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2 results

  • Chapter 5 - Dedicated Inventions

  • from Part II - Technologies and Ritual Experience
  • Tatiana Bur, Australian National University, Canberra
  • Book:
    Technologies of the Marvellous in Ancient Greek Religion
    Published online:
    04 September 2025
    Print publication:
    24 July 2025, pp 125-184
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  • Summary

    Chapter 5 explores how technical ingenuity featured in the act of religious dedication in ancient Greek religion. Two epigrams (describing the Bes rhyton and the Lykon thēsauros) are taken alongside descriptions of pneumatic inventions in Philo of Byzantium and Hero of Alexandria’s technical manuals. Though not typically read together, Hellenistic epigram, and Philo and Hero’s texts all describe pneumatically enhanced dedications, and demonstrate, within the confines of their genres, how religious awe and technological capabilities were co-constructed and mutually reinforcing. The chapter then turns to the material record, examining traces of technically enhanced dedications in practice. Two examples are explored: wheeled tripods and articulated figurines. Both categories of votive objects show different ways in which the mechanical, human, and divine were configured. Both also stretch further back chronologically than the discussion of preceding chapters, allowing for discussion of texts including Iliad 18 on Hephaistos’ tripods, and Prometheus Bound, to think about the (mythic) prehistory of the phenomenon at hand.

Figurines in Hellenistic Babylonia
  • Miniaturization and Cultural Hybridity
  • Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper
  • Published online:
    19 December 2019
    Print publication:
    12 March 2020
  • In this volume, Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper investigates the impact of Greek art on the miniature figure sculptures produced in Babylonia after the conquests of Alexander the Great. Figurines in Hellenistic Babylonia were used as agents of social change, by visually expressing and negotiating cultural differences. The scaled-down quality of figurines encouraged both visual and tactile engagement, enabling them to effectively work as non-threatening instruments of cultural blending. Reconstructing the embodied experience of miniaturization in detailed case studies, Langin-Hooper illuminates the dynamic process of combining Greek and Babylonian sculpture forms, social customs, and viewing habits into new, hybrid works of art. Her innovative focus on figurines as instruments of both personal encounter and global cultural shifts has important implications for the study of tiny objects in art history, anthropology, classics, and other disciplines.