Dying as a Macedonian in Egypt: Styling Social Identity through Hellenistic Burial Practices

Co-sponsored by the Institute of Fine Arts

Institute of Fine Arts, Lecture Hall, 1 E. 7th St., 6:30 PM

The lecture discusses the Hellenistic Necropoleis Of Alexandria in Egypt: the tombs, the finds, the paintings, Greco-Egyptian ideas on death and dying. We will be exploring Macedonian responses to death and dying, as well as the ways Macedonian mortuary habits were transmitted, transposed, developed and “edited”, once the Macedonians found themselves on top of the world, and in lands so different from their own. From Macedon to Asia and Egypt, and from Aigai and Mieza to Shatby, Macedonians had to renegotiate their fundamental beliefs on death and the afterlife, committing themselves to the amalgam we now understand as “Ptolemaic Alexandria”.

Biography

Dimitris Plantzos is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the Department of History and Archaeology at the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens. He holds a degree in History and Archaeology from Athens, and a master's degree and a DPhil in Classical Archaeology from the University of Oxford. Before his election to the University of Athens, he was an Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology at the Universities of Ioannina and Peloponnese, and a British Academy post-doctoral fellow at the University of Oxford. In Greece, he has also worked as a curator at the Museum of Cycladic Art and the Ilias Lalaounis Jewelry Museum.His research interests include ancient Greek art, archaeological theory, and modern receptions of classical culture. He has authored the monographs Hellenistic Engraved Gems (Oxford University Press 1999), Philostratos Imagines: Introduction, translation, comments (in Greek; Katarti 2006),The archaeologies of the classical. Revising the empiricist canon (in Greek; Eikostos Protos 2014), Greek art and archaeology, 1200-30 BC (in Greek; Kapon 2016), The recent future. Classical antiquity as a biopolitical apparatus (in Greek; Nefeli 2016), The art of painting in the ancient Greek world (in Greek; Kapon 2018), The Story of Lemnos. Myth – History - Heritage  Kapon 2022), Archaeopolitics (in Greek; Eikostos Protos 2023). He was editor (among others) of the volumes A Singular Antiquity. Archaeology and Hellenic Identity in Twentieth-Century Greece (with D. Damaskos, Benaki Museum 2008), A Companion to Greek Art (with T.J. Smith, Wiley–Blackwell 2018), and The Monuments of Others. Unwanted legacies on the fringes of memory and oblivion (in Greek; Nefeli 2023). Two of his books (Greek Art and Archaeology and The Art of Painting) are also published in English by the American publishing house Lockwood Press.

His articles and studies have been published in local and international scholarly journals, collective volumes, special journal issues, and university blogs. He has written entries for the Macmillan Dictionary of Art and the Oxford Classical Dictionary. 

He is the director of the Research Institute for Digital Humanities of NKUA, co-director (with D. Damaskos) of the Argos Orestikon University Excavation, several research programs internationally, and a member of the international archaeological mission to the Ptolemaic Cemetery of Shatby in Alexandria, Egypt.