11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Art History Department Schermerhorn 807
Rachel Kousser, “‘Living like a king:’ Integrating Persian and Macedonian Customs in the Feasts of Alexander the Great”
Abstract
Chryselephantine couches — exquisitely carved and gleaming with gold, glass, and ivory — are among the best preserved traces of the Hellenistic embrace of Persian customs. Well-documented in archaeological remains and written texts, the couches offer a concrete material lens through which to analyze the transfer of cultural knowledge about feasting: an ephemeral activity as significant for the courts of Alexander and his Successors as for their Achaemenid predecessors.
This paper draws on artifacts as well as epigraphic and literary texts to examine Alexander’s feasts and their relationship to Persia. It focuses particularly on chryselephantine couches, over forty of which have been preserved in the Macedonian tombs of Alexander’s officers. The couches show how these officers adopted luxurious Persian-style banqueting customs and exotic materials like ivory. At the same time, through their militaristic iconography and ivory medium, the couches celebrate the Macedonians’ defeat of Persians and their eastern conquests. In this way they show the significance — but also the limitations — of the global interconnectedness and integration brought about by the empire of Alexander.
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