Avis de soutenance - doctorat - Bilal ANNAN

The aim of this dissertation is the study of funerary portraiture in the Hellenistic Near East, in its diverse aspects and in its relation to ancient commemorative rituals, from the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE) to the annexation of Syria to the Roman Republic by Pompeius Magnus (64 BCE). The study widens its scope to include all of Hellenistic Syria, although such artefacts have on the whole been found in the coastal cities of Syria-Palestine (and this peculiar geographical distribution in itself calls for an explanation). If one defines a funerary portrait as any image of the deceased (or the bereaved) decorating or erected in a funerary precinct, regardless of any intent of verisimilitude, then even the most rudimentary portrait may stand as a symbolic substitute for the deceased, and act as an agent for the perpetuation of his or her memory. In this regard, the epitaph that often accompanied the funerary portraits and detailed the deceased's anthroponyms, lineage and social ranks, contributed to their further identification, thus compensating for the portraits' generic character. A preliminary overview of the archaeological antecedents of this commemorative practice in Iron Age Syria down to the Late Achaemenid period enriches our understanding of what this funerary custom owes to the cultural input of the Graeco-Macedonian settlers that moved into the newly founded Seleucid and Ptolemaic cities across Syria. This overview also brings into focus the survival of some modes of aristocratic self-fashioning well into the second half of the first millennium BCE: one may observe, for instance, in depictions of priests or in hunting scenes, iconographic characteristics that can be traced back to the Achaemenid aulic and satrapic repertoire. One also notices the concomitant emergence of novel forms of self-representation that belonged to the Hellenistic visual koine, and that were in part determined by new modes of civic governance. Another trend that is salient in this corpus is a then newly-found interest in the commemoration, through portraiture, of women, children and adolescents, i.e. demographic categories that had been hitherto largely absent from the funerary repertoire. Men, women and children were also depicted in a number of longstanding attitudes that embodied social values that were perceived as desirable and emblematic of the kaloi kai agathoi, the noble and good citizens. The portraits can thus be analysed as social constructs stemming from a rather rigid civic ideology that ascribed age- and gender-specific roles to each individual. When contrasted with similar corpora emanating from diverse parts of the Greek-speaking Mediterranean world, the study of these portraits opens the path to a delineation of a history of taste and offers a glimpse into ancient communal worldviews. The interest of our investigation also lies, perhaps, in the typological and technical variety of the material under study, since it gathers and, most importantly, confronts funerary portraits that belong to artistic categories (rock-cut reliefs, sculpture in the round, wall painting, high- and low-reliefs and painted stelae) that are too often studied independently from one another despite their belonging in Antiquity to a shared visual culture and to a common physical environment, i.e. the necropolis. Finally, four appendices complement this study, that seek to approach ancient portraiture and visual culture from different angles : the first addresses the archaeological exploration of the necropoleis of Achaemenid Phoenicia ; the second is devoted to an examination of the Greek and Latin vocabulary pertaining to portraits and (divine) statues in the Imperial Near East ; the third considers the epigraphic testimonies to the professional categories that made up the “funerary industry” in Graeco-Roman Syria, and the fourth deals with the marble mythological statuary documented across the Imperial Near East.