oh what a lovely sound
Dec. 15th, 2009 11:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbI was going to leave the internets and go to sleep, but my wonky shoulder has chosen this moment to seize up and object to me moving, so in the meanwhile, I write a blog post.
(And how annoying is it that I have a wonky shoulder? Foolish muscles. Foolish strain.)
It has been twelve weeks since the start of term, and a little longer since I started working on my thesis. Between then and this, I have learned:
- French excavation reports and scholarship are much, much easier to read than a graph with the labels in German;
- Isis became popular during the Hellenistic period, but due to lacunae in the archaeological record, it's very hard to trace the processes by which she became popular;
- Sarapis started out as more popular than Isis and ended up, in the Roman period, held in much less wide regard;
- Apuleius' The Golden Ass is on crack;
- the imagery thought to be related to Isis in grave stelae of Athens [E.J. Walters, 1988] may have started out as imagery associated with the royal women of Egypt, not Isis, and only quite late became co-opted into the goddess's iconographic repertoire [S. Ashton, 1999];
- water was associated with Isiac (and Sarapic) ritual, and the river Inopos on Delos may have had some relation, either mythic or ideological, to the Nile;
- we don't actually know much about Isiac cult at Delos or at Athens - we don't even know if there was a cult to Isis in Athens proper before the Roman period: the extant archaeological remains for the sanctuary are Hadrianic in date - or anywhere outside Egypt before the Roman period, because of said lacunae in the historical record;
- due to the Athenian hegemony in Delos after the mid second century BCE, Athens and Delos had very strong connections, and it is only from this point that we have evidence for growth in the cult of Isis and the identification of Isis with Tyche and Nemesis, among others, on Delos;
- reading inscription catalogues in French is hard;
- wow, the aretalogies are on crack and really make much of Isis instituting proper relations between men and women, inventing writing both hieroglyphic and demotic, making laws, having dominion over sea and storm, making things to grow, and instituting cities;
- and if the aretalogies are on crack, the hymns to Isis at the temple of Philae (think Aswan, and go south a bit) are even stranger in their own way
- Roman Isis is a whole different animal to Egyptian Isis, and Hellenistic Isis? Well, if there were a few less lacunae in the archaeological record, it'd be a hell of a lot easier to explain the process of evolution
- post-colonial theory uses many, many long words, and all I want to know about is hybridity and "colonising" religion by co-opting and exporting it, and whether "-isation" is a useful term to use.
There. And my shoulder complains less, so I go fall over now.
(And how annoying is it that I have a wonky shoulder? Foolish muscles. Foolish strain.)
It has been twelve weeks since the start of term, and a little longer since I started working on my thesis. Between then and this, I have learned:
- French excavation reports and scholarship are much, much easier to read than a graph with the labels in German;
- Isis became popular during the Hellenistic period, but due to lacunae in the archaeological record, it's very hard to trace the processes by which she became popular;
- Sarapis started out as more popular than Isis and ended up, in the Roman period, held in much less wide regard;
- Apuleius' The Golden Ass is on crack;
- the imagery thought to be related to Isis in grave stelae of Athens [E.J. Walters, 1988] may have started out as imagery associated with the royal women of Egypt, not Isis, and only quite late became co-opted into the goddess's iconographic repertoire [S. Ashton, 1999];
- water was associated with Isiac (and Sarapic) ritual, and the river Inopos on Delos may have had some relation, either mythic or ideological, to the Nile;
- we don't actually know much about Isiac cult at Delos or at Athens - we don't even know if there was a cult to Isis in Athens proper before the Roman period: the extant archaeological remains for the sanctuary are Hadrianic in date - or anywhere outside Egypt before the Roman period, because of said lacunae in the historical record;
- due to the Athenian hegemony in Delos after the mid second century BCE, Athens and Delos had very strong connections, and it is only from this point that we have evidence for growth in the cult of Isis and the identification of Isis with Tyche and Nemesis, among others, on Delos;
- reading inscription catalogues in French is hard;
- wow, the aretalogies are on crack and really make much of Isis instituting proper relations between men and women, inventing writing both hieroglyphic and demotic, making laws, having dominion over sea and storm, making things to grow, and instituting cities;
- and if the aretalogies are on crack, the hymns to Isis at the temple of Philae (think Aswan, and go south a bit) are even stranger in their own way
- Roman Isis is a whole different animal to Egyptian Isis, and Hellenistic Isis? Well, if there were a few less lacunae in the archaeological record, it'd be a hell of a lot easier to explain the process of evolution
- post-colonial theory uses many, many long words, and all I want to know about is hybridity and "colonising" religion by co-opting and exporting it, and whether "-isation" is a useful term to use.
There. And my shoulder complains less, so I go fall over now.
