In His Actions He Will Seem a Foreigner: Performative Indigeneity through Embodied Ritual in the “Mithras Liturgy”
By Dora Gao (University of Michigan)
The “Mithras Liturgy” (PGM IV.475–820) is perhaps the most famous text from the PGM IV, one of the longest extant papyri in an archive of Greco-Egyptian religious formularies likely found in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes. Dating to the fourth century CE, this long and extensive ritual for temporary immortalization details the experiences of a practitioner as they pass through seven planes of existence to achieve a divine consultation with the god Helios Mithras.
Religion and Birth Work in Late Ancient Roman Palestine
By Pratima Gopalakrishnan (Duke University)
This panel approaches local religious practice as a window into the multiplicity of lived experiences beyond the binary of “resistance” to or “assimilation” into an imperial center. This paper takes up that invitation by focusing on the practice of birth work as a site of interaction between Jews and non-Jews in late ancient Roman Palestine,
Not Roman or Phoenician, but Gaditanian: A Reevaluation of the Temple of Melqart at Gadir
By Leah F. Borquez (University of California, Berkeley)
In recent years, archaeological and geological surveys have revealed important new information about the landscape surrounding the Bay of Gadir and the Temple of Melqart in the city. Archaeologists have located the Temple underwater (Monterroso Checa, 2021), for example, and have recreated the seascape and coast lines of Gadir as a whole (Bernal-Casasola et al, 2020). In the wake of such findings, the Temple of Melqart at Gadir is overdue for a reevaluation.
What Makes a Good Neighbor?—Egyptian and Nubian Interactions on the Southern Egyptian Frontier
By Candace Buckner (Virginia Tech)
Recent scholarship on Rome and Nubia in Late Antiquity has noted how the burgeoning instability of the southern frontier mirrored a negative shift in the characterization of the peoples in the Upper Nile Valley (Burstein 2020:707–8). In particular, Christian Roman accounts of these areas and the people who inhabited them as increasingly painted at risk to barbarous and marauding entities from the south (Burstein 2020:707) or a population ripe for Christian imperialism (Dijkstra 2008:143–146).
North African Religion and Local Power
By Danielle Perry (University of Pennsylvania)
The Maghreb, the region of North Africa west of Egypt and north of the Sahara Desert, had been successively inhabited and colonized for millennia: first inhabited by the Berbers, then colonized by the Phoenicians, and eventually ruled by the Romans. By the Imperial period, the Maghreb was a site where cultural heterogeneity was constantly being negotiated and navigated.