At the gates of ancient Egyptian temples are traces of public space and transcultural politics that have gone misrecognized and neglected in histories of the Hellenistic age (ca. 330-30 BCE). Over three centuries of Ptolemaic rule, temple gates, and forecourts emerged as sites of political, judicial and religious practice that mediated relations between a Macedonian Greek king and a multi-ethnic population, between the court at Alexandria and the Egyptian countryside. Some practices, such as the decree on the Rosetta stone, were glocalizations of widespread genres of discourse, evidence that Egyptian temples were not worlds apart, but at a nexus of Mediterranean relations.

Ian Moyer is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Michigan. He completed his PhD at the University of Chicago, and before coming to Michigan, he taught in the History and Classics departments at Pomona College. He has also been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His first book, entitled Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism, explores the ancient history and modern historiography of cultural and intellectual encounters between ancient Greeks and Egyptians. This work ranges across the fields of history, classics, Egyptology, and the history of religions, and addresses problems of culture, identity and agency in cross-cultural interactions. In his current work, under the working title "At the Gates of the Temple," he is examining the gates and forecourt areas of Egyptian temples in the Ptolemaic period as sites of cultural and political mediation and the construction of authority. Together with Adam Lecznar and Heidi Morse, he is also editing a volume entitled Classicisms in the Black Atlantic, a collection of essays on the reception and (re)construction of the "classical" in the Black Atlantic.

This lecture is free and open to the public.

This event is part of the Thursday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.