Luxury and the Contestation of Political Identities in Hellenistic Asia and the Post-Achaemenid Iranian World

Speaker: Prof. Matthew Canepa, Professor and Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Presidential Chair in Art History and Archaeology of Ancient Iran, University of California, Irvine. 

As Alexander the Great closed his eyes for the last time in Babylon in 323 BCE, a vast interconnected and multipolar world extending from the Balkans to the Gangetic Plain emerged from the wreckage of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, built on its legacies but substantially new. This lecture focuses on the role of luxury material in shaping and contesting politically useful elite identities in the lands of the former Persian Empire and its Central and Southern Asian borderlands and littorals. Over the last century, scholarship has made significant advances in the study of what has variously been approached as the ‘Hellenistic Far East,’ ‘Hellenistic Asia’ or ‘post-Achaemenid Iran,’ at first recovering its history and in recent decades developing a more nuanced set of interpretive approaches to its art, archaeology, and religions. Earlier studies of Hellenistic Asian luxury objects have largely focused on technical or formal questions, such as categorizing vessel shapes or searching for the origins or dating of ornamental or iconographic features. Here we ask a new set of questions and seek to understand their roles as objects of political transculturation, creating and contesting elite bodily and practical states of being within a wider Afro-Eurasian context.