Megan Daniels, Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek Material Culture at AMNE, has been awarded funding through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)’s 2022 Insight Development Grants competition. Congratulations!
Greek Terracotta dinos (mixing bowl) ca. 630–615 BCE featuring “Orientalizing” elements, found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Dr. Daniels’ project, entitled Re-Orienting “Orientalizing”: Intercultural Iconographies of the Mediterranean Iron Age, builds a deeper understanding of cross-cultural mobility and interaction in the Mediterranean Iron Age through the systematic study of widely disseminated religious iconographies. These iconographies were often described as “Orientalizing” elements in early Greek culture, based on contact with Egypt and the Near East. Yet the frequency and consistency with which they appear in sanctuaries in the Greek world between ca. 900 and 500 BCE, and their translation into local materials, suggests a much deeper integration between peoples across the Mediterranean and Near East.
With the help of three student research assistants, this project will gather data on iconography from five Iron Age sanctuaries into standardized databases that can be compared and visualized for patterns in this iconography, with the goal of arriving at more holistic (and hopefully more realistic!) accounts of social development and cultural interaction in this vibrant period of Mediterranean history.
Dr. Megan Daniels
To learn more, visit Prof. Daniels’ faculty profile, or check out Peopling the Past, a digital humanities blog about real people in the ancient world, where Daniels is blog editor. Recently, Daniels wrote about our contemporary conceptions of “east” and “west” in the context of the ancient city of Naukratis, located in the Nile Delta, and its role in 19th-century western European imaginations.
