Vortrag Dr. Nicola Barbagli (Pisa/Trier) im Rahmen des ZAT-Kolloquiums "Ägypten - Griechenland - Rom: Neue Forschungen"
Dr. Nicola Barbagli (Pisa/Trier): Roman obelisks: reception and diffusion of an Egyptian monument in the Roman world
Im Rahmen des ZAT-Kolloquiums "Ägypten - Griechenland - Rom: Neue Forschungen"
hält Herr Dr. Nicola Barbagli (Pisa/Trier) einen Vortrag über
Roman obelisks: reception and diffusion of an Egyptian monument in the Roman world.
Obelisks are as familiar a sight in Rome as the Colosseum or the remains of the imperial fora. Deeply integrated into the local cityscape, they still retain, to some extent, a foreign character: their form, materiality, and inscriptions betray, even to the untrained eye, their Egyptian origin. If this is true today, how did early Romans receive them? What purposes did they serve, and what did their inscriptions mean to them? This paper addresses these questions by providing an overview of the diffusion and understanding of obelisks in the Roman world from the first century BC to the fourth century AD. Drawing on a wide range of archaeological, visual, and textual sources, and adopting a contextual and historically grounded approach, it examines how the conceptualisation of the obelisk varied across time and place, ultimately shedding light on how this typically Egyptian monumental form came to be integrated into imperial culture.
