Carolina Lopez-Ruiz, "Herodotos on Herakles and Aphrodite, or the Phoenician-Egyptian entanglement"

Description: Who is “Egyptian Herakles” and why did Greeks use this title when referring to the Phoenician god Melqart? Why did the ancient Greek historian Herodotos look for Herakles’ origins in Tyre and associate the cult of Aphrodite with the Levantine goddess Ashtart and her temple in Ashkelon? In this talk I juxtapose these narratives of divine origins against the backdrop or artistic developments in early Greece, when art in the Aegean and elsewhere in the Mediterranean emulated Levantine and in particular Phoenician models. I will propose that Phoenician modes of representation (including Egyptian and Canaanite inflections) affected perceptions of cultural affiliations and origins.

I will also offer an informal workshop, for a discussion on the Phoenician project in the western Mediterranean and the case of Iberia.

Biography: Carolina López-Ruiz is Professor of the History of Religions, Comparative Mythology, and the Ancient Mediterranean World at the Divinity School and the Department of Classics. Previously she was a Professor of Classics at Ohio State University. She studied Classical Philology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, and did graduate studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Chicago, where she earned her Ph.D. 2005 from the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World. 

She is the author of When the Gods Were Born: Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East, Harvard University Press, 2010), and has edited the anthology Gods, Heroes, and Monsters: A Sourcebook of Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern Myths in Translation (Oxford 2018, 2nd ed.). She has also co-edited or authored several volumes on colonial relations in the western Mediterranean and Phoenician studies. In her most recent book, Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean (Harvard University Press, 2021), she offers a fresh appraisal of cultural contact and the Phoenician’s agency during the so-called orientalizing period. This book received the Frank Moore Cross Award form ASOR, 2022. Prof. López-Ruiz co-directs the University of Chicago excavation at the Phoenician site of Cerro del Villar, Málaga, in collaboration with the University of Málaga.

This talk will not be available on zoom and will not be recorded.