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Fashioned selves: dress and identity in antiquity PDF

257 Pages·2019·27.981 MB·English
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Fashioned Selves Dress and Identity in Antiquity Edited by Megan Cifarelli Oxford & Philadelphia Published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by OXBOW BOOKS The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JE and in the United States by OXBOW BOOKS 1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083 © Oxbow Books and the individual contributors 2019 Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-254-5 Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-255-2 (epub) A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: 2019938764 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing. Printed in the United Kingdom by Short Run Press Typeset in India for Casemate Publishing Services. www.casematepublishingservices.com For a complete list of Oxbow titles, please contact: UNITED KINGDOM UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Oxbow Books Oxbow Books Telephone (01865) 241249 Telephone (610) 853-9131, Fax (610) 853-9146 Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] www.oxbowbooks.com www.casemateacademic.com/oxbow Oxbow Books is part of the Casemate Group Front cover: BM 124876 Assurbanipal on horseback, dressed in a rosette-patterned hunting dress with stylus inserted in the waistband. North Palace Room S, Panel 13 (© The Trustees of the British Museum). Back cover: Tribute procession of the Syrian delegation, with a Persian courtier leading a delegate by the hand on the Eastern stairway of the Apadana, Persepolis (top); Tribute procession of the Assyrian delegation, with delegates leading rams and carrying textiles on the Eastern stairway of the Apadana, Persepolis (bottom) (courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago). Contents List of contributors �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������v Introduction: Fashioned selves ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������1 Megan Cifarelli Part One: Funerary selves 1 Fashioned identity in the Şərur Valley, Azerbaijan: Kurgan CR8 ��������������������������11 Jennifer Swerida and Selin Nugent 2 To toggle back and forth: clothing pins and portable identities in the Old Assyrian Period ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������27 Nancy Highcock 3 Male dress habits in Roman period Palmyra ������������������������������������������������������������41 Maura Heyn and Rubina Raja Part Two: Sacred fashions 4 Dressed to heal, protect and rule: vestiges of shamanic praxis in ancient Near Eastern rituals and beliefs��������������������������������������������������������������������57 Diana L. Stein 5 A proposal for interpreting the role of colour symbolism in Prepalatial Cretan body adornment� �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������75 Cynthia S. Colburn 6 Biblical regulation of tattooing in the light of ancient Near Eastern practices ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������89 Nili S. Fox 7 Weapons and weaving instruments as symbols of gender in the Ancient Near East �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������105 Sophus Helle iv Contents 8 Israelite high priestly apparel: embodying an identity between human and divine ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������117 Christine Palmer Part Three: Communal selves 9 A feather in your cap: symbols of “Philistine” warrior status? ���������������������������131 Josephine A. Verduci 10 Some observations on fringe in Elamite dress �������������������������������������������������������147 Trudy S. Kawami 11 The impenetrable body: armour and the male nude in Greek art ����������������������161 Marina Haworth 12 Dressed to dazzle, dressed to kill: staging Assurbanipal in the royal lion hunt reliefs from Nineveh ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������175 Omar N’Shea 13 Banqueting, dress, and the idealized Sogdian merchant ��������������������������������������185 Betty Hensellek Part Four: Beyond identity 14 A sense of stone and clay: the inter-corporeal disposition of Minoan glyptic �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������203 Emily S. K. Anderson 15 The phenomenology and sensory experience of dress in Mesopotamia: the embodiment of discomfort and pain through dress ���������������������������������������������219 Allison K. Thomason 16 The tangible self: embodiment, agency, and the functions of adornment in Achaemenid Persia ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������233 Neville McFerrin List of contributors Emily S. K. Anderson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at Johns Hopkins University. Her research and fieldwork primarily concern the material and visual cultures of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age with a focus on the ways in which objects are involved in the relations, negotiations, and unfolding of sociocultural life� Megan Cifarelli is Professor of Visual Studies and Art History at Manhattanville College, and a Consulting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Her research focuses on applications of dress, gender, and archaeological theory to the visual and material cultures of the ancient Near East, particularly during the 1st millennium BCE. Cynthia S� Colburn is Professor of Art History at Pepperdine University� Her research focuses on the art and archaeology of the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean, including identity construction through bodily adornment and performance. Nili S. Fox is Professor of Bible and Director of the Archaeology Center, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati. Her current research focuses on dress practices in ancient Israel and neighboring cultures� Marina Haworth teaches Art History at North Hennepin Community College near Minneapolis, Minnesota. She specializes in Greek art, with a specific interest in symposium pottery. Sophus Helle is a PhD student in Comparative Literature and Assyriology at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. He has published on a number of topics relating to authorship, epic poetry, and the representation of gender in cuneiform cultures. Betty Hensellek’s research interests revolve around the material culture of Central Asia and Iran in the 1st millennium CE. She is the Sylvan C. Coleman and Pam Coleman Memorial Fund Fellow in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of the History of Art, Cornell University. vi List of contributors Maura Keane Heyn is an Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research focuses on the funerary portraiture of Palmyra, in particular the hand gestures, depictions of women, and the significance of the different styles of dress worn by the deceased. Nancy Highcock is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. In addition to her work on the material culture of Mesopotamia, she is the director of the lower town excavations at the site of Kınık Höyük-Niğde in south-central Anatolia. Trudy S. Kawami received her PhD in art history and archaeology from Columbia University, where she focused on the art of ancient Western Asia. Living in Brooklyn, NY, she has a special interest in ancient Iran and the many manifestations of its rich visual traditions� Neville McFerrin is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics and World Religions at Ohio University. She specializes in dress theory with a particular focus on the interactions between adornment, sense modalities, perception, and materiality on the sites of Persepolis and Pompeii. Omar N’Shea is Senior Lecturer at the University of Malta. His research interests span the visual and textual cultures of the ancient Near East in general, and Iraq in particular. In his work, Omar has addressed the methodological issues that arise in the study of masculinities in Mesopotamia. Selin E. Nugent is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Anthropology and Mind at the University of Oxford and a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. Her research centres on nomadic pastoralism, human migration, and group cohesion in the South Caucasus, which she explores in her doctoral thesis, “Pastoral Mobility and the Formation of Complex Settlement in the Middle Bronze Age Şərur Valley, Azerbaijan”. Christine Palmer is a faculty member at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary where she teaches courses on the Hebrew Bible and leads archaeological study trips to Israel, Jordan, and her own native country of Greece. Her research focuses on ritual at the intersection of text, material culture, and embodied experience. Rubina Raja is Professor of Classical Archaeology and centre director of the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions. She also directs the Palmyra Portrait Project, which she initiated in 2012. Raja’s fields of interest cover iconography, numismatics, and urban development in the Mediterranean and the East from the Hellenistic into the Medieval periods� List of contributors vii Diana L. Stein lectures in the Department of Classics, History, and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. An Alexander von Humboldt scholar, she has authored, co-authored, and edited publications on aspects of ancient Near Eastern material culture, including seal use and design, Bronze Age chronology, and ritual practice. Jennifer Swerida is the Assistant Director of the Naxçivan Archaeological Project (Naxçivan, Azerbaijan), Co-Director of the Bat Archaeological Project (Sultanate of Oman), and is the Dyson Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests centre on identity formation and alternative forms of social complexity in the Ancient Near East. Allison K. Thomason is a Professor of Ancient History at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She specializes in the material culture of the ancient Near East. Josephine A. Verduci specializes in the personal adornment of the Aegean and the Near East and is author of Metal Jewellery of the Southern Levant and its Western Neighbours: Cross-Cultural Influences in the Early Iron Age Eastern Mediterranean. She is currently an Honorary Fellow of the University of Melbourne and a Research Fellow of the Australian Institute of Archaeology� Introduction: Fashioned selves Megan Cifarelli This volume gathers papers presented in the Approaches to Dress and the Body sessions at the Annual Meetings of the American Schools of Oriental Research in 2016 and 2017, as well as in sessions relating to ancient dress at the Annual Meetings of the Archaeological Institute of America in 2018.1 The case studies in this volume draw upon varied and overlapping corpora of evidence, including archaeological bodies themselves and the physical traces of dress in the form of markings on the skin and associated mortuary goods, as well as evidence for dress in written and visual culture. The materials stem from a range of geographic and chronological contexts – including Late Antique Central Asia, the prehistoric Caucasus, Iran, Mesopotamia, Syria, the Levant, Egypt, the Aegean, and the Greco-Roman world. The breadth of this volume is deliberate, intentionally underscoring the cultural specificity and localization of the reciprocal interactions between dress and identity. The chapters emphasize as well that dress does not simply function as a static expression of identity or status – inscribed on the body to be “read” by others – but is a dynamic component in the construction, embodiment, performance, and transformation of identities.2 A brief look at the origins of dress in human history – its relationship to the evolution of human cognition and the development of behavioural modernity – sheds new light on the proverbial statement that “clothes make the man” (attributed to Erasmus of Rotterdam, among others). Direct evidence for the initial development of dress is lost to time and the perishability of materials. Indirect evidence, however, suggests that our distant ancestors were decorating and covering their bodies as early as the early Late Pleistocene (Bar-Yosef Mayer and Bosch 2019). Caches of coloured pigments accompanying sites of human activity in this period, for example, may have been used to mark bodies (Barham 2002; Langley and O’Connor 2019). Three sites claim to have the

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