| Domain | ‘Hellenization’ and ‘Romanization’ in Ptolemaic Egypt, Central & Western Asia and Greece |
| Researcher(s) | Lennart Kruijer |
| University | Leiden University |
| Degree | PD |
| Date Range | September 2025 - present |
| Supervisor(s) | Prof. Miguel John Versluys |
This project examines how architectural and floor decoration functioned as actants of cultural transformation in the Hellenistic kingdom of Commagene (modern SE Turkey) between the 3rd century BCE and the 2nd century CE. Drawing on archaeological legacy data from the sites of Arsameia on the Nymphaios, Samosata, and Doliche, it traces when, how, and in what contexts non-local forms were introduced, and how their integration interacted with existing material and social circumstances.
The focus lies not only on identifying new decorative forms, such as tessellated mosaic flooring and architectural ornament, but also on analysing the dynamics of their adaptation and embedding. Decorative forms never arrived in neutral fashion: their material qualities, patterns, and affordances conditioned how they were received, reinterpreted, and used. This project therefore moves beyond a purely anthropocentric perspective, investigating how these material repertoires were actively entangled with practices and meanings, shaping and reshaping them in turn.
This approach situates well-known initiatives, such as the cultural programme of King Antiochos I (c. 69–36 BCE), within wider and longer trajectories. While Antiochos was undoubtedly an agent of innovation, bringing together novel decorative schemes across the kingdom, he was not the sole actant in Commagene’s cultural formation. By expanding attention to earlier and later centuries, and by recognising the role of objects themselves as actants within relational assemblages, the project decentres singular human agents in favour of a post-anthropocentric and more long-term view of cultural change.
In doing so, the project contributes to debates about cultural connectivity and transformation in Hellenistic and early Roman West Asia, embedding the perspectives of the Anchoring Innovation programme within the more relational ontology of New Materialist assemblage thinking. It demonstrates how architectural and decorative repertoires shaped, and were shaped by, intensified flows of people, ideas, and materials. Through this lens, Commagene’s cultural character is not the product of a diffusing ‘Hellenization’, nor (solely) of eccentric and self-conscious royal actors; rather, the region is approached as a laboratory of ancient globalization, where the familiar and the unfamiliar were continuously re-anchored within evolving human-object assemblages.