Vessels as Portraits of Divine Queens (20 min)

Presenters

Patricia Kim, New York University

Abstract

In the Hellenistic world, both royal courts and nonroyal subjects deified their queens as a way to elevate and reaffirm the legitimacy of a ruling dynasty. While some women were linked with powerful goddesses like Aphrodite, others were divinized in their own right, in most cases receiving posthumous worship. Especially within territories governed by the Ptolemaic Dynasty, royal women’s cults depended on and were facilitated by their portraiture—from sculptures carved in-the-round and in relief from temple contexts to luxury portable objects that emphasize their divinity. In other words, the corporeal presence of the deified queen was central to the facilitation of her cult.

In this paper, I reconsider the so-called queens’ vases, or mold-made faience oinochoai that depict deified royal women (e.g., Arsinoe II), who are identified via Greek inscriptions of their names and are represented performing ritual libations at an altar. Hundreds of these vessels are extant, and the majority that have been excavated come from nonroyal tomb contexts in Alexandria. As Dorothy Thompson’s 1973 monograph on these oinochoai discusses, these vessels facilitated ritual activities. But how do these votive objects enable us to think about the role of the figural—especially anthropomorphic representations of the divine—in both cultic and noncultic settings? Recent discussions by Jörg Rüpke and Jessica Hughes nuance the theoretical and methodological parameters of votive objects by attending to the relationship between “real” bodies and represented bodies. With these discourses in mind, my paper approaches these vessels as portraiture, examining what these objects reveal about both the role of portraiture and the ways in which worshippers encountered the divine in the Hellenistic period. Finally, this corpus of divine portraiture urges us to rethink the relationship between human agency and divine agency as mediated via the material world.