Episode 97: Aegyptiaca Romana, with Bet Hucks
Note: this is mostly an automatic transcription, lightly edited and corrected. Punctuation and formatting are not perfect.
Mark: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Endless Knot Podcast
Aven: where the more we know
Mark: the more we want to find out
Aven: tracing serendipitous connections through our lives
Mark: and across disciplines.
Aven: Hi, I'm Aven
Mark: and I'm Mark.
Aven: And today we're talking about Egypt and Rome and Egypt in Rome. Today, we have an interview with Bet Hucks. Before we start, one new patron to think. Thank you, Kory, for joining us.
So we'll get right to the interview. Bethany "Bet" Hucks is a PhD student at Heidelberg University Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies at the Institute for Near Eastern Archaeology and the Institute for Egyptology.
Mark: Her thesis is on the Egyptian and Egyptian style, art hieroglyphic, inscriptions, jewelry, and architectural elements collected for public and private use in Rome during the second to third [00:01:00] century CE, and she also works with 3D modeling of buildings and architectural objects. She is an advocate for increasing access for marginalized students in ancient, Mediterranean studies and archeological excavations.
Aven: So let's get straight to our interview with Bet.
So hi, Bet! Thanks so much for being with us.
Bet: Thanks for having me.
Aven: So we will start off with our traditional first question, which is, are there some unexpected or surprising connections between what you study and other aspects of your life or other places on the path to what you're doing now that were perhaps surprising connections between different areas?
Bet: Sure. I am an American studying the role of ancient Egyptian presence in ancient Rome. As such, I am someone who is also wandering around Italy, thinking about how long [00:02:00] it takes to sort of lose your place of origin, how long it takes to assimilate into the place where you live, what evidence will be left behind once I go, and how that relates to the people I study in the ancient world. So that's been something unexpected that has come up just sort of recently, as I'm thinking about what my next steps are after I finish my doctorate.
Aven: Oh, that's really interesting. So a parallel that you didn't expect to be there when you started this line of inquiry.
Bet: Exactly. Thinking about being far from home, away from community, living in a second or third language, You know, are there other people like you around? And you know, I'm also Black American, so there's even smaller communities that I'm missing out on here. As much as you can find other Americans, which is not really what I do when I'm around here.
I do spend most of my time with Italians, but thinking about-- I'm not going to have a family here-- but thinking about if I wanted a family here, what that would mean [00:03:00] for my kids and their kids and that kind of thing.
Aven: Oh, that's really interesting. So, okay. So can you expand then on that area of study and maybe a little bit about why you're in Italy to do it as well?
Bet: Sure. So I came to Italy in 2017, I want to say-- no, no, 2015, almost six years now, to do my master's degree in museums. Part of the reason I chose this program is because it's a joint American Italian program. So I get my diploma in both places. And I don't have to sort of qualify myself if I choose to work either in the states or in Europe afterward, which is really helpful.
But also because I knew that I wanted a PhD and my language skills were not advanced enough. And I couldn't find a program based in the states that would get me to where I needed to be to do a PhD with enough languages to start one. So I came here and through my work here, I got interested in emperor Hadrian and his collection, his enormous collection of [00:04:00] Egyptian and Egyptian-inspired objects at his palace at Tivoli.
A lot of them are now at the Vatican, they've become quite famous now, the Vatican and the Capitoline Museums, but essentially thinking about how these objects are displayed separately from this Greco-Roman pieces that were originally in the same spaces. So if you go to a museum now, they have the Egyptian section, which includes all the things made in Egyptian style but not made in Egypt itself.
And then they have the Greco-Roman sections with the Hall of the Muses, all these white marble statues, et cetera, when originally they would've been displayed in confrontation and comparison with each other. So I was thinking about how important it is to look at them as entire assemblages in general.
So that's for my PhD, I'm looking at not just Hadrian's Villa, but a couple of other sites and I'm reconstructing them using a database, primarily, in order to analyze them statistically, by point of origin, materiality, et cetera. And then I'm creating digital 3D models so that [00:05:00] people can walk through visually the spaces.
And what I'd like to do is print those 3D models and make the plans available for printing, for people who want to use those models in schools or museums, et cetera, so people can play around with them. So people who can't see the actual-- like, on a screen, can't see-- can touch them and experience the same, move the pieces around and see how they would have been able to be in conversation with each other.
Aven: That's really cool. Okay, so I-- this is something I don't know a lot about at all. As somebody who doesn't work in this, in either material culture, or in-- I hesitate to call Hadrian Later Antiquity, I might get in trouble-- I work in an earlier period even than that. Hadrian's always associated-- in as much as I know much about him-- as collecting. You know, as Hellenizing, right? That's the most famous thing about [00:06:00] him, though also as just generally a traveler. Can you tell us more about the Egyptian material that is in his collection and, and where and why, as much as we know about it, why it was there?
Bet: Sure. So Hadrian made two trips to Egypt many years apart as part of his sort of attempt to integrate the Roman Empire and to emphasize his dominance, especially after the Jewish revolt in Egypt the second time. That means that he had the opportunity to take a lot of stuff back, if he wanted.
Instead, based on the work out of my master's thesis, what he seems to have done is to create a lot of things in Egyptian style. He's taken some things from Egypt, yes. And of course we don't have anything that would have been made of wood or more easily transportable because those things were the first things to get stolen or damaged or destroyed. Nothing made of linen survives, because it's basically a swamp.
So we don't know whether he took it back fabrics [00:07:00] or things like that that are more ephemeral. But as far as the larger, the stone pieces that remained, only a few of them come from Egypt and quite a lot of them are later, made during Hadrian's time period out of sometimes Egyptian material, but often Italian marble made using Egyptian stylistic elements, but not using Egyptian craftsmen and integrating those styles together with Greco-Roman styles to create a sort of third form.
And this had been done before by other people, notably the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt itself, which he would have had a large amount of exposure to during his trips there. But we know that he either purchased an obelisk in Egypt blank, and then had it inscribed in Italy or purchased an obelisk, had it inscribed in Egypt and then shipped over to Italy.
And that's still standing, although not in its original location. So he did take a few things, but he largely created this whole series of pieces that he [00:08:00] felt fit into his planning scheme. He's known for being super involved in design and the architecture of his Imperial palace at Tivoli. He's created a couple of different new architectural forms by combining things that he sees in his travels in unusual ways. So he does the same with these kinds of objects.
Mark: It's interesting. We typically think of imperialist --not only of the taking of the artifacts but also the appropriating of the culture. And we think of that in terms of like, Britain and other European countries during the colonial period, but it's interesting that there is a sort of ancient world parallel to that. Rome is, was the biggest empire and they too 'borrowed' and literally took artifacts.
Bet: This is pretty common across the ancient Mediterranean throughout this time period, but it goes back, you know, almost-- at least [00:09:00] 6-700 years at this point, we're talking second century CE by the time I'm discussing. This process is already entrenched in Roman history, but it doesn't start with Rome and it doesn't start with the Ptolemies.
There are stories across West Asia talking about these sort of--after you conquer a city, what do you do? You take the statues of their gods back to your home capital and you display them for your citizens in a way to say that their gods weren't strong enough, ours are stronger. We rule them.
And then the people who see those objects back in the home countries, who might not have any sort of context as to how they would have looked or what they would have been used for in their original spaces, look at that and get inspired and make their own pieces in reference to it, using the sort of common artistic tropes that they're used to seeing in their own world.
And this is really common. I mean, it just makes sense, right? You see something new and shiny, you like it, but you [00:10:00] don't necessarily know how to do it the way they do it. Or you might prefer your own cultural background to have more influence on it. Or that just might be like, the kind of art that you're used to making. So you integrate it into a way that makes sense and is visually pleasing to you yourself. And if it catches on, you know, then it becomes this whole third form art form.
Aven: Yeah. And there's particularly famous examples, I suppose, with people like Alexander and then those who followed him, of this sort of taking the gods, but also also straightforward aesthetic 'Hey, look at all-- let's find all the cool stuff everywhere and bring it home and make it part of my stuff', because one of the prerogatives of conquering somewhere is to get the cool stuff.
Bet: Yeah. I mean, you hear a lot about it from like, modern art historians and there's quite a lot of-- like, I think there's quite a lot in popular culture that implies that this sort of thing starts with Napoleon, but he's following a long tradition at this point.
Aven: Yeah. Yeah, I mean the very obvious [00:11:00] sort of locus classicus for Rome is Syracuse-- the conquest, not that it won't have happened before, but that's the one where we sort of-- where the Romans themselves saw it as really starting is when they sacked Syracuse and brought all the Greek stuff back home. And as we know from the Roman moralists, everything went downhill from then on.
Bet: And the funny thing is-- like, it's not quite the same as a triumph, like a parade, a triumphal parade where you sort of demonstrate all of the people you enslaved and all the plants you took back and all the statues you got, that kind of triumphal parade. But when you roll an obelisk from the port at Ostia to Rome on rollers through the streets, I mean, you make a big impact and it takes so long and you can only do it during certain seasons or the road gets too swampy. So you can only do it during like, colder seasons.
This is a huge process. And then to raise an obelisk takes a ton of people, [00:12:00] a lot of engineering skills, it's incredibly difficult to do and very heavy-- we have ancient drawings of how they performed this labor. And it becomes its own form of parade. Not to mention a lot of the people who work in the shops nearby get really angry because you blocked the streets for their actual customers.
Then they wind up doing these sort of things where they like, pay people off or give them like holidays to celebrate the movement of the obelisk, which becomes its own social phenomenon. Just because people get so mad about how many columns you're rolling through the streets on a regular basis.
Aven: Yeah. I mean, we think quite a lot about-- you know, we hear in various contexts of the Romans of how, essentially the big engineering stuff they did, while pragmatic sometimes, was also in its own way simply a demonstration of power. Like, if you can put that much resources towards something, if you can do that much work-- so not just that they brought the obelisk from Egypt, but that they could manage an obelisk at all, as you say, [00:13:00] is a way of demonstrating a certain kind of dominance.
Bet: I also think it's really important to remember that this is a way to give people jobs. Like, you're regularly employing a huge number of people. So you're displaying power, but you're also like, making sure that there's less civil unrest because people have labor, which gives them food.
Aven: Right.
Bet: And gives them somewhere to go every day. Because these are people, some of them are highly skilled. Some of them are let's say untrained labor, but wind up rope-pulling or whatever-- but it becomes a regular enough thing that you are now a construction worker, essentially. You're trained in this and you can go do it other places or for other people.
Aven: Right, yeah. And I think that's an underappreciated--that's a good point, cause that's an underappreciated part of the 'circuses' of the 'bread and circuses' idea, which is-- it's not just the entertainment itself which keeps people happy, but the entire industry around the entertainment, and if you expand the entertainment or 'circuses' there to artistic and cultural [00:14:00] elements beyond just, you know, the actual circus--
Bet: --plus the bread part is like, how many people are buying, making bread? How many people are employed in the bakeries? I mean, there's a ton of labor that goes into everything that happens in the Roman Empire that I think is understudied.
Aven: For sure. Yeah. We had a-- speaking of bread. We have spoken with Josh Nudell, and he was talking about, you know, how much that everybody talks about bread all the time as a basic staple. And people do not spend nearly enough time thinking about who made it, how they did it, where they did it, you know, how those mechanics happened, because these things, they're invisible right? In so many of our sources, but clearly important.
Bet: Shoutout to Josh. I'm also thinking about like-- so there are a lot of jobs that people don't spend a lot of time thinking about. So I'm working on some research for an article that I'm writing about how you get Nile crocodiles to Rome for the games.[00:15:00] They're not exactly docile cows that will like, hang out quietly on this ship. So just like, thinking about all the people whose jobs it is-- because at this time, it takes about three weeks based on the winds and the currents to get from certain Italian ports to Alexandria in Egypt, but it takes about three months going the other direction, hugging the coast all the way north and then west to get back.
So how do you keep a crocodile alive and happy without killing enough people that there are people willing to still transport them and then like, get them from Ostia to Rome for the games?
Aven: Yeah. And you know that you can't just bring the little crocodiles, cause that's not going to fly in the Colosseum.
You gotta have the terrifying ones.
Bet: Yeah, they grow at a rate of about a third of a meter a year. So like, if you're feeding them well--
Aven: --the Nile crocodiles are generally fed [00:16:00] well--
Bet: Yeah, so you want to keep them fed well. But also like, if they're upset,they go off their feed, just like any other animal. So you have to keep them happy. You tried to not sail during storms because I don't know if they get seasick, but they're not going to be happy being thrown around very much.
Aven: Yeah. I was going to say that don't exactly have tanks like we might be able to now. There's no SeaWorld tank--
Bet: Exactly! And there's no tranquilizer. I mean, maybe there were other ancient ways of keeping them sort of like the equivalent of tranquilized--
Aven: I would like to imagine the person whose job it was to pour wine down the gullet of a Nile crocodile--
Bet: Well, I was thinking that you'd drug the meat, right? Like, that would make the most sense. It's like putting some sort of powder or whatever onto--
Aven: --opium or something in there. Yeah.
Bet: Yeah, but we know from modern crocodilians that-- like, if you ever hear stories of alligator hunting in the Americas, crocodiles are very persnickety about which meats they prefer and they prefer their own sourced-- [00:17:00] like, they prefer nutria to chicken, for example. So like, now you got to bring a whole bunch of other animals. Cause it's not like they're going to cure meat to feed crocodiles for three months, or you've got to stop in a lot of ports, which adds to your time to acquire fresh meat on the regular basis.
So who are the butchers? It's just a whole lot of like, random little connections that I'm-- it's more of a thought experience experiment because there's so little actual documentation, but it's a really fun one that I'm working through.
Aven: Yeah. And this is the kind of thing you don't want to do practical archeology for, experimental archeology, sorry. I think a), the ethics board might not allow you to do it--
Bet: And b), I prefer personally to not have been chomped on by a croc as like, a fun archeology story. There's a reason there's very little underwater archeology in the Nile and it's largely hippos and crocs that prevent it.
Aven: Yeah, you know, preferentially [00:18:00] keeping all your limbs, like, you know, one manages with what one manages, but really.
Bet: It would make a great story at conferences, but I'd rather not.
Aven: Yes, indeed. Yeah, the crocodile is so interesting because I mean, it's so iconically the symbol of Egypt, as we know from things like the-- coins and stuff, yeah. Yeah. And to anyone who had been to and visited Egypt, it was presumably a very-- it wasn't hard to see or hard to find them because it's from all the stories they seemed to have been very common. But actually seeing them in Rome-- and so if you want to bring a symbol of Egypt to Rome, that's the obvious symbol. And yet.
Bet: There are some mosaics and things that demonstrate that people clearly have not seen crocodiles or are not good artists when they reproduce them. And then there are some that are like, 'oh, this person definitely saw one'.
Like, this person knows what they're talking about, which I find a really interesting [00:19:00] juxtaposition. But yeah, we have stories of a particular tribe of people in Egypt that were training a breed of crocodile that is now extinct in Egypt, but continues to exist in Western Africa. And these crocodiles are purportedly more docile and were actually trainable.
So this particular group of people used to perform acrobatic tricks with the crocodiles and use to breed them for use in temples, et cetera. So I would be interested if we were ever able to find, you know, sort of larger numbers of crocodile remains in Rome, which is pretty unlikely-- again, bones get destroyed because it's a swamp, and it gets built over and there's just like very little left.
Aven: Yeah, but if you find the right midden somewhere, maybe.
Bet: I think some way to identify which type, whether it was a traditional Nile crocodile or this West African crocodile would be really interesting to me.
Aven: Yeah.
Mark: And trying to imagine what performing crocodiles--
Aven: Having [00:20:00] a Peter Pan moment.
Bet: There's a very famous statue of one of these, the person is on the back of the crocodile, basically on its neck, doing a handstand.
Aven: Oh, yeah!
Bet: So it's-- I mean, yes. Stay behind the mouth, that seems like a very good beginner strategy. I can't imagine the first person to be like, 'you know what I'm going to do'.
Aven: Afternoon's a little boring, I think I know what I'm going to do to try to pass the time.
Bet: Like, life was not dangerous enough at this point. Like, everything could kill you and yet you're like, 'you know what I need? More risk. More risk in my life'.
Aven: Yeah, one thinks of, when you talk about the representation, the all those Nilotic scenes, I guess they're called, right? The art, the paintings, wall paintings of scenes with the Nile---
Bet: --And also mosaics that are incredible.
Aven: And mosaics, yeah. Started long before. So, Hadrian is not by any means [00:21:00] the first Roman, obviously, to be interested in Egypt, it's a longstanding fascination. Do you look at all at the sort of earlier or other connections between Egypt and Rome in that context or do you focus strictly on the Hadrianic?
Bet: Yes. So it's really interesting what kinds of objects survive from the earliest parts of Egyptian artistic influence in the Roman peninsula, which is around the first century-- or, you know, around 150 BCE, you start getting some smaller objects and then around 50 BCE, you get like a large influx. And then of course you get the sort of suppression of Egyptian cult s like the cult of Isis, et cetera. Because they bring political implications that the empire does not want. And then after the conquering of Egypt, there's sort of this mass wave, obviously, as the trade level and contact level increases [00:22:00] dramatically between people going back and forth to take especially grain, beer, et cetera, from Egypt to Rome.
And then, you know, people going, soldiers and administrative officials, et cetera, going to Egypt, living there and then sometimes coming back. So there's a lot of, there's this huge boom at the time I'm talking about, this sort of passion for things that look-- there's obviously a big divide between what people who don't earn any money can acquire and what people who basically own the Empire can acquire.
But we see these sort of like, really cheap replicas of clay lamps that have a lot of Egyptian motifs on them, like oil lamps, tons and tons of them have survived. So we know that there must've been even more that didn't. And again, things that are made of linen or wood, destructable things wouldn't have survived and those are most likely to be owned by poorer people who can't afford granite or gemstone or anything like that. [00:23:00] But yeah, there's a lot of jewelry, personal jewelry, rings, earrings, and that sort of thing, cameos that have Egyptian motifs on them, people are buying and spending with coins or collecting them as commemorations of the conquest of Egypt, et cetera.
So it starts to become pervasive across Rome and Ostia and the surroundings there, Benevento, and even as far as Florence. Just outside of Florence in Fiesole there's a cult center too, that has a statue of Isis, a statue of Mithras, et cetera. And then you get things that spread through the Roman empire.
So you get dedications to Isis in London, in Germany, in Paris. So it goes all over the place very quickly.
Aven: You know, it's funny when we look back at different periods, especially at 'prehistoric'-- and I'll put that words in quotes-- but anyway, periods evidence, there's always this sort of complicated question of when you see goods that are from one [00:24:00] region in another region, does that imply trade? Does it imply movement of people? You know, how was it taken and what kind of cultural contacts are you seeing? And sometimes, depending on the period, people really do take them as 'okay if you see stuff that's made in one place, ends up in another place, that means people from this place ended up in that other place'. But then when we look at Rome, because we know so much of the historical context of the relation between Egypt and Rome, we know that often it's importation of things, not people, but to what extent do we know anything about how much-- you know, were there craftspeople being imported as well, were there workers, are-- like, you know, how much of the Egyptian material or pseudo-Egyptian --or, that's not quite the right word-- but Egyptian influenced material is coming from Egypt, is being created by Roman or Italian craftspeople? Are they importing the Egyptian craftspeople? Are there actually Egyptian people [00:25:00] coming to live in Rome and surrounding areas who are bringing their own material? Like, is this tourist material or settler material? Like, is there any kind of evidence about that? Cause I can imagine there might not be.
Bet: So there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that people use to say there must have been Egyptians in Rome. There is not very much textual evidence, which people tend to take more seriously than archeological evidence for a variety of reasons-- longer story there-- but in my opinion, you have to look at the two things together.
For example, when we're talking about the priests and priestesses of Isis at the temple in Rome, they were known for speaking Late Egyptian. Late Egyptian is an incredibly complex language. Not even that many people in Egypt would have learned it at this point, except for priests and priestesses. So it's highly unlikely that someone Roman learned it and then came back, you know, within the span of a [00:26:00] couple of years, it's much more likely that someone from the priestly classes in Egypt came to Rome.
And on the flip side of that, based on some of the ways that some of the hieroglyphic inscriptions are done, it looks more like someone did them after arriving in Rome than someone who was used to doing them in Egypt. Stylistically, they appear similar, but the grammar differences are notable in a couple of cases.
There's a little obelisk here in Florence that is clearly not made in Egypt because it's made of black granite. The obelisk is meant to indicate the rays of the sun god reaching out to his people on earth, so it's done in red or pink granite. Doing it in black granite totally destroys any sort of original Egyptian meaning or context to it.
But it's interesting because the top third of the hieroglyphics that surround it on all four sides make [00:27:00] sense. And then the bottom two thirds-- like, either the person who was in charge of it died or left the project, or maybe they had a transcript and it got wet or destroyed or whatever. But what they start doing is putting random, real hieroglyphic symbols, but in an order that makes zero sense.
Aven: So it moves from communicative to decorative. Yeah.
Bet: Yes. So it's a really interesting case study in terms of like, what is happening. Now, it's hard to tell how old that obelisk is, but that's sort of indicative of what's happening on the Italian peninsula.
It's like, people are trying in some cases to be as genuine as possible, but not understanding the original purpose or function of objects or they're making them work for them in completely new and different ways. So they'll take, you know, hieroglyphics that don't mean anything and put it onto objects that appear original Egyptian [00:28:00] like canopic jars, et cetera, that are used in the ceremonies, religious ceremonies in Rome. So there are quite a lot of these objects that have sort of double lives. They had lives in Egypt and then they were brought over and they're modified in some really interesting way.
But what that means to me is that either there are so few Egyptian people involved in these religious practices or they've been there so long that they also have lost that sort of visual connection, that sort of knowledge, linguistic knowledge, et cetera, as they're participating in these things. Yeah, so there's a lot of-- basically the answer is always is 'it's complicated', which is like, not really a good answer answer, but we don't-- at this point, a lot of Egyptians have been writing in Greek and Latin, especially Greek or variations of it, Demotic et cetera, for 300 years.
So when they come over here and they're writing in Greek and Latin, how can we even tell unless they have Egyptian names, but they also have Greek names. Some of them have multiple names for different contexts, et cetera. So it's [00:29:00] one of those things I don't know that we'll ever know the answer to.
Aven: Yeah, because the cultural context of Egypt, especially Alexandria is already a super, super complicated place before Rome even gets its hands on it. So, yeah.
Bet: I mean, my favorite Alexandria story in regard to your question about like, who's making these objects is that there's a Greek colony just outside of Alexandria and those people start making fake shawabti, those little statues that are founded in Egyptian tombs that are meant to be your servants in the afterlife.
And we know they're all mass produced out of this one place because there's a transcription error where they mess up the hieroglyphics in one specific place. And then they keep making that error over and over and over and over and over again. And they export these shawabtis to like, all over Greece.
And they're really popular in Greek context, but they're not used as funerary objects. They're kind of like travel trophies are displayed to be like, 'oh look, I'm so cultured'. I dunno, people are using them in completely different ways than they would have been used [00:30:00] in Egypt where they wouldn't have had been displayed publicly for people to look at.
I mean, they serve a function in the afterlife of the person. So yeah, I just, I love that story of like, the early mass production of sort of collectible--
Aven: Tourist paraphernalia, basically.
Bet: But I mean, a lot of these people didn't go to Egypt to get it. They just bought one off a trader. So it looks like you're more well traveled than you are, or that you have connections or whatever. It's just such a fascinating phenomenon to me.
Aven: Now, you've mentioned Isis a couple of times in this discussion, and I know that's another area that you're interested in. Would you like to expand on Isis, who is just a generally fascinating topic to everyone.
Bet: Sure. So Isis is the primary goddess of the Egyptian Pantheon. She forms a family group originally with Osiris and their son Harpocrates-- well, with their son Horus. In Greek and Ptolemaic and Roman Egyptian context, Osiris takes on this other [00:31:00] aspect of the God called Serapis, which looks a lot more like Zeus and Jupiter stylistically, but wears an Egyptian headpiece. So it makes him identifiable to both cultural groups. And then there are some-- you know, he sort of takes on the more curvy form of Greek and Roman style carvings, becomes more Greek and Roman-appealing that way, but he maintains an Egyptian hairstyle.
And then Isis can be-- Isis is so popular as a goddess because she can be what's called syncretized with so many other gods and goddesses. So Isis becomes popular in large part because you can make her into the protectress of whatever thing you need her to be. So in her aspect of Isis Fortuna, so she combines with the goddess Fortuna, she becomes the goddess of luck. There's a version of her which becomes Isis who's the [00:32:00] goddess of sailors. So she becomes the protector of motherhood, of farmers, of sailors, of children, of soldiers, basically all of the people who need protection. That's why she's so popular. And she's-- like, her cult spreads like wildfire. So many people are worshiping Isis throughout the Roman empire, even if she's not necessarily their primary goddess or whatever. There are so many little totems to Isis found all over the place. There's certainly a market for protection at this point, that people feel some sort of way about Isis that doesn't happen with many other gods or goddesses.
And I think it really is that that thing that you can make her into whatever you want her to be.
Aven: Right. Well, and she is given a personal interest in the lives of humans in a way that is not always true of Greco Roman gods. I mean, they can be, some of them are, but some of them are not.[00:33:00]
Bet: Yes. And you do find cult sites that are in the Italian peninsula that are more dedicated to Osiris or Harpocrates, et cetera, or even Anubis. But Isis is definitely more pervasive.
Aven: So the textual discussions of Isis are interesting, and I'm going to just go out on a limb and say not fully representative of what we find in the archeological record and that's just based on I don't know what we find in the archeological record. I just take that assumption because the textual references in Rome to cults of Isis are-- at least the ones I know-- are denigrating, generally, and either are about laws banning it, as you mentioned earlier, and often lumping Isis in with Bacchus in terms of sort of two sets of religious practices that are not welcome in the city, that are-- you know, invite foreigners and corrupt the youth, always a concern of the [00:34:00] Romans. Youth was amazingly corruptible, it's really-- but then also the other place that I'm most familiar with Isis is she turns up in Roman elegy a lot, in Roman poetry. Again, not usually as the focus of the poet's worship, but as their girlfriend's and there's a definite class and gender thing going on there. So can you talk a little bit more about how Isis was viewed or worshiped in Rome or in Italy?
Bet: Sure. So obviously there are early political problems with the cult of Isis, especially in the Italian peninsula. So the cult gets banned and suppressed for a while. But there are still people worshiping Isis, to the point where in Pompeii, the first temple of Isis was destroyed, I think in an earthquake, and then there was a fire and they kept rebuilding it. So they rebuilt it at least twice. That's how important she was to them, even though you [00:35:00] might've taken it as a sign from other gods that her temple kept getting destroyed.
Aven: Yeah, but if Pompeii had taken those particular notes from the gods...
They got quite a few signs, to be fair. They did not listen.
Bet: But then in Rome itself, for example, we have all of this text written by men about how much women love Isis and her worship. You couldn't-- you had to get initiated into the mysteries of Isis and at the end of its life, this temple complex was enormous. So obviously there's a lot of money coming into it. There are a lot of objects that are brought from Egypt or using Egyptian stone. And that cost a fortune to transport, granite is some of the heaviest material found in Rome. You usually have to get it worked in Egypt because the Italians were not great at granite statuary and things like that in comparison, they just have a very limited relative history. And they're used to working with softer stones, quite a lot of marble, et cetera. So you [00:36:00] get these really expensive objects. So there's obviously like, a lot of higher-class women, higher-class people heavily involved, but then you get all these like upper-class men or soldiers or sailors, et cetera, who are complaining about the involvement of the women in there with this cult of Isis, possibly because they weren't initiated so their wives couldn't talk about it with them. So it becomes a sort of like, private thing that a lot of men can't control when in fact, normally the pater familias is allowed to have every bit of control over every inch of his wives' or daughters' lives.
Aven: And especially their religious lives. I mean, that's part of, of where Roman unease about some of these kinds of religions comes from is that the pater familias is the religious center of the family, in theory, and anything that's outside of that is upsetting. Yeah.
Bet: Yes. So we have some descriptions of people who describe their friends telling them 'I got [00:37:00] initiated into the cult of Isis' and that there's male and female things that happened there. But we mostly-- the complaints we get are from men saying either 'my wife joined the cult of Isis and they have too much sex and I'm really uncomfortable with that' or 'my wife joined the cult of Isis and they have a day when they're not allowed to have sex and I'm really mad about it'. So it's like, there's a lot of trash talking that is in conflict.
And basically, it seems to me to be sort of misogyny based jealousy around this, because they're not complaining so much about their male friends being inducted, but they're like-- some of these soldiers and sailors are writing formal letters of complaint asking the government to deal with the women involved in the cult of Isis.
Aven: Right. And yeah, there's this weird tension about how-- cause I know that there's Roman poetry, love poetry too, that also says like ' [00:38:00] my girl barred me from her door saying that it's because of Isis, but I'm not sure about that. But if it is, dammit!'
Bet: Poetry loves calling on Isis as the protectress. So there is like-- there's a little bit of offsetting, but not enough to make it-- at least what survived has not been enough to make it balanced. And I wonder how it would look different if we had more women writers preserved. You know, are they-- especially people who are looking from both the inside and the outside-- do women feel the same way about other women's involvement in the cult of Isis? Do women involved in the cult of Isis-- are they allowed to write or talk about their experiences or is it more like Fight Club where, you know, first rule is you can't talk about the mysteries, but can you write about it for your private self? What are the rules? How far can you stretch the boundaries there?
Aven: And one is-- you know, another thing we're never going to know, probably, is how much does that worship of Isis change when it leaves Egypt? What does it [00:39:00] transform itself into? Cause I'm sure it did change to some extent when it came to Italy, but you know--
Bet: We do have some really interesting columns from the temple of Isis. Three are in the Musei Capitolini in Rome and one is in Florence in the archeological museum, and they show processions of people at the temple of Isis, carrying Egyptian and Roman objects in and modeling different dress and hairstyles that come from a mixture of both cultures. So you can see that they're already, you know, at the early point here, integrating their practices together.
But it's more than likely that there was still for at least several decades a priest or priestess of Isis who came from Egypt to read these magical spells in Egyptian, which might contribute to why people thought it was so mysterious. Because if even you-- it's sort of like going to Mass in Latin as a [00:40:00] modern person who does not speak Latin. Like, you kind of have an idea of what the priest is trying to get you to do and you know what you're meant to perform, but like, do you actually know what's happening? Do you know what's being said over you? Probably not.
Aven: Yeah. Yeah, and that's going to add to the suspicion because it's foreign.
Bet: To the suspicion, but also to the desirability of it. It's the sort of exoticism of-- you know, 'there's a power there that other people have that I want access to' and this is my way through to that'.
Aven: Right. Right. I mean, I guess I should mention that-- I don't know if it's something that you spend much time on-- but the other, the most famous literary representation of Isis is of course The Golden Ass story, which is all-- centers around, at least in theory, the worship of Isis. I mean, trying to explain what that novel, what that work is about is always a little bit complicated. And maybe we won't get into [00:41:00] that now.
Bet: But he does relate the story of his friend being initiated into this cult of Isis and how he's-- he puts himself into the story as he's like, walking around the temple. So the temple is a public space in itself, but the inner sanctuary is protected by these heavy drapes. So you can't-- if you're not initiated, you can't go into that inner sanctuary. And it's not like, walled off. It is curtained off in his description. So he can't see what's happening, but he can kind of hear a little bit of some muffled sounds, maybe smell a little bit of the incense that's happening. Cause there there's a lot of incense being burned as part of religious practices, et cetera.
So he is jealous that he can't participate, but not enough to join and find out what it's about, which I always find really interesting that he sort of like, feels like he should be permitted full knowledge without the induction ceremony, just from like a [00:42:00] curiosity perspective.
Aven: Right. And then the whole story ofthe transformation, et cetera, has to do with sort of bringing him to the point where he's willing to be initiated, I guess.
Bet: But also it's-- I find that story really interesting from the perspective of trying to do my 3D modeling, because we know there were drapes, but he doesn't describe color, length, detail of the fabric, et cetera. But we know that there were, there was a lot of fabric involved in partitioning off these spaces, but because we don't have a standing structure, we don't know how they were hung up. What kind of stylistic things there would have been, did they come from Egypt? What colors were they? Did they come from Rome or elsewhere? You know, what kinds of spaces could have been created through the use of drapery? So that's something I'm working through using wall paintings of other spaces.
Aven: Right.
Bet: Because it's more than likely that they would [00:43:00] have done so in a more Roman style than Egyptian style. Given the fact that the temple itself is laid out using quite a lot of Roman elements.
Aven: Right. Well and yeah, and if fabric was important in spaces to do with Isis in Egypt, then Hadrian probably brought or incorporated fabric into his displays, but how you would ever-- you know, that's not something you're going to find preserved. So, yeah, that's an interesting question, cause of course I like the idea of the 3D representations because it's really cool. But also because you know, it gets us back to that question, which I know you've thought about a lot about museums and representations of ancient spaces and things.
So often we can-- because we only have what survives and there is an understandable reluctance to sort of make up the other stuff that went around this, you know, necessarily. To say like, here's a possible-- if you're going to [00:44:00] actually build a museum room in meatspace and put-- you don't want to be, people are reluctant to do completely hypothetical recreations and reconstructions and make it seem like it was the real thing.
And I get that, but it means that we have this image along with our white statues, which we've talked about elsewhere as being a problem. But we also have an image of like, Roman spaces as being all hard edges.
Bet: Yes.
Aven: All solid stone and concrete and tiles and mosaics and maybe a bit of wood because that's all that survives, but it doesn't make any sense that that would be true. But then trying to like, imagine or portray what it might've been like when you're not sure, you know, people tend to be conservative about that.
Bet: And it's easier to do for, in my estimation, based on like, [00:45:00] literary sources. Cause that's the-- literary and visual sources-- it's easier to do with eating spaces because those are public spaces. That's where other people come into your house and describe it. It is very unusual for people to describe their own spaces in Roman literature. They're commonly describing like, their neighbors, either a really good dinner party or really terrible dinner party. And you'd go to these public spaces, these few public spaces, and you go back home and you write about. But you don't talk about-- like, nobody's ever going to check out your kitchen or nobody's writing about your bathroom. And very few people are writing like, about private spaces. Of course, most people who would have been permitted into the extremely private spaces would have been enslaved people who are cleaning or otherwise taking care of the spaces or artisans who go in there and then they leave with a static image of it. Cause it's not like [00:46:00] they're going back after they're done with their piece of work.
Aven: Yeah, so you don't have the representation of what it would be like. And then as you say--
Bet: And all the furniture is gone, cushions are gone, anything made of wood that you would have sat on, anything made of wood with rope or straw lacing to cushion your rear end.
Like, all of those things are gone. We have examples of some of them, a few of them, but mostly what we have to work off of is either literary depictions or these wall frescoes.
Aven: Yeah.
Bet: Some of them are not from Rome. Some of them are from Pompeii, because obviously those are the best preserved ones, but that's a frozen moment in time. And I'm talking about a period 75, 80, 90 years later, like how much has changed? Yeah, ancient history isn't static. It's just that we tend to collapse whole centuries together cause it's just easier because we don't have [00:47:00] all the evidence that we have for say, the 18th century or something.
Aven: Yeah. Yeah. You end up having to say 'well, I've got evidence for this, this, this, and this, here's six things. They do cover 300 years, but we're going to have to say this is one thing, because that's all I got.' That is like, such a perennial problem in all these-- you know, whenever you're teaching Roman history or any ancient history, you're always like, 'okay, I'm going to say upfront that material is taken from a 500 year span'. And when you think about that, we do that all the time in the ancient world, and when you think imagining doing that, you know, in a period that we have that's better documented and saying, 'okay, I've taken material about what people ate from 1500 to 2000. We don't have great evidence, I'm going to take like one thing from each century and say that that's--and then imagine that there was one dinner party that had all of those things at it. [00:48:00] Just like, even leaving aside the Colombian Exchange, which completely throws that off--
Bet: Gosh, even if you just threw, for instance, like what a parking garage with cars in it looks like over the last hundred years, it's just such a radically different space.
Aven: Yeah. Yeah, so we do that and yes, the pace of change was perhaps somewhat different in the ancient world. But it wasn't-- it didn't stop changing.
Bet: Yeah, so power dynamics are constantly shifting, but part of the joy of doing the 3D models on the computer is that you can do things like change the seasons, so you can change the lighting around. You can easily like, drag and drop objects. If I'm permitted, I don't know what the object rights are going to look like for this yet, but if I'm permitted to give people access to a version in which it's not just static, they can play around with it. Or, you know, the 3D models that we print, part of the joy for students is to decide what they would want [00:49:00] that space to look like. If you have nine Muses and this certain number of Egyptian statues, some of them are in black granite, or some are in black marble, some of them are in red granite. Some of them are in steatite, other different variations of colors. They're not white. Some of them are white, but you know, with very striking-- like the head of of Demeter, of Isis Demeter that's in the Vatican. It's the size of, you know, a love seat, basically. It's just the head. It's just the head, this white marble head with this incredible headdress. Like, what do you do with that when the next statue over is this life-sized bust of-- basically it's, it's got the head of a bull on one side, the Apis Bull on one side and the face of a man on another. And they're joined, you know, head-to-head like--
Aven: --like a Janus--
Bet: --like a Janus, yeah. So, I mean, where do you put those? What do you want to do with them?
Aven: What was the thematic center of this assemblage? Yeah.
Bet: Yeah. Like, [00:50:00] is Isis Demeter meant to look down on you? Because we don't have evidence because the walls crumbled, of any sort of niche or column that's big enough to support it. It's this huge piece. So like, what do we do with the fact that we're obviously missing some major piece of information?
Aven: Well, yeah, no, I like that-- that's what I mean, by being able to do like, to try out hypothet-- because once you've got this as a 3D setup or as a computer setup, you can try out the hypotheticals without committing a museum space to saying, 'okay, we're going to put draperies in this whole room' or 'we're going to do whatever those things are impractical and problematic', but being able to say, 'okay, well, let's try this hypothesis. Let's see what it would look like, if this wall painting is an accurate representation of what it might've looked like or something like that'. And I think that's just a really helpful set of possibilities.
Bet: Yeah. I'm going to make the 3D printable schematic available, so anybody with access [00:51:00] to a 3D printer or a Makerspace or a school or whatever that has a 3D printer can print out the objects and the physical space. Probably without the roof, because, or-- I don't know how I'm going to do the roof thing, make it a separate piece? So you can optionally put it on there.
Aven: Yeah, because obviously you want to be able to get in and move stuff around. Yeah.
Bet: Yeah. And just to look around at it and whatever, but yeah. Just like, make it so that people can play around with it in their own space for very little cost. Cause I think that that's one of the things I work a lot on, like trying to bring access to the ancient world to people who normally don't see themselves represented in Classics studies, et cetera. And, you know, trying to bring archeology to people who don't feel like they can physically or financially access spaces. So this is one of the ways I'm trying to, I'm experimenting with. We'll see how it goes.
Aven: Yeah, no, it's fascinating. Okay, well maybe we should stop there on that note and maybe sometime in the next year or two, we can [00:52:00] revisit that project when it has gone another step or two, and also talk more about those other interests that you have in terms of making the ancient world accessible. But we've kept you for a bunch of time now, and I know you have some Latin to learn so-- I would never want to stop anyone from spending some quality time with Latin.
But this has been really fascinating. It's such an interesting area of study, but also such a really fascinating way of approaching it and trying to open it up. So I look forward to hearing what happens as you go on with this!
Bet: Thank you, I hope I can get it published soon enough that other people can make good use of it. I'm hoping to finish my PhD and submit in September. So it'll be accessible as an idea for people to read through within the next year or two.
Aven: That sounds great. Now are there places that people can follow up and see more of your work or interest? Are there places you want to [00:53:00] tell us about where they can access you?
Bet: Sure. So I am available on Twitter, I'm very online.
Aven: I don't understand that--
Bet: For those listeners who are not familiar, that's how we became acquainted. Yes, so I'm @RomanAegyptiaca, that's A-E-G-Y-P-T-I-A-C-A, but you can look me up as Bet Hucks on Twitter if you have trouble with transcribing the spelling. Otherwise I have a little bit of work on academia.edu, including a chapter that I've written in Italian about the arrival of the first objects or the main volume of objects from the collection at the Museo Egizio in Turin from Egypt in the early 1900s. And some other works in progress I've listed there. But yeah, basically I have a couple of things I'm hoping to get out in publication this year [00:54:00] and next year. So yeah, you can follow me on either of those locations to keep updated.
Aven: Perfect. And we will put links to that in the show notes, of course.
Bet: Thank you.
Mark: Well, thank you very much for talking to us today.
Bet: This was such an enjoyable conversation.
Aven: On a rainy day here, it's nice to think about Egypt. Maybe less so the crocodiles, but you know--
Bet: I don't know. I mean, I feel like when I want to escape, when I want to like, think about how nice where I am is now, you can think about the humidity and crocodiles, and then maybe the rain seems a little more palatable.
Aven: Fair point, very fair point. All right, well, thanks again and enjoy your Latin!
Bet: Thank you.
Aven: For more information on this podcast, check out our website, www.alliterative.net, where you can find links to the videos, blog, posts, sources, and credits, [00:55:00] and all our contact info.
Mark: And please check out our Patreon where you can pledge to support this show and our video project. You can go directly to the videos at youtube.com/alliterative.
Aven: Our email is on the website, but the easiest way to get in touch with us is Twitter. I'm @AvenSarah A V E N S A R A H.
Mark: And I'm at @alliterative. To keep up with the podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcast app or to the feed on the website.
Aven: And if you've enjoyed it, consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. It helps us a lot. We'll be back soon with more musings about the connections around us. Thanks for listening.
Mark: Bye.