University of Heidelberg

Interculturality in Image and Cult in the Hellenistic Levant: Problems of Approach and Interpretation

Jessica L. Nitschke
(Waseda University, Tokyo)

Some scholars have pointed to the evidence of religious life in the Greco-Roman Near East as a clear indication of the continuity and flourishing of local non-Greek cultures; others have brandished this same evidence to argue just the opposite – the so-called hellenization of these peoples and their cultures. The apparent dichotomy lies in the vagueness of methods traditionally used to evaluate interculturality as well as the ambiguity of the evidence. Surviving descriptive testimony for religious beliefs and rituals in the Hellenistic East is scarce and often problematic, leaving us overly dependent on epigraphic material – a useful but limited source of information regarding the evolution of mythology, rituals and belief. As such, it has long been customary to turn to the material and iconic manifestations of cult and ritual for clues as to the development, evolution, or change in cultic practices and religious beliefs. 
This paper concerns the evidential value of images related to cultic practices (i.e. cultic objects, votive objects) and other artistic evidence (i.e. other representations of deities, such as on coins, and decorative styles of religious architecture) for tackling questions of continuity and transformation of culture and identity in the Levant in the Hellenistic period (and later). How confidently can we use changing visualizations of the gods as represented in material images, including the adoption of foreign imagery, as explicit evidence of a shift in theological ideas and beliefs, and thus a shift in cultural affiliation and/or identity? Did the inhabitants of the Hellenistic Levant, be they Phoenician, Greek, Jewish, Syrian, etc., view the same categorical distinctions of artistic and iconographic style in the images of gods as we do, and how much weight did they put on this? Or is the employment of Greek artistic and architectural vocabulary merely a veneer over a cultural system that remained essentially indigenous unchanged?