AIMS

“Ancient” cities like Alexandria emerge in modernity as integral memoryscapes, where social and cultural identities are deployed over several, superimposed layers of reception. And this is where we find the connections between the individual art histories to lie in our Program. Our aim is not only to fine-tune our understanding of specific moments in ancient funerary art, but also to establish how such memoryscapes functioned in the Eastern Mediterranean cultural landscape, operating as social hubs within the urban grid of a Hellenistic city (4th-1st c. BCE), as well as cultural and ideological powerhouses within the societies that created them. The idea, then, is to study how Classical and Hellenistic realms of death turn themselves into memoryscapes through the materiality of their art forms.

Our main goal in this Program is to bring together classicists and art historians from the entirety of our region, in order to investigate how Ptolemaic / Alexandrian art transforms itself into a distinctly Eastern Mediterranean idiom, at once consuming and marginalizing its sources of inspiration. In our Program, we are hoping to create a welcoming platform for both classicists and art historians in order to study Ptolemaic funerary art in its various forms as a distinctly Eastern Mediterranean cultural phenomenon.