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SELEUCID-PARTHIAN FIGURINES FROM BABYLON IN THE NIPPUR COLLECTION: IMPLICATIONS OF MISATTRIBUTION AND RE-EVALUATING THE CORPUS1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2016

Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper
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Abstract

This article formally documents an important correction to the provenance attribution of three reclining female figurines from Babylon that reside in the Nippur collection at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and were published with that corpus. Few scholars have noticed the misattribution of these figurines, and the problem has not been formally documented for scholarship. Through historiographical analysis of the late nineteenth century Nippur Expeditions and early twentieth century cataloguing and publication of the Nippur corpus, this article reconstructs how and why these three reclining figurines have been continually misassociated with Nippur, and traces the continued impact of this confusion on scholarship's understanding of the Nippur figurine tradition. Most critically, the publication of these three figurines as Nippur objects lent credence to the testimony of an antiquities dealer who sold an additional eight reclining figurines “from Nippur” to the Harvard Semitic Museum; these figurines continue to be regarded as Nippur objects. This article casts doubt upon that provenance. The figurine tradition of Seleucid-Parthian Nippur is reevaluated in light of the absence of securely-provenanced reclining female figurines at that site. An art historical evaluation of these figurines is undertaken, which links these figurines to the general use of hybrid Greek-Babylonian imagery in Seleucid-Parthian figurines, and connects the specific motif of the reclining figure to Greek banqueting imagery. It is proposed that the Nippur community's lack of interest in reclining female figurines can be correlated with a disinterest in pan-Hellenistic ceramic tablewares; together, these lacunae indicate Nippur's non-participation in negotiated Greek-Babylonian banqueting practices. These differences in cross-cultural interaction between Nippur and the neighboring Babylonian communities have not been fully recognized nor explored, due to scholarship's misunderstanding of the use of reclining female figurines at that site. It is this confusion that this article attempts to resolve.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 78 , December 2016 , pp. 49 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 2016 

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Footnotes

1

Portions of this research were presented at the American Schools of Oriental Research Annual Meeting (San Francisco, 2011), College Art Association Annual Meeting (Los Angeles, 2012) and the Archaeological Institute of America Annual Meeting (Seattle, 2013). I thank the session chairs, other presenters, and audiences at those meetings for their thoughtful feedback and support. For feedback on drafts of this article, I thank Marian Feldman, Margaret Cool Root, S. Rebecca Martin, Kiersten Neumann, Andrew Hershberger, Allie Terry-Fritsch, and Ruthy Light. Staff at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology were critical in facilitating my research on this project, and my sincere thanks go to Katherine Blanchard, Chrisso Boulis, and Alessandro Pezzati for all of their assistance. I am also appreciative to Ann Kuttner and Holly Pittman for orchestrating my research trip. Adam Aja and Joseph Greene provided me with information concerning the figurines in the Semitic Museum, Harvard University. McGuire Gibson and Helen McDonald supplied me with information about funerary contexts, as well as terracotta figurines, from the University of Chicago excavations at Nippur. Jerry Langin-Hooper edited several of the images published in this article. For all of their help, I am grateful. Any errors remain, of course, my own.

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