that ‘Hellenization’ that historians have postulated. What, then, can be a reliable philology of visual dialects, for when Diadoch visual rhetoric spoke in local ways to local viewers? 
    This paper compares the Attalids and Seleukids, both dominant where much indigenous design did not ‘look Greek’.  Both polities occupied polyethnic former holdings of the Achaemenids, who themselves modeled sponsorship local and ‘fusion culture’, not just imperialist imposition of Persian rulers’ homeland visual environments. Further, both powers engaged tightly in war and peace for the 3rd-2nd c. duration of their simultaneous existence, sometimes even on the same Anatolian territory, and so can sometimes have been self-conscious of competitive/emulative Kunstpolitik. I sample several ancient realities of the look and generic character of the monument record. The remains of Attalid and especially Seleukid visual culture are sparse, but the terms on which we know them matter. Profoundly localized practices could be targeted to ancient peoples invited to comprehend the occupiers in their own terms – but also, could acculturate Greco-Macedonians to a new Asian identity; and, what we would call a Greek look of things was not only ‘Hellenization’ – it could innovate on Greek practice and converge locally with rooted art practice and ideas. Last, not least fused practice, ‘fusion’ culture of makers and what they made, aided the visualized imaginaire of an Asia whose peoples older and newer shared common projects. That left an enduring legacy to next empires – the Attalids to Rome, the Seleukids to Parthia.