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 will focus on the development of an Arsacid tradition of precious metal and ivory vessels and a new Iranian court culture that participated in both the Hellenistic and Iranian ecumenes. This lecture will consider such sites as Parthian Nisa and the incredibly rich assemblages it held and consider its interrelation with those from earlier and later sites, such as that of the Temple of the Oxus in Bactria or Niched Temple at Ai Khanum. In contrast to the paucity of objects traditionally assigned to the Seleucid Empire, a large and varied array of precious metal vessels has regularly been ascribed to Arsacid, Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek milieus. Inscriptions on a significant number have provided the primary anchor for these attributions with formal elements allowing for comparisons to be made with others. Unfortunately, the number of vessels with any sort of documented provenance, let alone discovery in a controlled archaeological excavation, is vanishingly few. Those that have a provenance largely come from Sarmatian burials excavated between the Volga and Don rivers. Put into dialogue with such anchor points, here we focus on what can be gleaned from the objects themselves to reconstruct an art and archaeological history.

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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