Rostovtzeff Lecture Series: Power at Hand: Luxury and the Contestation of Political Identities in Hellenistic Asia and the Post-Achaemenid Iranian World

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW.

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The Rostovtzeff Lectures are supported in part by a generous endowment fund given by Roger and Whitney Bagnall.

As Alexander the Great closed his eyes for the last time in Babylon in 323 BCE amid the wreckage of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, a vast new interconnected and multipolar world extending from the Balkans to the Gangetic Plain was beginning to come to life. This lecture series focuses on the role of luxury material in shaping and contesting elite identities in the lands of the former Persian Empire and its Central and Southern Asian borderlands and littorals. Over the last century, scholarship has made significant advances in the study of what has variously been approached as the ‘Hellenistic Far East,’ ‘Hellenistic Asia’ or ‘post-Achaemenid Iran,’ at first recovering its history and in recent decades developing a more nuanced set of interpretive approaches to its art, archaeology, and religions. Earlier studies of Hellenistic Asian luxury objects have largely focused on technical or formal questions, such as categorizing vessel shapes or searching for the origins or dating of ornamental or iconographic features. These lectures ask a new set of questions and seek to understand their roles as objects of political transculturation, creating and contesting elite bodily and practical states of being within a wider Afro-Eurasian context.

This lecture focuses on the role of luxury objects and spectacles as deployed by the Seleucids in their conflicts the Antigonids, Ptolemids, Greco-Bactrians, Arsacids and later the Romans. The tactics deployed in these ‘tryphic battles’ (Gr. tryphe) ranged from grand urban spectacles and lavish votive gifts given to sanctuaries in the Mediterranean, to open-air sacrifices and feasts evoking Achaemenid rites on the Iranian Plateau. Indeed, in Iran the conjoined regimes of feasting, gifting and violence were deployed as complementary methods to undermine the stability of the Greco-Bactrian and Arsacid empires. While these efforts were not always successful, they drove the circulation of both objects, images, artisans and elites, which had a direct impact on the development of the broader Hellenistic Asian tradition. Moreover, luxury drinking vessels themselves acted as “scriptive things,” eliciting and shaping behaviour while, as often literally inscribed objects, they functioned as micro-monuments and repositories of memory. This lecture will consider this problem against the backdrop of the broader legacy of Seleucid art and architecture in Western and Central Asia, considering them not as the product of influence but a common competitive arena. 

Matthew P. Canepa is Professor and Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Presidential Chair in Art History and Archaeology of Ancient Iran at the University of California, Irvine. An elected fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and former Guggenheim fellow, Canepa is the author of numerous publications including the award-winning books The Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity through Architecture, Landscape, and the Built Environment, 550 BCE–642 CE (2018), winner of the James R. Wiseman Award from the Archaeological Institute of America in 2020, and The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran (2009), recipient of the American Historical Association’s 2010 James Henry Breasted Award. His most recent volume is entitled Persian Cultures of Power and the Entanglement of the Afro-Eurasian World (2024).

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