Table Of ContentMemory 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
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First published 2012
© The Editors with the Contributors, 2012
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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
