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Contents
Introduction ....................................................................................... 3
Programme Annual Meeting ............................................................... 4
Abstracts ............................................................................................ 6
Visitors information ......................................................................... 15
Places in the city centre to visit ......................................................... 15
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Introduction
Welcome to the 5th CRASIS Annual Meeting, themed ‘Hellenism.
Interaction, Translation & Culture Transfer’. We are delighted to have you
here in Groningen, and we hope you will enjoy your stay.
This booklet aims to offer all information you may need for a pleasant
time at our conference. If you have any questions, concerns or remarks,
please do not hesitate to ask us. We are happy to help.
We wish everyone an inspiring conference!
Best wishes on behalf of the organising committee,
Tamara Dijkstra
Sjoukje Kamphorst
Raf Praet
Sam van Dijk
Kristel Fraase Storm
Eelco Glas
Monique Louwes
Caroline van Toor
& the CRASIS board
Lidewijde de Jong
Onno van Nijf
Mladen Popovic
Bettina Reitz-Joosse
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Programme Annual Meeting
Location
Old Courtroom, Oude Boteringestraat 38 (Faculty of
Theology and Religious Studies)
08:30 – 09:00 Coffee and registration
09:00 – 09:15 Welcome by Mladen Popovic
Chair Bettina Reitz-Joosse
9:15 – 10:00
Bärry Hartog
‘Qumran vs. Alexandria? Hellenistic Ideals of Universal
Knowledge and Second Temple Judaism’
10:00 – 10:45 Annette Harder
‘‘Back to Hellas’. The Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius in
relation to Hellenism’
10:45 – 11:15 Break
Chair Onno van Nijf
11:15 – 12:00 Hanna Tervanotko
‘Prophets as Tragic Figures in the Hebrew Bible and
Ancient Greek Literature’
12:00 – 12:45 Angele Rosenberg Dimitracopoulou
‘Trading “La Sophocléene” figurines in Hellenistic Greece’
12:45 – 13:45 Lunch in the Bruinszaal, Academy Building
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Chair Lidewijde de Jong
13:45 – 14:30 Rocco Palermo
‘It’s (not) all Greek to me: Cultural entanglement in North
Mesopotamia during the Seleucid period’
14:30 – 15:15 Denver Graninger ‘Rewriting ancient ethne’
15:15 – 15:45 Break
Chair Jan-Willem Drijvers
15:45 – 16:30 Tiziana D’Angelo
‘How did Poseidonia Become Paestum? Funerary Painting,
Political Power and Cultural Identity’
16:30 – 17:15 Seth
Seth Bledsoe
‘Of Beasts and Men: Animal Fables as Political Ideology in
Greco-Roman Egypt’
Chair Mladen Popovic
17:15 – 18:15 Keynote Lecture by Benjamin Wright (Lehigh Univ., PA)
‘Greek Paideia and the Jewish Community of Alexandria in
the Letter of Aristeas’
18:15 – 19:00 Reception
19:00 – 21:00 Conference buffet in Oude Boteringestraat 38
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Abstracts
Qumran vs. Alexandria? Hellenistic Ideals of Universal Knowledge and
Second Temple Judaism
Bärry Hartog, KU Leuven/University of Groningen
Propagations of universal knowledge are often closely bound up with
issues of culture, power, and identity. The institutes that stand as
hallmarks of this ideal in the Hellenistic world – the libraries of Alexandria
and Pergamum – embody the connections between these three issues.
These libraries served as focal points of Greek identity and legitimations
for the power of the Macedonian-Greek ruling classes. Thus, the claim
that they contained “all there is to know” supported a political and cultural
agenda.
In this paper I explore how Hellenistic ideals of universal
knowledge made an impact on Second Temple Judaism. My treatment is
set against the background of recent work on “glocalisation” – the
interaction between global and local identities – in the Hellenistic world. I
suspect that, starting in the Hellenistic period, certain strands in Second
Temple Judaism came to reflect an ideal of universal knowledge akin to,
but not identical with, the ideals fostered in the Hellenistic world. This
Jewish ideal serves as a counterpart to the Greek one.
After a concise methodological introduction, I intend to present a
survey of the ideal of universal knowledge in Hellenistic culture and
identity. Secondly, I shall turn to the Book of Jubilees. This book promotes
the acquisition of all kinds of knowledge and so reflects an emerging
Jewish ideal of universal knowledge. Finally, I shall argue that the Qumran
scrolls collection embodies a further stage in the development of this
Jewish ideal.
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‘Back to Hellas’. The Argonautica
Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius in relation to
Hellenism
Annette Harder, University of Groningen
Apollonius Rhodius in his Argonautica, an epic written in III BC when the
first generations of the Ptolemies ruled in Alexandria, presents a picture of
the world that is conceived as consisting of ‘Hellas’ as the home of the
Argonauts, largely overlapping with mainland Greece, and a strange and
often hostile outside world into which the Argonauts are venturing on
their journey to Colchis. This world is full of wars and crimes, monsters
and exotic peoples. Only rarely the Argonauts meet people who share
Greek values, but then these are under threat from surrounding enemies.
Opposed to this strange and dangerous world the Argonauts
represent modern Hellenic values, formally linked to ‘Hellas’, but in fact
reflecting Alexandria and Ptolemaic rule as well: Jason as a diplomat and
‘farmer-king’; the emphasis on harmony among the Argonauts; the lack of
room for Heracles or old-fashioned heroes like Idas. Even so, although the
Argonauts do leave some traces during their journey, they effect no
fundamental changes and are not able to put a Greek stamp on this world.
They leave it much as they found it, sometimes even worse.
So the epic evokes various questions about Hellenism: How are the
differences between Greeks and others conceived? Are Hellenic values
something you can export and impose on others? Can Greeks settle
succesfully among other peoples and mix with them? Or are the
differences too big for fruitful contacts and should one remain separate? If
so, how could an epic propagating such an attitude fit in with Ptolemaic
ideology in the wake of Alexander’s Greek expansion?
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Prophets as Tragic Figures in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Greek
Literature
Hanna Tervanotko, University of Helsinki/KU Leuven
The Hebrew Bible preserves references to various prophetic figures that
are not believed when they transmit their oracles (e.g., Hos 9:7; Isa 28:9;
Mic 2:6). Yet perhaps the most complex image of a prophet, who is met
with resistance concerns Jeremiah. His predictions are not listened to and
in several passages he cries out his misfortune (e.g., Jer 15:10-18; 20:7-18).
Interestingly, various prophetic characters that feature in ancient Greek
literature of the Persian and Hellenistic eras also meet disbelief. The prime
example of such figure is Cassandra, whose predictions concerning the fall
of Troy are not listened to. Also other characters such as Laocoön and
Tiresias meet similar difficulties.
While in the level of the narrative the prophets are not believed,
both Jewish and Greek audiences are expected to recognize the true
prophets and thus sympathize with them. This raises a question
concerning the function of the disbelieved figures. Why they are not
believed? In this paper I will first analyze the disbelieved prophets
separately in both ancient Jewish and Greek corpora. Then I will ask to
what extent Greek tragedies, and their portrayal of tragic prophets could
have inspired the authors and editors of the Jewish texts. Through this
comparative reading and use of literary theory (rhetoric of fiction) my
intention is to shed new light on the tragic prophets and to discuss the
cross-cultural influences between the ancient Jewish and Greek texts.
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Trading “La Sophocléene” figurines in Hellenistic Greece
Angele Rosenberg-Dimitracopoulou, University of Amsterdam/Allard
Pierson Museum
In this paper I examine the production of a single type in coroplasty, the
so-called “La Sophocléene” type, from the fourth to first centuries BCE to
demonstrate the potential that studying terracotta figurines has for
understanding the interaction between cultures during the Hellenistic
period.
The paper begins with the type’s diffusion in the eastern
Mediterranean. This type is well suited for such an investigation because,
unlike many coroplastic types, it is clear where it may have originated. La
Sophocléene probably imitates the basic composition of a lost bronze
statue of Sophocles from the 330s BCE that also inspired a series of
Roman statues known as the Lateran Sophocles. This suggests that the
terracotta figurines were first made in Athens. They subsequently became
popular beyond Athens and examples have been found in sites all over the
Mediterranean. In this paper I discuss the diffusion of the type through
the findspots, relative chronologies, and fabric types of extant figurines.
In the second part of this paper I address a common assumption
that function followed form when objects were traded between cultures.
The non-Athenian contexts from which examples of La Sophocléene have
been excavated indicate that the local culture usually incorporated the
figurines to existing uses. Thus the trade of terracotta figurines suggests
that new, local identities were created when foreign objects were imported
and adapted integrated in daily use.
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It’s (not) all Greek to me:
me: Cultural entanglement in North Mesopotamia
during the Seleucid period
Rocco Palermo, Frederico II University of Naples
When the Achaemenid empire dissolved in late 4th century BCE, the Near
East experienced the formation of a new trans-regional entity, which
imposed itself as the very first globalized and self-conscious empire of
antiquity. The Seleucids ruled over several regions, from Bulgaria to
Central Asia, and the differentiation in physical and political landscapes
forced the kings to respond with the creation of both ideological and
tangible interventions. The landscape exploitation, the colonial
foundations, and the material culture all left their mark upon the
Hellenistic period, contributing to the creation of common cultural
framework.
On the basis of the available data and the new researches carried
out in North Mesopotamia (Kurdistan region, in particular) in these very
last years, this paper aims to explore the integration of new inputs into the
pre-existent substratum through the analysis of previously undocumented
archaeological evidence. Settlement patterns, material culture (notably
ceramics) and local identities will be investigated with a particular
attention to the mixed society that shaped the Mesopotamian region
between the Gaugamela battle and the very early 1st c. BCE.
Central questions are: How does the colonial displacement and the
sites location affected the regional landscape? How do the daily use objects
fit into the newly formed societies? Is there a traceable social crisis/change
in the archaeological record? The answers might point at the recognition
of the Seleucid period in Mesopotamia as an intense moment of cultural
hybridization when all the agents acted on the background of a significant
mutual influence.
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Rewriting ancient ethne
Denver Graninger, University of California, Riverside
A kaleidoscope of tribes (ethne) inhabited the ancient eastern
Mediterranean and encompassed populations regarded variously in
antiquity and today as Greek, non-Greek, or something in between.
Despite being more populous, geographically widespread, and politically
influential than city-states (poleis), ethne remain little studied, largely due
to the polis-centered priorities of modern scholarship: Writing ethne into
the center of ancient Mediterranean history is a firstorder desideratum for
historians and classicists alike. The paper offers a preliminary approach to
such work by penetrating beneath the mass nouns used to describe large
populations in the southern Balkans in antiquity — e.g., Greeks,
Thracians, Macedonians — and throwing into high relief the extensive
range of more local and persistent ethnos identities to which individuals
and collectives ascribed from the Early Iron Age through Late Antiquity
(ca. 800 BCE - 400 CE). Specific case studies include the Perraiboi of
Thessaly and Macedonia and the Thracian Bessi.
Two aspects of the paper are novel and resonate with the themes of
the CRASIS conference. First, by drawing Greek ethne into comparison
with non-Greeks similarly organized, this paper deemphasized the ethnocultural dichotomy between Greeks and non-Greeks and exposes a deeper
unity expressed through membership in ethne. Second, despite the
strikingly international character of the materials of and participants in the
modern study of ancient history, a parochialism can linger whenever one
strays too far beyond the evidence associated with principal ancient sites,
invariably city-states. The proposed papers begins to challenge such
barriers.
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How did Poseidonia Become Paestum? Funerary Painting, Political Power
and Cultural Identity
Tiziana D’Angelo, University of Cambridge
The painted tombs that have been discovered in Paestum represent one
of the largest corpora of pre-Roman wall-paintings across the
Mediterranean. Scholars have often looked at Paestan painting as a
phenomenon triggered in the late fifth century BC by the military
conquest of the Greek city of Poseidonia by a group of indigenous
people identified as “Lucanians”. Consequently, the development of
funerary painting throughout the fourth- and early third- century has
been seen as a self-referential phenomenon which reflected the
formation of the Lucanian ethnos and ended with the deduction of the
Roman colony in 273 BC.
In this lecture, I will re-assess the role of painted tombs in
Paestum in order to shed new light on this controversial political and
cultural transition. These tombs provide crucial evidence to understand
how Greek, Roman and indigenous groups articulated and negotiated
space and power. I will examine the meaning and function of their
decoration in connection with their architectural, topographic and
archaeological context. I will argue that the introduction of funerary
painting in Paestum was not the effect of an Italic conquest of the Greek
city, but marked a transitional period when various native groups were
competing for space and power within the city, gradually defining their
own cultural identity. I will demonstrate that the development of tomb
painting in Paestum testifies to the emergence of a restricted number of
indigenous clans which gained political power in the second half of the
fourth century BC and possibly maintained it even after the deduction of
the Roman colony in 273 BC.
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Greco--Roman
Of Beasts and Men: Animal Fables as Political Ideology in Greco
Egypt
Seth Bledsoe, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich
This paper is part of a broader project that aims to understand how
communities in Hellenistic and early Roman Egypt responded to political
and social pressures through literary means. The project brings together
traditions in Demotic, Aramaic, and Greek from this period and explores
the ways that narrative or narrative-type texts, in particular, were used in
order to construct or negotiate the competing political identities. A
primary focus, therefore, are representations of authority figures,
especially the king. What rhetorical strategies are employed by the
respective authors to make their political arguments? What do these texts
reveal about the tensions within the respective community’s in terms of
their self-understanding vis-à-vis the political authority and external
groups?
The time period and the specific media I have chosen provide a
poignant window into an era of intense multi-cultural exchange and
interaction. Moreover, several of the texts share formal and thematic
features and yet they have not received significant attention and hardly
any of them have been brought together. While some studies have
discussed, for example, the interaction of Greek and Egyptian (Demotic)
myth and narrative in the Ptolemaic period very few of them have
considered the earlier and even concurrent Aramaic traditions. In this
paper, I will investigate one aspect of this neglected cultural interaction,
namely the use of animal fables as disguised political critique in two texts
from the Ptolemaic and early Roman period: Callimachus’s Aetia and
Demotic Mythus text. This paper will discuss the various ways each text
made use of earlier fable-literature—in Aramaic and Greek—and
demonstrate how each one used the received traditions in service of their
respective political agendas.
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Keynote
Greek Paideia and the Jewish Community of Alexandria in the Letter of
Aristeas
Benjamin G. Wright (Lehigh University, Pennsylvania)
The author of the Letter of Aristeas produced a thoroughly Greek book,
even though it treats the translation of the Jewish Law into Greek, the socalled Septuagint. When one examines the text, one can see evidence of
the author’s Greek education in passage after passage. As one of the most
significant literary products from the Alexandrian Jewish community,
indeed from Hellenistic Alexandria period—and perhaps a close second to
the Septuagint itself—the Letter of Aristeas deserves attention for what we
can learn about educated, elite Jews in second century BCE Alexandria for
whom that great city was home, both a home from which they apparently
could not imagine an Exodus and a home in which a second giving of the
Law on which a quintessentially Jewish identity could be constructed, only
this time in Greek, made complete sense.
Benjamin Wright is professor of the History of Christianity in the Religion
Studies Department at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. His
area of expertise is the history of Judaism in the Second Temple period,
with a focus on Jewish Wisdom literature, the translation of Jewish
literature from Hebrew into Greek (Septuaginta, Ben Sira, Aristeas) and
the Dead Sea Scrolls. His broad array of publications in these and other
areas shows his interest in larger questions such as Hellenization,
(cultural) translation, heritage and identity. In September 2015 his
commentary on the Letter of Aristeas appeared with De Gruyter (Berlin).
He is currently preparing a commentary on the Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sira,
has recently co-edited a new English translation of the Septuagint, and will
be Dirk Smilde Fellow at the Qumran Institute in Groningen from
February to May 2016.
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Visitors information
Emergency call
Doctor Service Groningen
Police
Public transport
Taxi Groningen
112
0900 9229
0900 8844
www.9292.nl/en
(+31) (0)50 541 8452
University of Groningen
Academy building, Broerstraat 5,
9712 CP Groningen,
(+31) (0)50 363 5250
Places in the city centre to visit
What to do in your spare time when you are in Groningen? The city has a lot to offer. We
list a few possibilities here. You may also ask one of the coordinators for advice.
Restaurants
Mr Mofongo, Oude Boteringestraat 26
The place to go to for excellent dishes from all over the world for agreeable prices (€15€25,-) and a dish of the day for €10,-. The restaurant also has a nice cocktail bar upstairs,
and is located right around the corner of the Academy building.
Het Pannenkoekschip, Schuitendiep 1017
For something traditionally Dutch, try one of the tasteful pancakes at the ‘Pancake ship’,
located on an actual ship. Don’t fear seasickness though – the ship is still on the water, but
is placed on a giant block of stone and does not bob on the waves. Prices around €8-12,-.
De Uurwerker, Uurwerkersgang 24
This is the only restaurant in town that bakes its pizzas in a stone oven, which makes them
smell and taste deliciously. Not a fan of pizzas? Try a salad or one of the dishes on the
menu. Many locals spend the evening here enjoying a cold drink in the atmospheric yard.
NB: ordering is self service. Go to the bar/pay desk.
Cafés
De Drie Gezusters, Grote Markt 36/39
On a sunny day, the famously crowded sidewalk cafe of the Drie Gezusters is impossible to
overlook. Of course, it has a perfect location in the city centre, with a view on Grote Markt,
the old city hall and of course the Martini tower.
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Café-Restaurant Het Goudkantoor
Waagplein 1
A somewhat smaller café is located in a beautiful 400-year-old building in the centre of
Groningen, near the Grote Markt. Apart from coffee and cake, they also have a rather chic
menu.
See also De Uurwerker and Mr Mofongo (above)
Museums
Martini tower, Martinikerkhof 1
Although not so much of a museum, its view makes the Martini tower definitely worth
climbing. Buy your tickets to climb the 97 meters of the tower, also called ‘Olle grieze’ (‘old
grey one’), at the colourful building that houses the tourist office on the Grote Markt, right
across the street. €3,- (you can also buy a combination ticket to visit the Martini church as
well).
Groninger Museum, Museumeiland 1
Towering out of the water in front of Groningen Central Station is a beautiful building
housing the Groninger Museum. At the moment, there is an exhibition on David Bowie
(‘David Bowie is’) and a collection of works by the experimental Dutch designer and artist
Joris Laarman (‘Joris Laarman Lab’). Adults €13,-, students €10,-.
University Museum Groningen, Oude Kijk in ‘t Jatstraat 7A
Currently, the University Museum has an exhibition entitled ‘Copying the World’, with
plaster art from 1860-1960. Furthermore you can find here a series of objects showing the
University’s 400-year-existence and Aletta Jacobs’s consulting room. She was the first
female academic graduate, the first woman to obtain a PhD and the first female doctor in
the Netherlands. No entrance fee.
Tourist information office
Grote Markt 29, http://toerisme.groningen.nl/en/
A good place for more information on restaurants, cafés and museums, but also on city
walks, some beautiful places to visit, and souvenirs.
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