This chapter discusses the agency of objects in cultural and stylistic classifications (or taxonomies) and the consequences of modern and ancient categorisation for the interpretation, use, and perception of objects in the Roman world. Both within modern scholarship and in antiquity, the role and agency of objects in classification is vital, albeit on different levels. It should be stipulated that material agency in this chapter is not meant as bestowing life, personhood, or intention on objects. Instead, material agency is proposed as the power that style or objects have to affect human intentions and behaviour. Stemming from their apparent role within cultural classification schemes, Egyptian(-styled) objects in Roman Italy are used as a case study to highlight the complex role of object agency in categorisation. Furthermore, as the objects found in domestic contexts are less subject to imperial-political decision making, these are considered a good way of elucidating agency and categorisation processes. It could be suggested, moreover, that Egyptian artefacts (Aegyptiaca) in Roman houses have suffered exponentially from the traditional symbolic, historical, political top-down interpretations, in which they were taken as religious or exotic, and treated as a distinct collection on the basis of stylistic properties. In this respect, it is not only important to re-evaluate the process of classification, but also to investigate the effect that such artefacts themselves could instigate. I argue that our understanding of objects in the Roman world can be significantly improved through a critical application of methods and theories from the recent material turn in archaeology.
The ‘material turn’ is now approximately a decade old, and by fits and starts a number of critical voices have emerged (e.g. Barrett 2014; Gardner 2004; Graves-Brown 2013; Lindstrøm 2015. See Robb 2010 for a historiography of ‘agency’). Although a few scholars have discarded material agency altogether as a flawed social theory or a re-invented empiricism after post-processual archaeology (considered overtly anthropocentric by its opponents), most critical voices warn against one-sided views of how agency as a term is applied, against the reductionist approach of object-oriented philosophy focusing too much on material, and against the sometimes simplistic and conflicting views on the relations between objects and human beings (Lindstrøm 2015, 207–38; Harman 2015, 94–110; Fowler and Harris 2015, 127–48; Sørensen 2013, 1–18). Such criticisms are useful for their realisation that it is not only the object that moves people, and for drawing attention to the particularities of different socio-physical environments. The agency of objects should never be accounted for in isolation, nor should we conceive agency as having only one significance in terms of power and directionality when human-object relationships are concerned (Mol 2013; 2015). In fact, object agency may be a dangerous theory for archaeology, running the risk of granting too much power to the material remains of past societies. Objects have the power to shape and move people, but human beings are not slavish followers of material constraints; they find ways of using them differently, alter their meaning, appearance or physical workings (Knappett 2005). Their relationships are more complex and multifaceted than a term like ‘symmetrical’ suggests (Webmoor and Witmore 2008, 53–70; Graves-Brown 2013), and although society is built up from things, things do not exist or act out agency without people, they rather co-exist in complex and dynamic networks of being and becoming.
To date, Roman archaeology has not been at the forefront of the debate on materiality; but it has lots to gain from it, and to offer to it. In contrast to many other ‘archaeologies’, Roman archaeology has a dominant historical basis, and has only recently begun to explore other avenues. The historical knowledge of the Roman past is exhaustive, and it is human agency that forms the principal framework for this knowledge. Roman archaeologists must therefore weigh the value of words and ideas, both in history and historiography, when making interpretations. Materialising Roman Histories, as the book title proposes, is therefore not only a useful initiative, but a necessary one, as it balances the prevailing human agency in the writing of Roman history. However, because of the existing conceptual burden, a different view can only be brought about by carefully integrating the power of objects into the present frames of textual and visual knowledge. Can we understand Roman history from objects? Using theories from the material turn is not only valuable to Roman history as counterbalance to the written word; because Roman archaeologists are continuously forced to take a nuanced approach due to the existence of texts, images, and objects, they are able to add to the general theory of materiality and object agency in archaeology. In other words, Roman archaeology might be able to ‘soften’ the material turn. This book and its contributions do not promise to re-write history, but to materialise it, to show where objects and environmental processes outside human intentionality mattered and what objects did while people made decisions.
In order to evaluate object agency – i.e. how objects shape our minds and influence Roman history – it is useful to analyse the emergence of mental classification and categorisations. Classifications or taxonomies are cultural constructs made to describe the external world, and are at the same time influenced by the world itself, in a process also called ‘ecological hermeneutics’. Although classifications are perceived as static bounded entities (otherwise they would not function), in effect they are a continuously changing network of links. As classifications are used to understand the world, exploring their dynamics and the influence of form and matter on this process is able to inform both about existing and changing worldviews. This starts with the scholar him- or herself: when considering relationality and object agency it is important to acknowledge that the object of study is not detached from the study itself. A ‘thing’ is what it is because of the precise configuration of relations that comprise it at any moment, and the investigator is part of that configuration too. For this reason, the scientific entanglement with Egypt forms an important part of the analysis (see Barad 2007, 91–2).
Cultural labels are powerful guiding elements when studying Roman material culture: Greek, Etruscan, Egyptian, Archaic, Classical; these classifications are based on form and appearance, on stylistic properties. The main problem is that such labels seem to have slowly concealed how objects were categorised by their users, thereby obscuring how cultural styles might have played roles in the past. Another issue is that categorisation, both modern and ancient, is an automatic process that occurs largely unconsciously. This makes studying classifications not only significant to learn about the Roman world, it also becomes relevant on a historiographical and methodological level. Our current knowledge about the Roman world was shaped through these unconscious existing taxonomies, by academics and non-academics alike. As Bianchi Bandinelli aptly put it, ‘The art of the Roman period, like Greek art, is part of a widely disseminated cultural pattern. It is precisely for this reason that the underlying historical truths have acquired such a thick incrustation of commonplace judgements, affecting the specialist as much as the man in the street’ (Bianchi Bandinelli 1970, ix). For these reasons scholars often fail to correctly classify something from a Roman viewpoint, mainly because of two causes: (1) automatic reliance on modern categories or (2) arguing from scientifically constructed classification schemes. Neither of these represent Roman perception, but nonetheless they often cause an emic/etic confusion in which the scholarly classification becomes equated with Roman use. The elusive category of ‘Egyptian’ has suffered substantially from both types of errors in cultural classification.
How can this be overcome? Cultural taxonomies present an inherent difficulty inherited from their original counterparts developed in biology (invented by Linnaeus), which were not only seen as a useful ordering of the world, but as describing its truthful nature. However, even biological classifications are creations that do not fit all dynamics of nature (see Dunnell 1986; 2001, xiii–xxiv; Hurt and Rakita 2001). An ecological approach as emphasised in this chapter holds that things (objects in this case) are not determined by their logical relations within a classification scheme, but by their working relations with other things in their environment, in which the relations are prior to the things related, and the systemic ‘wholes’ are prior to their component parts (Baird Callicot 1996, 199–200). It therefore strongly emphasises relationality and perception of the environment as the basis for categorisation. When carefully dissecting categorisation schemes, it might be possible to design a new way of looking at style, and point to some of the dangers involved in classifications made on the basis of cultural styles. These dangers, however, also prove to be important, because they illustrate the large influence that objects and their appearance have had on the human mind outside of human awareness.
Another important point that arises from this chapter on object agency is that although some objects move us (emotionally and consciously such as art works, or physically like walls), it can be argued that all objects shape us. This means that not all objects have a conscious effect on human behaviour, but that they do affect human beings in some (not always tangible) way. This less tangible impact of objects on humans becomes most evident when regarding categorisation as a neurological aptitude. A wine glass is a mundane object that does not catch immediate conscious attention – in our everyday use it goes un-interpreted. However, the material and form of the glass elicit a certain mental concept of a glass; its form dictates how to drink, and thereby unconsciously affects how we use it (Gibson 1979), but also how we think of it. It affects how different drinking vessels and different glass objects are valued and thereby aids in the creation of a category. This shows that categories such as ‘drinking vessels’ are usually formed from what can be observed in a person’s immediate surroundings. When unknown things are encountered, they become automatically added to the category or discarded depending on whether they fit the category. In some cases, depending on certain factors that will be discussed below, objects might even stretch the category. Categorisation is an ecological feature showing that we understand the world through objects and therefore objects form our view of the world. For this reason, it is of considerable importance to take Roman material culture into account when regarding its conceptual history. Can Roman ontology be understood better by looking at objects?
Although not often featuring explicitly in literary sources, scholars have connected Egyptian-style objects to political and historical events. This begins with Augustus’ defeat of Marc Antony and the annexation of Egypt, which was physically commemorated through raising an obelisk on the spina of the Circus Maximus. During the reign of Augustus an alleged wave of Egyptian objects (commonly described as ‘Egyptomania’) reached Italy due to the easier transfer of objects after Egypt became a Roman province. All things Egyptian-looking in Italy were either interpreted by scholars to belong to the Isis-cult or to Augustus’ capture of Egypt, including Egyptianising wall paintings, the pyramidal grave monument of Cestius, the miniature obelisk copied from the Circus Maximus in the Horti Sallustiani and countless smaller artefacts imported from Egypt or made to look that way (Van Aerde 2015 for an overview). The objects and influences assigned to this Egyptomania were automatically labelled by scholars as ‘Oriental’, ‘exotic’, and ‘Other’. Augustus’ negative reaction to the Isis cults added to these ideas and reinforced the connection between the concepts of Egypt and Isis in relation to material culture (Orlin 2008, 231–53). Another prominent historical point in time concerning Egyptian objects is the Flavian period, especially illustrated through the refurbishment of the Iseum Campense by Domitian after the great fire of AD 80, which again linked the use of particular objects to a clear historical event. Under his auspices, the sanctuary not only saw the erection of a multitude of obelisks, he also imported a tremendous number of statues of Egyptian deities and animals from Egypt to redecorate the sanctuary. Through this particular event it is argued that the Flavians purposely re-Egyptianised the temple and forever changed the concept of Egypt in Rome (Versluys 2017a, 8–9; 2013a, 252).
As can be noted, in all these cases the objects clearly function to symbolise representational concepts, such as political power or elite status, and explanations depend on human intentions and historical individuals. Did Roman classifications change after the influx of different objects, and can we trace that through studying how objects were used? Of course, the obelisk of Augustus fell within the category ‘Egyptian’ at the moment of its installment, as it was literally inscribed on the object itself (for the use of obelisks see Parker 2007, 209–22; Curran et al. 2009; Versluys 2010, 7–36; Swetnam-Burland 2010, 135–53). A more harmful effect of the preoccupation with historical evidence, however, is the tendency of an event such as the Iseum Campense reconstruction to somehow dictate the use and meaning of all other objects that look Egyptian. This is why it is important to investigate how objects were used and how they behaved in ancient classifications, when analysed apart from the scientific cultural label Egyptian. The main question in historical terms is therefore not what Augustus or the Flavians intentionally did to the image of Egypt or of Isis, but what the objects did in the Augustan and Flavian period that could accommodate such decisions.
Before moving to the objects in question, it is important to further elucidate some of the scholarly problems concerning classification, the act of classifying, and the role of the object herein. As briefly discussed, two types of classification (although linked to the same neurological principles) are used to interpret Roman material stylistically. The first are scientific sequential period styles, first introduced in Classical Archaeology by Winckelmann for classical sculpture (in which he made an ordering according to style instead of location, later redefined by Wölfflin: see Winckelmann 1764; Wölfflin 1915). Winckelmann and Wölflinn’s work, and the works they inspired throughout art history and archaeology, made style and stylistic analysis an inherent part of the archaeologist’s vocabulary. Criticisms of these cultural styles are part and parcel of the vocabulary too. However, both through use and through criticism they have shaped a framework that still guides how ancient art is viewed today. In this vein, it is especially problematic that these art historical classification schemes of Greco-Roman art slowly became equated with a Roman perspective. Mapping small stylistic differences in isolated objects that are studied in a museum-context, as Winckelmann did, produced different perceptions and categories to the Roman emic ones (although Winckelmann’s schemes were nonetheless based on comparable neurological principles in terms of perception in ecological use-contexts: the objects at his disposal and the room in which he made his observations hugely influenced his final categorisations – see Pommier 2003; Harloe 2013).
The second type of categorisation that complicates emic object analysis in Roman archaeology is the influence of the modern analyst’s internal classification systems, as shaped by automatic responses to modern environments in everyday life. This can be illustrated in a conceptual network constructed on the basis of questionnaires, which in this case shows the modern concepts to which Egypt is associated. Fig. 12.1 depicts the network of associations (semantic network) concerning the concept ‘Egypt’, based on interviews with students from different disciplines in the central library of the University of Amsterdam in May 2014, as mapped in the network software program Gephi. Although the survey contained no proper statistical analysis, it serves as a useful point of departure to explain how classification principles work and how objects and the environment play a role this process. It shows the difference between modern associations and those of the past concerning the concept of ‘Egypt’.
The most frequently occurring concept linked to ‘Egypt’ (the most central node) listed by all participants was ‘pyramids’ (Fig. 12.1). ‘Mummies’ and ‘desert’ also occurred often. Secondly, the reference to ‘General Sisi’ and the ‘Muslim brothers’ are the only contemporary concepts covered in the news at the time of the questionnaire. Looking closely at all the answers, there are very few abstract concepts (‘violence’, ‘dry’, and ‘magic’ occur, but are not directly related to the concept ‘Egypt’). Most are objects or visual images, derived from our knowledge through books, travels, museums and movies. This shows that visually based entities principally created our image of Egypt. What is the role of objects? Concepts of course are not given entities, like physical objects, but are actively derived from the world of objects via abstraction (Klaus 1973, 214). Any concept formation and any semantic relation has an ecological foundation (Hjørland 2009, 1519–36). The immediate physical environment is of fundamental importance in the creation of classifications, something which also increasingly has been established by studies from linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, and biology (Rogers et al. 2003, 625–62; Hjørland 2009; Noë 2004; 2009; Gibson 1979). However, the small survey teaches something more about classification in general, the role of objects, and its relation to Egypt. Although the world is more complex and dynamic than humans can cope with, the fact that humans constantly categorise and try to make their world less dynamic is significant in itself. Through the storage of mental representations (concepts) and the subsequent categorisation of these concepts, the world may be made sense of. These are cognitive brain functions without which humans would not be able to cope with new information.
Figure 12.1 Modern semantic network of the concept ‘Egypt’.
The encounter of a new unseen marble statue would be an impossible task if it could not be stored in a mental category of other objects. Concepts do not exist independently of one other, but are interlinked. The relations between such concepts are known as ‘semantic relations’ (Stock 2010, 1951–69; Khoo and Na 2006, 157–228; Storey 1993, 455–88). These semantic relations in the brain work through a complex set of storage capabilities, linked to hierarchies, symbolism, and visual input. On the most superficial scale semantic relations can be defined on the basis of a couple of premises: resemblance (Wittgenstein 1953) and co-occurrence. When things resemble each other, they are likely to be linked, such as cats and panthers, for instance. When things do not resemble, but usually occur together they are also linked, as for instance water and boats, or bacon and eggs. Wittgenstein argued in his Philosophische Untersuchungen that things formerly thought to be connected by one essential common feature were in fact connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature was common to all (Wittgenstein 1953).
The relations between concepts are more complex and dependent on different types of existing relations that can vary in different contexts. According to Barsalou there exists a wide variety of relational concepts, including spatial relations (e.g. between seat and back in the frame for chair), temporal relations (e.g. between eating and paying in the frame for dining out), causal relations (e.g. between fertilisation and birth in the frame for reproduction), and intentional relations (e.g. between motive and attack in the frame for murder) (Barsalou 1992, 35–6). The greater the similarity, or the more often they occur together, the stronger the association between them. These workings are universal but the associations are very much environmentally and culturally based. If someone has never seen a panther, this will not become an association, no matter how much it looks like a cat, and the same goes when one is not used to eating bacon with eggs (Storey 1993, 455–88). Although archaeologists tend to be very much focused on the phenomenon of resemblance within classifications, co-occurrence usually receives less attention, while it plays a large role in the creation of categorisations – not only in antiquity, but also in historiography (work has been done in the context of contextual ecology, e.g. Butzer 1982, and on analytical correspondence and its consequences for social practice, e.g. Pitts 2010b).
Through the highly evolved and automatic classification system of the human brain, co-occurrence facilitates the creation of links that were not present in the past, which has a huge effect on the modern interpretation of objects. This becomes pointedly apparent in museum exhibitions, in which Egyptian objects used to be physically separated from other cultural styles, helping to create the impression that these objects were categorised as a single discrete group. The physical separation of objects from their use-contexts is effectively an altered co-occurrence on the basis of resemblance that influences how people view the past. The process of this alienation of objects is called artefaction: the transformation of objects from material culture in use and finds contexts to isolated artefacts in museums (Colla 2007). This shows not only how ‘Egypt’ as a style was created for the modern world, but also the way concepts and objects could become ‘enframed’ as static bounded entities within academic reasoning, and the further consequences this had for the interpretation of past objects.
With the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, the relation between Egypt and Rome changed significantly, resulting in what was believed to be an ‘exotic crave’ for Egyptian material culture in Rome and Italy. This is, however, based on modern classification systems of what Egyptian entails. A semantic graph such as shown in Fig. 12.1 is impossible to construct for an ancient situation due to the lack of conceptual data; however, realising how dependent categories are on the visual and physical environment, a detailed contextual object analysis might be able to retrieve some comparable semantic relations. This section provides two case studies of objects that were traditionally classified to belong to the conceptual category ‘Egyptian’ – sphinxes and Egyptian-styled wall paintings, and analyses of their ecological-semantic networks to see how they informed Roman emic categories.
The Egyptian sphinx is usually differentiated from its Greek counterpart by its reclining pose, male identity, absence of wings, and pharaonic headgear (nemes); it features regularly in Italian contexts in the Roman period, is sometimes linked to Isis in the Iseum Campense in Rome or the Iseum in Pompeii, and in other cases far removed from cultic use, such as the sphinx statues in Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli or in the gardens of Roman Pompeii. Egyptian sphinx-materialisations in Roman Italy were occasionally imported from Egypt, but could also be made locally, and appeared in a variety of materials such as greywacke, granite, marble, terracotta, painting, or bronze. The large variety of size, material and settings should already caution against a single meaning and purpose; and whether the sphinx was in all cases experienced as culturally Egyptian should be questioned. A telling example is the small marble sphinx-statue found at a canal in the garden of the Casa di Octavius Quartio (II 2,2) in Pompeii (Fig. 12.2). After it was stylistically identified as Egyptian, and through a small peripheral painting of an Isis priest located in a very different section of the house, the whole canal was consequently interpreted as symbolising the Nile and the inhabitant of the house as a priest of Isis, despite the many other attested statues that had no direct connection to Egypt in either style or subject (Della Corte 1932; Maiuri 1947). Although this view has been nuanced in recent research (Tronchin 2011; Mol 2016), it remains a recurrent interpretation in publications on the house.
Figure 12.2 Marble Sphinx from the Casa di Octavius Quartione (II 2,2), Pompeii. Soprintendenza Pompei, Inv. 2930. De Caro 2006, fig. III.134, p. 211.
Figure 12.3 Painting of a marble sphinx statue from the north wall of the peristyle of the Casa del Peristilio (VII.6.28), Pompeii. PPM VII, fig. 6, p. 187.
Did sphinxes belong to the category of ‘Egyptian’? Looking in more detail at the object-network that made up the visual environment of Pompeians shows quite a different image. This becomes notably clear regarding sphinxes in Pompeian wall painting, which accommodate a popular tradition of depicting marble sphinx statues in garden settings (Fig. 12.3). The sphinxes painted on the walls have a few recurrent characteristics: they are all depicted as statues instead of living creatures, they are portrayed to convey white marble, and they all were without exceptions connected to water features, either painted on the wall, or real features in proximity such as fountains, canals, or nymphaea.
As sphinxes were either positioned near a fountain or painted as fountain themselves, a cognitive relation between the concepts of sphinxes and water therefore seems evident (Mol 2015, 246–50). In style, however, sphinxes are quite varied: there are Egyptian sphinxes (in the Casa di Bracciale d’Oro), more Classical-styled sphinxes, Greek Archaic sphinxes and sphinxes that combine multiple styles. Wherever the original basis lies for the strong semantic connection between white marble sphinx statues and water, it was strongly present in first century AD Pompeii. This connection makes it much more understandable why a marble sphinx statuette ended up alongside the canal than through the top-down understanding of the scholarly classification of Egypt. The object is therefore also not particularly used to ‘exoticise’ the garden or to show religious preferences; placing the sphinx at this specific location derived from a Pompeian tradition that linked water to marble sphinx statues. The statuette, being displayed among other marble sculptures such as a young Hercules, a river god, a herm of Dionysus, and several animals such as dogs and lions, was selected for its material (marble), and its subject, and was clearly not classified according to cultural style.
A different sphinx-object that was likewise identified as both Isiac and as an exotic expression of Egyptomania is a bronze Egyptian sphinx that functioned as a table foot in the Casa dell’Ara Massima (VI 16,15) (De Vos 1980, 93; Mol 2015, 251) (Fig. 12.4). The modest middle class house was named after a large painted altar in the centre, which did not feature Isis or anything else related to Egypt. The bronze sphinx table foot, probably imported from Alexandria in Egypt, was placed in one of the cubiculi. If the category ‘Egyptian’ is discarded in favour of attempting to retrieve Roman semantic networks, can its use be explained?
As with the painted statuettes, tables in Pompeii also have a long history in which the sphinx as a subject plays a substantial role. It can be observed that decorated Roman tables all display so-called ‘mischwesen’, otherworldly creatures such as griffins, lions, phoenixes, and sphinxes (Moss 1988; Mol 2015, 251–4). Again, the tradition might be much older than Roman tables, because the sphinx as a creature was present on the Italian peninsula already from the Archaic period onwards, when so-called ‘Orientalising’ motives appeared due to contact with the East, which ultimately culminated in diverse appropriations of the influence in Hellenistic and Roman material culture. Such Orientalising motives also had a long history of cultural exchange between many societies in Greece, Egypt, and the Levant before they reached Italy (Riva 2006). The result in Roman table-decoration is that a mixture of all kinds of these creatures in a variety of styles and materials became present throughout Roman Italy (Moss 1988). Many of them, especially the marble tables with two slabs as feet, also render the creatures in an Oriental style, but this is not a general rule. The marble table found in the Casa del Fauno (VI 12,2) displays a sphinx foot in a distinctively classicising style (according to Zanker an expression of political loyalty towards the Augustan regime: Zanker 1988, 269), and a Hellenistic-styled bronze table with sphinxes could also be found (for example a bronze tripod table with sphinxes from Pompeii: MANN inv. No. 72995). The reason to choose a table with a sphinx-decoration in the Casa dell’Ara Massima seems to have stemmed from a time-honoured Roman tradition in table decoration, not from Isis-worship. It can most likely be excluded that the furniture was considered exotic or out of place on the basis of style (although the fact that it was an import of precious material and high level artistry might have played a role within social value systems). The category of perception was created not in terms of its cultural style, but in terms of its function, use, and subject.
Figure 12.4 Bronze table support in the form of an Egyptian sphinx. From Casa dell’Ara Massima (VI 16,15), Pompeii. MANN inv. no. 130860. From De Caro 2006, fig. III.133, p. 210.
These examples demonstrate that ancient classifications and associations can be retrieved when paying attention to ecological context and different networks of physical and visual objects. This does not mean of course that the objects did not also function in other networks, but it does show that this semantic network created a category decisive for their implementation and use. It also demonstrates that cultural style is not always a leading element within these classifications, but that use and material played a crucial role. Does this mean that style only has an unintentionally shaping agency and never a consciously moving one? While one of the main arguments of this chapter is that style need not have been the primary characteristic on which Romans categorised their material culture, this does not mean it should be completely dismissed. There are cases in which cultural style was the defining element of its classification and where Egyptian style was intentionally applied to express certain values. An example of this might be the Egyptian-style sphinx made of local red clay that featured in the Iseum of Pompeii (Fig. 12.5). It is generally assumed that the coarse red clay was purposely used to resemble Egyptian granite and therefore appeared more genuinely Egyptian. Emphasising the Egyptian as such was presumably more important for Isis priests than for the average Pompeian citizen. However, here it is apparent that the agency of style (how the object appeared) was more important than its physical provenance, for it evidently did not matter whether the sphinx was from Egypt, only that it looked that way. This suggests that Romans dealt with concepts of authenticity in a very different way to modern western society.
Figure 12.5 Terracotta sphinx from the Iseum of Pompeii, found in the Sacrarium. MANN inv.no 22572. From De Caro 2006, fig. III.135, p. 211.
The second case study in this chapter concerns Egyptian-styled wall paintings. These paintings show a ‘typical’ Egyptian style with a flat rendering of human figures (with the head and legs displayed en profil and the shoulders en face), depicting pharaohs, offering scenes, or Egyptian animals. There are not many surviving paintings from this category, but Egyptian- or pharaonic-styled wall paintings have been attested in a number of houses in Pompeii such as the Casa del Frutteto (Claudian, around AD 40) and in the Villa of Postumus in Boscotrecase (Augustan, around 10 BC). The paintings of the so-called ‘Black Room’ and ‘Mythological Room’ of the Villa of Agrippa Postumus, cubiculi overlooking the bay of Naples, show panels with Egyptianising offering scenes (Fig. 12.6a–b). The Casa del Frutteto in Pompeii was a modest house, but its first cubiculum after the entrance in the atrium space housed lavish scenes comparable to those at Boscotrecase: an architectural frame depicting Egyptian offering scenes and animals. The scenes were traditionally interpreted as part of the Egyptomania wave and its taste for the exotic, ‘reflecting a fashion which became especially popular in the decorative arts after the annexation of Egypt in 31–30 BC’ (Ling 1991, 39). Like the sphinx statues, the paintings received a historically based top-down interpretation, making it equally useful to explore their semantic relations.
Egypt is present in the Second and Third Pompeian Style, the latter connected to Augustus. The Second Style, also referred to as the architectural style, was characterised by an interest in creating illusionistic architectural vistas and ran approximately from 60 to 20 BC. The Third Style is dated between 20 BC and AD 40. Egypt in the Second Pompeian style can be observed in the Villa of Livia and the Aula Isiaca in Rome (between 30 and 25 BC), in the form of Nilotic scenes, vegetalised columns, Egyptian crowns, lotus flowers, a frieze with uraei and beaked water jugs; possibly perceived as Egyptian subjects, but never explicitly rendered in a pharaonic-Egyptian style (see Rizzo 1939 for the paintings of the house of Livia; for the relation of Nilotic scenes to Egypt and the re-interpretation of them in terms of this new methodology see Mol 2015, 256–91). Egyptian-related images in the Third Style are represented in the Villa of Agrippa Postumus, Villa della Farnesina (around 20 BC) and in the Casa del Frutteto (Late Third): the Frutteto and Agrippa Postumus examples display Egyptian styled wall-paintings, and the Villa della Farnesina (the alleged house of Agrippa and Octavia) shows a representation of an Isis figure emerging from a vegetal candelabrum (for the paintings of the Villa della Farnesina, see Mols and Moormann 2008; for Casa di Augusto see Carettoni 1983, 373–419; for details of Alexandrian influence on Roman art see Pensabene 1993, 140).
The imagery inside these residences contained artistic references that related to Egypt in different ways but have all been interpreted as closely connected to Augustan politics. Was this difference in rendering, in displaying style, related to a change in the way in which Egypt came to be perceived after Augustus? I argue that it was not, and that it instead has more to do with style perception and the medium of wall painting. It is generally accepted that the overall purpose of Roman wall paintings was to make allusions to larger worlds and scenes, both physically by means of painted vistas and symbolically by means of mythological related images, resulting in the exclusion of human figures or scenes from everyday life (Wallace-Hadrill 1994, 17–28; Zanker 2008, 23–33). In spite of this aim to create fantasy worlds, there had to be some realism in order to convey and communicate the symbolic; to make the fantasy work as an allusion. What the development of the Third Style brought as an innovation to the Second was the implementation of isolated frames and panels in the form of architectural features. In such panels one could easily apply more divergent styles and subjects, as it was no longer part of the ‘real’ scene and did not represent something ‘living’ but something abstract or architectural. These frames therefore allowed painters much more artistic freedom to play with styles such as the Egyptian. It could be recognised, used and copied, but was never considered realistic or integrated in the main frame.
An important deduction can be made with regard to Egypt as the alleged ‘Other’, which might put the historically based argument of Egyptian material culture in a slightly different perspective: Egypt was not seen as the embodiment of the ‘Other’ per se, and for that reason adopted in wall paintings, but was visually externalised as a result of a Roman development in wall painting. This alienation of Egyptian style in wall painting is reflected in the architectural frames of the villa of Agrippa Postumus in Boscotrecase as well as the Casa del Frutteto in Pompeii. However, this seems to be a result of the development of painting styles rather than political ideas surrounding Egypt, a view which is sustained by the paintings from the Villa della Farnesina. While a painting of the goddess Isis in this case was rendered in a non-pharaonic style, as she was part of the ‘real’ scene, the paintings of the Villa did depict similar architectural frames as the Egyptian frames in the Boscotrecase Villa and the Casa del Frutteto, with a similar composition showing deviant styles on externalised architectural features. In this case however, it was not Egyptian but Greek style that became framed: archaising images within a golden frame and a white background, supported by means of winged female figures standing on pedestals (Fig. 12.7). The painting technique (pale colours on a white background) recalls archaic lekythoi, and the style was deliberately applied in order to establish a stylistic contrast to the regularly (Roman) styled background. This example serves to underline that it was the use of style in Roman wall painting that externalised Egypt as something different, not a prior concept of Egypt as foreign.
All things that were regarded as ‘Egyptian’ or ‘foreign’ by scholarly classification schemes, appear in this analysis to be part of various categories, involving more complex relations not always based on style. Depending on the context, cultural style could still matter, but at many other occasions different concepts structured the semantic network and subsequent use and perception. Whether intentionally used as Egyptian or not, all uses were dictated by resemblance in relation to co-occurrence in local traditions and were locally established understandings. It is possibly too large a leap to connect this finely developed network of associations to the city of Rome. Nevertheless, the small-scale patterns that are witnessed in the towns of Campania might well reflect broader trends, and can in this way be used as a micro-environmental case study for an exploration on a wider scale.
Figure 12.6 The Egyptianising paintings from the villa at Boscotrecase. Top: Black Room (19), upper section, left panel north wall, in Boscotrecase. Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. No 20.192.2. Bottom: fragment from the Mythological Room (15), upper section west wall. Inv. Metropolitan Museum of Art No 20192.13.
Figure 12.7 Greek archaising scenes in the two white-coloured panels, from the Villa della Farnesina. Moormann and Mols 2008, fig. 28, p. 29.
I now return to the public domain of human agency and history – a domain in which Augustus places dedicatory obelisks in Rome, bans the Isis cults from the pomerium, and yet has his house and that of his inner circle decorated with Egyptian and Isiac imagery. As discussed above, it was a development in Roman wall painting that made it possible to connect Egyptian-Pharaonic style to the concept of the exotic or alien. This development is therefore more informative about traditions in Roman wall painting than that it reflects contemporary thoughts on Egypt or Augustus’ political influence on art and culture. However, in the context of the historical implications in relation to object agency it must be added that the development also did something. The possibility of playing with styles and images in wall painting under Augustus added something important to the allusion of the exotic and the otherworldly desired in Roman wall painting of this period (Zanker 2008), which urgently raises the question of object agency. Even when the use of Egyptian-styled painting should be regarded a less intentional and less political phenomenon than previously believed, with these new developments in wall paintings, the artistic externalisation of Egypt together with its change in style had consequences for how it became perceived in the Augustan Age. The effect of using style in this way was that Egypt became isolated and separated, allowing it to become foreign, exotic, and strange within Roman perception. This means that the style itself sometimes had the agency to change the concept of Egypt into something deviant, and not the other way around.
The appropriation of the sphinx in the Roman world showed that it could be used in various styles for various purposes, and that seeing an Egyptian sphinx did not necessarily fall within the cultural frame of ‘Egypt’. It seems to fit into a pre-Augustan category of an already well-integrated subject to which new but similar objects could be automatically added. Pompeii shows countless examples of sphinxes used as fantastic creatures. It is valuable to compare this ingrained local Roman tradition witnessed at Pompeii with the refurbishing of the Iseum Campense in Rome, geographically apart, but executed in more or less the same time frame – two or three years after Pompeii was destroyed by the Vesuvius (for a discussion on Domitian and the rebuilding of the Iseum Campense see Sorek 2010; Versluys 2017a; Boyle and Dominik 2003; Galimberti 2016, 92–108; Gallia 2016, 148–65). What did the emperor Domitian (or his workforces) choose from the available Egyptian material?
Many obelisks, imported and locally made, were recognisable for Roman citizens because they had adorned the city for almost a century after Augustus. It is likely that the obelisks were consciously selected (albeit in a larger quantity) because they did not signify ‘Egypt’ as much as the power of the emperor – in this case the choice is therefore an intentional political decision playing upon the category of ‘Egyptian’. However, there are also a notably large number of statues of lions and sphinxes – the same mischwesen already largely present within a Roman mental category shaped by tables, paintings and statues.1 So was it intentionally re-Egyptianised? Perhaps, but the work executed under the rule of Domitian was not original, nor did it change the idea of Egypt: it acted upon an already slowly developed semantic network that was afforded by the material culture present in Roman Italy and interlinked through co-occurrence.
It seems that the choices that were made for sculpture have been influenced by subjects that fitted into a Roman classification of material culture, unintentionally recognised because they already existed through objects in Rome and on the Italian peninsula and not because they were Egyptian or appeared Egyptian per se. They were imported as something new, but not as something completely alien. This means it was a category of Egyptian that was created, stretched, and transformed by the available objects in Rome: a Roman category of the Egyptian which existed next to countless other categories that included Egyptian objects that were never part of this classification.
Returning to the role that style played and the influence it had on people, a different picture emerges of Egyptian objects in the Roman world than that based on historical narratives. Style plays a role, but not in the way it is usually classified by archaeologists. Style indeed has a form of agency in categorisation, but in particular circumstances and within specific object-networks, and is therefore a far more intricate phenomenon than the simple application of modern stylistic categorisations suggests. A continuous historical framing of these objects as one distinctive category has furthermore obscured their Roman use and perception, creating on the one hand a stylistic foreignness and exoticism that was not always present, and on the other too anthropocentric a view on its development and integration. The analyses of Egyptian artefacts in the Roman domestic contexts of Pompeii demonstrate how complex and dynamic networks of materially and visually based projections, classifications of materials, style and concepts lie behind the everyday (aesthetically and socially guided) choice and use of objects. The choice for certain Egyptian objects and styles, or the implementation of it, was derived from existing mental categories. However, the influx of Egyptian objects could affect Roman classifications and stretch them; ranging from ‘tables’, ‘fountains’, and ‘garden decoration’ to ‘aesthetics’, and eventually (and unintentionally), also to ‘Egyptian’ and ‘Roman’.
What does this say about agency of style? Did Egypt as a style change things in Rome or Pompeii? First of all, it should be noted that a possible agency of style can only be regarded in cultural ecological terms. Under certain circumstances Egypt was used as a style, both in an intentional (moving) and unintentional (shaping) manner. Different networks of objects and concepts were changed in this way. It can additionally be stated that the concealed agency of Egyptian artefacts was able to change what was Roman, by not residing in semantic networks connected to the foreign, but in tables or water features; co-occurrence in social environments is able to affect categorisation to a crucial extent. Domestic units therefore might be the best way to illustrate how these processes work on a subconscious level, how they integrate and mesh within local frameworks without political intentions playing a decisive role. It is important to include these examples when studying material agency and not exclusively focus on imperial public buildings, because the latter were decorated with strong political intentions. A slight reappraisal is made in this case of Bianchi Bandinelli’s important theory on ‘arte plebea’, however, not as stylistic differences between the patrician and plebeian classes, but as a different bottom-up development through domestic use (Bianchi Bandinelli 1970, 51–105). It is the domestic contexts that show a more intuitive handling of things, and therefore might present a better view of unconscious but widely supported internal classification systems.
This chapter argues that objects play a significant role in mental classification systems and that the study of Roman history can be aided by acknowledging this more explicitly. Two important observations on the analysis of Egyptian artefacts emerge from the analysis to sustain this idea. First, a category of Egyptian was created in Roman Italy from local understanding and presence of objects that were not always Egyptian in the true sense. Second, objects circulating in scholarly categories of Egyptian might not have been used and perceived as such in antiquity. This gives a different understanding both to Egyptian material culture and its presumed relations to historical narratives, and to what ‘foreign’ and ‘internal’ material culture entailed for Romans. Studying domestic contexts alongside imperial uses of Egyptian style and objects shows this well, because the domestic contexts act from use, and are able to illuminate the undercurrents of object and style associations and perceptions.
This chapter also shows material agency to be a force that can work beyond that of conscious human agency. While this example of cultural classifications has focused on how Egyptian styles and objects might have affected human agency, it has broader significance for cultural and technical styles in the Roman world. The Classical, Oriental, Etruscan, Plebeian, Archaic, Provincial, Dacian, Indian: stylistic cultural-historical categorisations that made and transformed Rome might all be aided by a network re-evaluation that focuses on co-occurrence and resemblance in an ecological use-context. Initial deconstruction of how modern cultural taxonomies are obscuring networks of the past is thereby considered particularly useful. Before we materialise history, we need to know how concept and objects relate, and how the gap between the agency of matter and that of historical narrative can be bridged.
Using relationality and network theory to reveal the co-dependencies of the world of objects and the world of ideas avoids categorical interpretations in favour of relations, and sketches a more dynamic (and therefore more realistic) picture of object-human relationships, spread of techniques and artefacts (Mol 2013; 2015; Mol 2014; Brughmans 2013; Knappett 2011). The world is not an organised whole in which objects bend to human creation – humans (and human agency) are partly made through their dealings with objects. To materialise the Roman world therefore, it is necessary to realise that objects are real entities that enter into relations, but are also constituted from these relations. Furthermore, network theory in combination with object agency brings a new realism to scientific arguments by acknowledging that there is a world beyond the human grasp, the complexity of which might be better captured through the use of networks and the mapping of different ontologies.
The material turn has aided the realisation that overarching concepts of typological thinking and grand theories should be avoided, and that the focus should instead be on the dynamic practices and flows of becoming, complex assemblages, and heterogeneous relations (De Landa 2002, 42). This, however, should not dismiss human categorisation as a powerful tool and a constructive force. The focus on classification systems in this chapter shows clearly that human projection, which is concentrated on stasis, order, control, and boundaries, affects the understanding, use choice, and creation of other objects. Not everything is beyond representation. Trying to empirically integrate the dynamic nature of objects in complex systems as a source and force of creation with those of human classifications as a bounded perception is a daunting task, and one that Roman archaeology, with its complex and self-conscious historical, material, and historiographical entanglements, is perhaps best positioned to undertake.
I wish to thank the editors, Astrid Van Oyen and Martin Pitts, for inviting me to the symposium to share my ideas with such a diverse, stimulating, and knowledgeable audience, and for their incredibly useful critique on my paper during the publication process. For this latter point I also wish to express gratitude to my Leiden colleagues Marleen Termeer and Rogier Kalkers. I want to thank Martin and Astrid especially for the inspiration that the two of them – together and individually – have generated by setting up an important new agenda in Roman archaeology, and for their attempt to transform the study of Roman material culture in such a critical, ambitious and intelligent way. By papers, articles, and conferences – and with this publication as the most recent example – they have shown that Roman archaeology is taking a new turn, a turn which gives room to material culture as a vital instrument to understand the Roman world, but from an integrative perspective that embraces historical and art historical challenges, and is taking advantage of both the empirical and conceptual richness that the field has to offer. I hope there will be more future occasions to witness and be part of this development.
1. From the imports: five lions (nos 10–14 from the catalogue of Lembke), three sphinxes (nos 15–17), statues of deities (18, 19, 22, 23, 24, 28), baboons (20, 21) and other fragments of statues and naophorae (nos 25, 26, 27, 30–5). The statues that were produced locally contained three baboons (nos 36, 37, 38), a crocodile (39), three lions (41–3), two sphinxes (44, 45) and Domitian portrayed as a pharaoh (Lembke 1994, 221–53). For a discussion on style and material of the Iseum Campense, see Müskens 2017.
* Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University.
