Memory and Urban Religion in the Ancient World PDF
Preview Memory and Urban Religion in the Ancient World
Memory and Urban Religion in the Ancient World Cultural Memory and History in Antiquity Series Editor: Martin Bommas, University of Birmingham Head of Advisory Board: Elena Theodorakopoulos, University of Birmingham Advisory Board: Geoffrey Cubitt, University of York Franco D’Agostino, University of Rome La Sapienza Christopher Smith, British School at Rome Christopher Wickham, University of Oxford Memory and Urban Religion in the Ancient World Edited by Martin Bommas, Juliette Harrisson and Phoebe Roy Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 175 Fifth Avenue London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10010 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com First published 2012 © The Editors with the Contributors, 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. The Editors with the Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-4411-3014-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Contents Series Preface vii Notes on Contributors ix Acknowledgements xii Illustrations xiii Foreword: Memory, History, Forgetting Christopher Smith xiv Introduction: Sites of Memory and the Emergence of Urban Religion Martin Bommas xxvi Part 1 Ancient Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt 1 1 Marduk’s Return: Assyrian Imperial Propaganda, Babylonian Cultural Memory, and the akītu Festival of 667 bc John P. Nielsen 3 2 The Cult of the Pharaoh in New Kingdom Egypt – Cultural Memory or State Ideology? Gabrielle Heffernan 33 3 Saints in the Caesareum: Remembering Temple-Conversion in Late Antique Hermopolis Jennifer Westerfeld 59 Part 2 Ancient Rome 87 4 Moneta: Sacred Memory in Mid-Republican Rome Daniele Miano 89 5 Keeping the Memory Alive: The Physical Continuity of the Ficus Ruminalis Ailsa Hunt 111 6 Memory Shift: Reinventing the Mythology, 100 bc–ad 100 Ken Dowden 129 7 Nights of Egeria: Juvenal’s De Memoria Deorum David H. J. Larmour 149 vi Contents 8 The Iseum Campense as a Memory Site Martin Bommas 177 9 Isis in the Greco-Roman World: Cultural Memory and Imagination Juliette Harrisson 213 10 Cultural Memory and Roman Identity in the Hymns of Prudentius Peter Kuhlmann 237 Afterword Juliette Harrisson and Phoebe Roy 257 Index 261 Series Preface Culture as a set of shared attitudes, values and practices that characterizes a group or society – modern as well as ancient – is to a large extent based on the construction and transmission of memories. Differing from collective and individual approaches to the past, cultural memory describes a process that emerges from distant and collateral events and only appears in stand- ardized forms once a group or society has agreed upon them. Memory is a phenomenon that – by definition – is directly related to the present. When dealing with ancient societies, cultural memory as a tool can be used to disclose and identify this contemporary presence of the past within ancient societies. When investigating cultural memory of past societies, key questions are how and what ancient societies remembered about events that shaped the formation of their identity, and how they built on agreed memories to create a collective present. The term ‘cultural memory’ was first introduced in 1992 by the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann in his book Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (translated in English as Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance and Political Imagination), in which he further developed the theory of collective memory, first established in 1950 by the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in La mémoire collective (translated in English as On Collective Memory). Although Assmann’s approach was soon adopted by linguists, sociologists and anthropologists, ancient historians and classicists only slowly incorporated this term into the vocabulary of their disciplines. Today, 19 years later, Historical Studies and contiguous disciplines are increas- ingly reconsidering the question of history versus memory, rethinking history’s border zone. The use of competing terms such as ‘collective memory’, ‘social memory’ and ‘cultural memory’ – all discussing the ways in which individuals remember the past and at the same time define their social experience and involvement – has led to confusion about how social connections work and viii Series Preface where priorities lie when human beings construct their relationship with the past. As historians, we are unable to access the mental process of culturally defined memory of the past but only how memory is embodied in texts and objects. This new series is designed to investigate the role of physical remains or rather material memories such as written and archaeological sources that were regarded to have had symbolic significance by ancient societies. By identifying the ways in which the collective past was remembered by ancient societies as cultural memory encoded in archaeological and written data, this series will address and respond to the challenges that come with this term when used uncritically. Social memory, if pushed too far, inevitably represents a theoretical and idealizing picture of the past in the past, if the influences of conflict and the use and abuse of power of groups over others are not taken into account. Diverse recollections of the past can deconstruct cultural memory and hamper its integration into a collective past. In order to allow cultural memory to construct a collective past, groups of power can encourage and promote remembering, marginalize individual memories, initiate reinter- pretation or even actively instruct forgetting. Cultural Memory and History in Antiquity aims to reveal the mechanics of social connections in order to understand better the sources of collective pasts and to identify its continuative drifts rather than the connections established between generations. The motor of cultural memory is actively practised memory based on an agreed set of data, rather than tradition. In tracing shifts of meaning within ancient society, both cultural memory and cultural forgetting offer purposeful tools to identify the courses of history through both elite and non-elite perspectives. Martin Bommas Series Editor Notes on Contributors Martin Bommas received his PhD from the University of Heidelberg and worked as Assistant Professor at the University of Basel before he became Senior Lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Birmingham in 2006. He taught Egyptology at the universities of Heidelberg, Basel and Zurich, and held visiting appointments at the universities of Rome (Roma3), Venice and Sheffield. His recent publications include Cultural Memory and Identity in Ancient Societies (ed., 2011) and Das Alte Ägypten (2012). Ken Dowden studied at Worcester College, Oxford, before he became Lecturer at University College Cardiff in 1974. Since 1988 he has worked at the University of Birmingham where he became Professor of Classics. Since 2005 he has been Director of the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity. Among his recent publications are Zeus (2006) and A Companion to Greek Mythology (2011, co-edited with Niall Livingstone). Juliette Harrisson is a Visiting Lecturer at the universities of Birmingham and Liverpool, Newman University College and the Open University. Specializing in myth, religion and memory in the Roman world, her research has also led her to explore the reception of the ancient world in modern popular culture. She has published on cultural memory and identity and on the reception of Greek mythology, and her monograph Dreams and Dreaming in the Roman Empire: Cultural Memory and Imagination will be published by Continuum in 2013. Gabrielle Heffernan is a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham. Having graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2006 with a degree in Egyptology, she completed her MPhil in Egyptology at the University of Birmingham in 2010. Her current research focuses on cultural memory and kingship in the Egyptian Eighteenth Dynasty. Further research interests
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