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.

Registration is required at THIS LINK.

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 examines Arsacid luxury material beyond Iran both as object and idea. As under the Achaemenids before and Sasanians after, these charismatic objects potentially entangled or “assembled” aspects of identities of those outside the empire at a range of societal levels, including those who had dealings with the empire and those who encountered them even in negative and in reaction. It is equally useful to periodically shift our focus from material cultures and artistic traditions, to considering them within aggregate ‘objectscapes’ to provide a more variegated understanding of their shifting significances between Mediterranean, Iranian and steppe spheres. Excavated finds such as those from Sarmatian burials provide a textured view of the Afro-Eurasian material and anachronic political entanglements in which Arsacid luxury material participated, as do correspondences with objects and assemblages such as Tillya Tepe in Bactria and material from Sri Lanka, Northern India, Roman Italy and Syria. This lecture closes with a look towards late antiquity and this tradition’s legacy and transformation under the Sasanians. 

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).

This lecture will be followed by a reception.

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