Title: "Representing Queenship in the Seleucid Empire"

Abstract: In the Hellenistic world, the material and corporeal presence of dynastic women was important to articulating dynastic power, legitimacy, and continuity. In this talk, I examine the multi-modal strategies through which the physical presence of royal women was evoked in the Seleucid empire. The Seleucid realm requires a nuanced understanding of representation, inaugurating a different approach to the category of “portraiture,” as well as queenly faces, in ancient contexts. In the third and second centuries, Seleucid royal women were honored and represented in a variety of spatial contexts, from Anatolia to Iran. Honorific statues, glyptic and numismatic images, and surviving records of performative activations of the queen’s corporeality comprise the extant corpus of evidence. The Seleucid court and its subjects were not limited to any single mode of representation and instead embraced different kinds of portrait cultures—from the durable to the ephemeral, the over-life-size to the miniature—to evoke dynastic femininity. Furthermore, the evidence for Seleucid women charts the distinct movements of images, cults, and memories, as well as the physical mobilities of dynastic women themselves, across geo-cultural regions throughout the Hellenistic world. Ultimately, Seleucid portrayals of their royal women encourage us to challenge our own expectations of and encounters with figural representations in visual culture.