Women in the Ancient Mediterranean world: roles and representation

This course will explore the representation of women in the Ancient Mediterranean World through examination of art and archaeology from the Early Bronze Age to the beginning of the Roman period, encompassing cultures such the Cycladic, Minoan, Mycenaean, or later Greek and Roman cultures. We will focus on how women were portrayed in Art (based on the evidence of the extant monuments, rather than on the information of the literary sources) and how their roles and influence transformed across two millennia - not least that of women as sponsors of art works or architectural projects and women as dedicators of statues and other offerings - from Cyprus to the eastern Aegean islands, and from Athens to the Greek colonies of south Italy. By using a set of carefully selected case studies of women and their representations in the Ancient World, this course will explore a broad range of thematics relating to women, including: the images and symbolism of the Mother-Goddess phenomenon in the Aegean Bronze Age; identities of women in the Near East; the relationship of women with the Family and the State during the Classical period, or the topic of women and Religion between the Archaic Greek period and the Roman times. Finally, we will examine how objects were used by women, even if men were responsible for the commission and the funding regarding these objects, or material culture categories.

Most of all we will examine why the study of gender in Mediterranean Archaeology – a relatively new field of enquiry, mainly developed over the last twenty or thirty years – remains one of the most vigorous and challenging areas of scholarship, a battleground where many theories and methodologies drawn from archaeology, sociology and anthropology, are still being tested.