 Hi, my name is Brooke Norton and I would like to welcome our Internet audience to today's talk. I would like to begin by reading our land acknowledgment statement. We would like to begin by acknowledging that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the Huchun, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenye Ilone. We respect the land and the people who have steered it throughout many generations and we honor their elders and their ancestors. We are living in a moment that warrants deep reflection on our past and present. As a museum dedicated to advancing knowledge of the archaeology and history of the ancient Levant, the Body Museum welcomes scholarly discussions across boundaries of nationality, religion, and gender identity. In many global contexts, equal access to healthcare, education, fair wages, and human rights is contested on the basis of sex, gender, and other identity categories. In an effort to bring to light these timely issues, to serve a broader public audience online and to connect to the local community that it serves, the museum is taking action to becoming a more inclusive, welcoming, and equitable institution that practices the philosophy of radical inclusion adopted by its parent institution, Pacific School of Religion. One of these steps is the continued creation of public programming. Through this lecture series, we hope to highlight new and established scholars who are engaging with risky and marginalized topics concerning women, gender performance, and sexuality in the past. We invite you to participate in these programs so that together we can listen, learn, and work towards creating a more inclusive museum community. Thank you for joining us today. I'd like to now introduce my colleague, Curator Dr. Melissa Kratik. Thank you, Brooke. It is now my pleasure to introduce today's speaker. Jessica Nitschka is a research fellow in the Department of Ancient Studies at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. She's also the editor of Ancient Near East Today, a digital platform for public scholarship published by the American Society of Overseas Research. Dr. Nitschka received her PhD in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research concerns the history and archaeology of the Eastern Mediterranean in the first millennium BCE. She's carried out archaeological fieldwork such as Tel Dorm in Israel and Tel Tamai in Egypt, and she's involved in the curation and study of Egyptian antiquities in South African collections. She co-edited the volume titled Post-Colonialism, Heritage, and the Built Environment, New Approaches to Architecture and Archaeology, which was published by Springer in 2020. Currently, she's working on a monograph on the Alexander sarcophagus. And the floor is yours, Jessica, for your talk entitled Dress and Representation of Women in Phoenician Visual Culture. Take it away. Okay, great. Okay, can you see my screen? We're good? Yes, we are good. Okay, excellent. Thanks so much, Melissa, for the introduction. So, the... There we go. Oops, sorry. There we go. The topic of dress and antiquity has become rather popular in the last two to three decades through a profusion of conference sessions and edited volumes. These discussions and analyses have benefited from multidisciplinary approaches showing that even though we are unable to speak to ancient people to fully unlock the code of ancient dress habits, it is still possible to apply contemporary dress theory in order to better understand the function and meaning of dress in ancient societies. The books on the screen cover a wide geographic and chronological range. However, noticeably absent from these works is any discussion of dress in the Phoenician world. Why is that? Well, perhaps it's part because of the problems of the evidence. But before we get to that, perhaps we should first clarify exactly what we mean by dress. For this, I follow the definition offered by anthropologist Mary Ellen Roke Higgins and Joanne Eicher, whose work on the anthropology of dress since the 1960s has made a big impact on the field. They essentially defined dress as a series of body modifications, including but not limited to clothing, jewelry, hairstyles, skin modifications, and so on. Roke Higgins and Eicher prefer the term dress over other terms found in the discourse because it is both unambiguous and relatively free from bias. They also put the body at the center of discussion of dress, which I think is an important aspect to keep in mind when we consider Phoenician depictions of dress and social identity. So what evidence do we have for studying dress in the ancient record, and in particular the ancient record of the Phoenician world? And there are basically three potential sources of information. The first is surviving physical evidence related to dress. This would include actual garments worn if we had them. For the Phoenician world, we do not. So in terms of surviving evidence of dress that was actually worn, we are limited to jewelry, metal attachments and other accessories. Physical evidence also includes materials relating to production or manufacture clothing, such as spindle whirls, loom weights, dye facilities and so on. The manufacturer of text files is an area that we are seeing more research attention and archaeology, which is great. The second category is testimony in ancient texts. To my knowledge, we have little to no testimony concerning dress, Phoenician and Pune conscriptions, but I have to admit I have not combed this corpus looking for such evidence. So if anyone knows of anything, I would be keen to hear about it. There is an occasional mention of Phoenician dress in clothing, et cetera, in classical or biblical literature, but these are of limited use for understanding actual Phoenician dress practices or Phoenician social attitudes towards dress. The third and most important category is artistic or iconographic representations of dress. Most of our evidence for the forms of dress and antiquity and their function and meaning in ancient societies comes from the visual record. This is true not just for the Phoenicians, but for all ancient peoples. We do have quite a lot of visual depictions of dress in Phoenician and Punec material culture and a wide range of visual media, even if it is not as perhaps rich as some other iconographic traditions. The question is, of course, how do we go about analyzing this corpus with regard to the social practice and meaning of dress? What do these representations of dress signal to both the viewer and the patron? So again, to pull from the anthropological literature, dress functions as a form of nonverbal communication made up of signs, the meaning of which are culturally determined. Dress presents a wide range of messages and meanings to a wide range of viewers and wearers. Dress can signal various social categories that make up identity. On the screen, I put a general list of categories and messaging. The ones with an asterisk are ones that I think are somewhat ambiguous in the Phoenician visual record, whether that is intentionally so or simply because we lack the necessary access to the code. This is up for debate. For, of course, dress is a closed code. Items of dress do not possess inherent meaning. Rather, that meaning is assigned and specific to certain social and cultural contexts. How do we unlock the code from artistic depictions? This is the challenge because artistic representations of dress do not constitute documentary information. Artistic depictions are constructed images that have their own purpose and are governed by certain rules and limitations. We are missing a lot of information, of course, that is key to analyzing dress, sound, smell, movement. Our artistic depictions are fragmented and incomplete. One especially obvious problem is the disappearance of color. To study dress in black and white, this is a real challenge. So, my approach is not to try to reconstruct what Phoenicians actually wore, but rather to ask what are the representations of dress in the visual record trying to communicate? Are Phoenician social identities clearly indicated through dress in either minor or monumental art? Are women's identities represented in minor or monumental art? If so, what are those social identities? And can we figure any of this out from the visual record based on the limited information available to us? I want to explore the questions posed above by looking at some specific examples, especially of women since women and gender are the theme of this series. I am focusing on stone sculpture from the Levant as that is what I am most familiar with. I want to point out that I am not a specialist in women or gender in the ancient world nor am I a specialist in dress. This is very much a work in progress and I look forward to feedback and ideas in the in the discussion. Now, although women are frequently depicted in or represented in small-scale terracotta sculpture at Phoenician sites, we cannot, unfortunately, say the same for stone sculpture. So, for example, in the 500 or so fragments of road of sculpture from the Temple of Amrit, we cannot confidently point to any pieces that seem to depict a female figure. Even at the Temple of Ashmoon at Boston Ashik, Ralph Stuckey has cataloged about 250 figural sculptures or fragments of figural sculpture from the sanctuary, although there are some notable examples of sculpture of female figures, perhaps goddesses, that date to the Roman period. There are very few prior to the Roman period that seem like they might represent female persons. Then we have the anthropoid sarcophagi from the Persian period. This consists of 120 or so anthropoid-shaped coffins and mostly marble. The majority are from Sidon, but examples pop up at other sites in the Levant and in the Western Mediterranean. These objects present an interesting case. The patrons of these coffins, particularly those in the Levant, for the most part, chose not to represent much in the way of dress at all. What we have is mostly just hairstyle and head coverings. And as shown by Becky Martin in the previous lecture in the series, which I highly recommend, these hairstyles do not always clearly signal male or female. Given that the anthropoid sarcophagi allude to the body, some more than others, as you can see on the right, but rejects many forms or most forms of dress, I think that any serious study of the significance of dress for social identity and Phoenician art needs to take a very close look at this corpus. However, that is not what we're going to do today. Instead, we are going to look at the material from Umel Ahmed. The reason for this is that this site offers an interesting corpus of individuals and dress, both male and female, which serve as a good case study to address some of the questions I raised earlier. So just to give some background information, the site of Umel Ahmed is located near the town of Nakora, about 20 kilometers south of Tyre, maybe four kilometers near the south of the border of Lebanon. And I'm sorry that I cut it off the name of the site in the slide. But at any rate, the site has been investigated by various French Orientalists and archaeologists, first in the late 19th century and then into the 20th centuries. Scientific excavations of the two temple precincts were carried out in the 1940s. It was a small town dominated by two temples. And the site is perhaps best known for its Phoenician inscriptions, approximately 16. These inscriptions suggest that the primary occupation and building activity occurred in the third and second centuries BCE. There are no major remains from the Roman period. The site has produced a varied collection of figural sculpture. Today this corpus is mostly split between the Louvre and the National Museum of Beirut. Now there's a tendency in ancient Mediterranean studies to categorize both clothing and art stylistically based on its perceived ethnic or national origins. Any archaeologists with basic art historical or iconographic training in the ancient world might look at these images and immediately categorize the two on the left is Egyptian dress, the third image as Greek dress and the one on the far right as Persian dress or Persian influenced. This tendency to focus on dress as an ethnic marker has I think held us back in the analysis of dress and representation in Phoenician art as there is a tendency in the field to begin by separating everything into categories of Assyrianizing or Egyptianizing or Persianizing or Hellenizing. I think such categorization is of limited use in understanding Phoenician social perceptions of both dress and art. Therefore, I am going to try to avoid such labels as much as possible. So what I want to focus on today are the relief stylized. These are the most common sculptural type at Umel Ahmed and present us with a number of examples of both male and female figures. Over 20 stylized are recorded as having been found in or around Umel Ahmed. About 13 have been identified as male individuals, six as women, and three as a male female couple. They are carved out of a local stone. They all suffer from extensive weathering due to the coastal location. Many are in a fragmentary state. No signs of paint remain as far as I know, but I assume that they were painted in some form or another. I should also mention that none were found in situ or even come from the controlled excavations. They were found either through clandestine means or found in secondary contexts. The form and composition is more or less the same in all as far as we can tell. They are rectangular in shape upright with a semi-circular top. Often a winged sun disk fills out by the top of the steely. This is of course a common symbol in Phoenician art. An individual or two individuals stand in profile with the right arm raised, palm facing outward. More often than not, the individuals are facing right, but sometimes they face left as we shall see. And in the case of the couples, the two individuals face each other with their palms facing one another. Exactly what such a gesture means with the right hand raised, what that means in this context is open to some debate. The gesture is of course not exclusive to Phoenicians. It is found in the figural representation of both mortal and divine figures in a wide geographic area over a long period of time. And the steely with similar iconography as these have been found individually in other locations, other Phoenician sites in the Levant, but the Umelamid collection is the single biggest collection. Finally, I should note that the size is not the same, even within the Umelamid corpus. I've indicated the preserved height in all the cases where I know it. Before looking at the dress in detail, we should ask, what is the function? Well, the lack of clear context has left the function open to some debate. Most people describe the steely as funerary, primarily on the basis of the inscriptions. Six of the steely have inscriptions preserved. They are highly formulaic. There are essentially two variations which I have put on the screen. Either it's, you know, four, the person named, so four Ballyapton, or it says, you know, this is the commemorative steely of the person named. As the inscriptions don't directly mention a god, scholars have interpreted these inscriptions and thus the steely as funerary. Whether or not this is the correct interpretation, like I said, is open to debate, as is the question of whether we can extend that interpretation to the steely that lack inscriptions. There are six steely from Umelamid that depict a woman by herself. I only have images of the five that are currently in the Louvre and the National Museum of Beirut, which I have put on the screen. As you can see, they are not all complete, but from what remains, we can see they all have roughly the same composition. An individual stands in profile with hand raised, palm facing out. Note that the broken one in the upper right-hand corner is facing left rather than right. Even so, it is still her right arm that is raised. For the figures that face right, they each stand with their left leg forward and right leg sideway bent to the back. The weight is shifted toward the front leg. On the image on the left, you can see that the figure is standing on a base, which itself is decorated with two female figures with long hair kneeling on either side of a three stemmed plant, pouring a liquid, presumably water, at its base. If these are funerary steely, then perhaps this scene makes reference to rebirth or renewal in the afterlife. Let's take a closer look at the more complete ones, specifically the representation of dress. They are presented in similar but not exactly the same dress. Each one appears to wear a long pleated tunic. It reaches all the way to the ground. In the two where the bottom of the steely is preserved, we can see the feet peeking out from beneath the folds of the tunic. Let's see if I can get the pointer working. Yeah, so here, here, and then here and here. The figures do not appear to be barefoot, but no footwear is clearly articulated or preserved except perhaps in one of the right. Maybe she is wearing some sort of sandal. Perhaps paint is used to indicate the footwear. All three figures wear an overgarment or a mantle that falls to a slightly different length than each of the steely. So on the one on the left, it falls to about the knees. On the center one, it's not 100% clear, but maybe mid calf. And on the right, also mid calf. In all three steely, the mantle is closely wrapped around the body so much so that it forms almost a sling for the raised arm, which is clearly outlined by deep carving as we can see here and especially here. The garments hug the body as we can see the clear curvature of the back waist and hips. The tightness of the mantle is achieved by the left hand which tightly holds onto the edge of the mantle as it falls in curves that are softly rendered in the steely, the left hand steely and the right hand one and then more sharply indicated in the center example here. On the example on the right, the head seems to be uncovered and the hair tied up with some sort of ribbon that flows out the back. In this steely also, the artist has taken care to really emphasize the curvature of the body, especially the hip and leg through the fabric here. So what messages or identities are potentially being communicated by the dress choices and the representation of the dress? Gender seems to be the most obvious, perhaps also of course devotion or piety, some sort of sacred setting. It has been suggested that these women may represent priestesses more than that later. The economic social status within the community, there's a lot of fabric here and emphasis on fabric. The quality of the fabric is perhaps communicated by the effort put into representing the drapery, this to me suggests wealth. Then perhaps also then there's messages about beauty, marital status. To dig into this a bit further, we really need to compare the female dress with the male dress. So on the left here we have two steely for two different individuals named Ballyaton. The one on the left is Ballyaton, the chief. The one in the center is Ballyaton, sort of up the door, priest, cahen of Melkistart. So how does the dress of the men compare to that of the women? Starting at the top, the men wear a truncated cylindrical hat. This is sometimes referred to as a Kedaris in the scholarship on the assumption that it has been borrowed from Persian practice and iconography. There is a tendency in the literature to associate it with royal or priestly status. The men are clean shaven. This is the case for all the steely of male figures at Umel Amin. As for the clothing, the male figures also appear to wear a long pleated tunic as a primary garment. Over it is either a mantle that is belted in such a way as to create pseudo sleeves or it is a robe with sleeves that are sewn into the garments. Either way, both garments are ankle length in contrast to the women's tunic going all the way to the ground. This allows us to clearly see that the men are barefoot. Both the men and women have however the same gesture of the right hand, but while the women grasp the mantle with the left hand, the men hold the same objects and more on that in a moment. There is a clear difference in the relationship between the fabric and the body and how the fabric is depicted in the male images. While there is an emphasis on drapery throughout the women's garment, in the men's, this is restricted to the sleeves, which are represented as having some depth and movements, I think. For both men and women, the right arm is raised in that gesture, that arm is heavily cloaked in fabric, but it is clear that the men have more freedom of movement in their garments as compared to the women. The lower half of the men's tunic and mantle by contrast appears stiff and straight. The mantle or robe is especially noticeably straight and smooth compared to the women's mantle. I wonder if this is meant perhaps to indicate a different type of fabric. Some have suggested that the stiffness in the representation of the men's dress is the result of a less talented sculptor's hands. However, the details, especially in the steely on the left, I think argue against the suggestion. We can see subtle and skilled working of the stone in not just the sleeves here, but also in the modeling of the face. So I prefer to see the stiffness of the garment as a stylistic choice. Regarding profession, the dress of the male figures has been characterized by scholars generally as priestly attire. What do the inscriptions tell us? Well, as mentioned, Balliatone in the left is labeled as a rob or a chief, but chief of what is not indicated. Balliatone in the center is labeled as a cahan or a priest. There's nothing about the dress of these two individuals which conveys a difference in rank or status. So from this, we might hypothesize that dress in the art of Ulamid is not used to indicate status as a priest or at least a particular type of priest, but I say that with a big asterisk of caution. Now, as mentioned, the male figures in the steely hold an object in the left hand, in the original publication, this was described as a sphinx, but as clarified by the work of Henrica and Michela, the object is actually a type of ceremonial spoon, whereby the handle is in the form of a naked girl all stretched out, and she holds a spoon part in her arms. These are sometimes referred to as swimming girl spoons because of the pose of the female figure. Well, the types from Egypt, and that's where this type originates from is Egypt. The types from Egypt typically present the girl with a wig. The examples in our reliefs here present the figure as wearing a royal headdress, hence the original reading that these were sphinxes. The main point here, though, is that the individual male figures carry a ritual or ceremonial object, the same object in this case, despite their different titles, while the female figures do not. Another distinction between the male and female representations of dress at Alamed is that there is more variation in the dress among the men than there is among the women. So the one on the left is the one we just looked at. In the center, we can see that in this figure, the rover mantle only covers the upper arms. It goes only so far as his elbows. He has a stole of some sort over his left shoulder, right here. It goes down to about here. You can see the tassel. He also wears a flatter fabric hat resembling a beret, or perhaps a Macedonian causia. He carries a small box instead of a ceremonial spoon. He is called the chief of gates in the inscription. Perhaps then in this case, then, what we do see here is a distinction in dress due to official role or occupation. On the right hand side, we have a stele that is dedicated on behalf of Abdad Don. According to the inscription, unfortunately, only the lower half is preserved, but we can see that the tunic falls only to mid-calf rather than to his ankles. The figure is barefoot, as is the central one I forgot to mention. The depiction of the garment's relationship with the body in this right hand example, the way it hugs the body, showing off the curvature of the hip and the leg, this reminds us of the representation of the dress of the female figures in the previous slides. Now, there is a comparable stele in the collection of the American University of Beirut. In this case, the stele is more or less complete, but it lacks an inscription. We see a similar garment, this one also reaching mid-calf, and we can again see the clear curvature of the back hips and legs. The cloak mantle is drawn very tightly, again creating almost a sling for the arms similar to the depictions of female dress that we saw earlier. I assume it is for these reasons that the curators of the AUB Museum label this image as female. Yet, in our comparable stele from Ula Amid, the inscription clearly indicates the figure is male, because I've now added the rest of the inscription, it says abdadan, son of abdrabad. So does this mean we should read the AUB stele as male also? Or can this type of dress in representation with the body the way it interacts with the body, can this be used by both men and women? These images would seem to invert or these challenge our expectations of what constitutes male versus female dress. Now, I didn't comment on the head covering of the figure on the left, it is difficult to make out, but I do not think in this case that it is that the figure is veiled. I think rather we are meant to understand a skullcap of some sort. Now, we have another sculpture from Ula Amid that also highlights this ambiguity. This is an orthostock found in the courtyard of the temple of Melka Stardt by the excavators. A single figure is represented in relief with a hand raised in the now familiar gesture. The figure stands before a votive or sacred column topped by an iolic capital. The excavators in their final publication identified this figure as a male priest. When I looked at it, I thought surely the figure is veiled and it's female, but now having looked at the other images that I just showed in the previous slide, I'm not so sure. Part of it really depends on whether or not we think the head is veiled or wearing a skullcap and, you know, as often happens, the kind of critical point is damaged. But even if it is a veil, could the figure still be male? I mean, after all enrollment arts, it is common for depictions of men to have their outer garment drawn up over their head. While I'll leave that question aside for now, we should also consider the steel eye of the male and female couples together. These two on the screen are the best preserved, I am sorry to say, but even so in both examples we can see that the couple face each other. The male figure is significantly taller than the female figure, but less so in the example on the right. They both raised their right arm with palm turned outwards. They also both hold an object in the left hand. The object in the man's hand is schematized and abbreviated, and here I'm just really looking at the left hand example. It's because it's clear. But like I said, it's schematized and abbreviated, but it is I think it is meant to represent one of the ceremonial spoons without anthropomorphic handle that we just looked at. As for the woman, it's difficult to see, but there is certainly an object in her left hand, and it is a narrow jar for perfume or oil. As for the dress of these figures, it is largely the same as what we have seen on the previous steel eye. However, in the steel eye on the left, the man's head covering rises higher in the back than in the previous examples. And as for the woman, the mantle of the woman looks a bit more like a robe with actual sleeves. There may even be three garments. It's hard to tell. I mean, you can see because you can see what looks like an edge or hemline here, but the garment clearly goes across here. So perhaps this is another outer garment. I'm not sure. Due to the style and the preservation, it's difficult to determine. So what to make of these steel eye of the couples. There are no inscriptions on the steel eye with the couples, at least non-survives, that can provide us with context or interpretational hints. Should we assume they are married and that this perhaps accounts for the presence of an object in the woman's hand? Does the cosmetic vessel reflect the ceremonial act of getting married? Do the hand gestures, the right hand raised, also depict the act of giving vows in a marriage ceremony? Are the steel eye then commemorating the marriage or are they funerary? Do they mark a joint grave? If we assume that the couple is married and that the steel eye is funerary, do we then hypothesize that the steel eye of individuals indicates unmarried status at the time of death? Might this then account for the more voluptuous, perhaps even sexualized representations of the bodies? These are a lot of questions, which I'm afraid I don't have answers to, but I hope you will indulge me to return to one issue and raise some more questions before I wrap up. As I mentioned earlier, there has been some speculation if perhaps the women represented here hold some sort of priestess status and perhaps this is what actually merits their representation in stone, their proximity to deities or priestly elite. Perhaps, but it's notable that one inscription we have that of Issy Bark up on the upper right hand corner makes no mention of a title of priestess. There is also nothing in the dress that signals clearly priestess, at least not to us, but looking at these steel eye, steel eye did make me rethink a couple of other steel eye from elsewhere on the Phoenician coast. And these two steel eye follow the general type that we have seen so far. A round top steelie surmounted by a naked sun disk. In the left example, the sun disk, it looks like it's been chopped out. We have an individual figure in profile with the right hand raised in the gesture we are very familiar with by now. The dresser is clear, the dress is clearer in the right hand example. She wears a wide-sleeved robe that is bound up under the breasts, clearly indicating the gender is feminine. In her left hand, she holds a papyriform staff on her head. She wears a rather interesting headdress. It seems to be a variation on the iconographically well-known nummies headcloth from Egypt. And I also just want to say, before I forget, while I'm zoomed in, I want to point out that you can see here clearly the preserved paint on her hand. There's also a little bit on the hair, maybe also on the staff and also on the rest of the headdress. Let's go back to these, yes. So as for what is on top of the, you know, the pseudo nummies headdress or wig, whatever you want to call it, on the right hand side, we can clearly see a pair of cowhorns and a sun disk. Here are the cowhorns, here is the disk. On the left, it is less clear. Maybe these are meant to be ram's horns at the bottom. Maybe these here are feathers like in the autef crown, perhaps, but they're a little uneven. It does seem to be a sun disk in the middle. Now, as I've indicated here, the lube catalog labels the stele on the left as a goddess. And as far as I have been able to determine, there is no label for the one from the American University of Beirut, but if there is one, and someone knows about it, please let me know. As for the identification of this figure as a goddess, I can certainly understand why. The relief depiction from the famous the Hellmilk stele dated to the fifth century BCE looms very large on our field, and the principal goddess of Biblos is here depicted. She is torn with cows, horns, a sun disk, and a wig that perhaps resembles that on our stele, and she holds up a pair of form staff in her left hand. In the Hellmilk stele, the distinction between mortal and divine is clear. But I wonder if in Phoenician art, the distinction between divine and mortal is always so stark, and if there is not more blurring between the iconographies, especially in funerary art. For example, on the anthropoid sarcophagi, we see multiple use of symbols that we might otherwise associate specifically with royalty or the divine. Their drawing on Egyptian iconography, which itself regularly blurred the line between divine and royal. So we have from left to right an image of a person with a false beard in the center. We have someone holding the was scepter. And on the right, we have both anemis style headdress plus a false beard. In the case of our stele with divine attributes here in the center, we might ask if this is not meant to be a funerary stele of a mortal woman, either in the guise of a goddess or simply dressed as a priestess. After all, we don't actually know what priestess is wore in the Phoenician Levant. The obvious comparison we can make here is the famous sarcophagus from Carthage, which shows a woman in relief wrapped in goddess-like wings. But if we do insist that this depiction in the center is that of a goddess and thus presumably part of a religious relief or votive relief of some sort, what does this mean then for our other female stele from Umel Ahmed? Can we be so sure then that they are funerary and not votive? Well, to wrap this up, I have raised a lot of questions and offered very few answers. As I said at start, this is a work in progress and clearly there is a lot of work to be done on the interconnection of dress, representation, art, identity, and gender and Phoenician studies. So thank you for your attention and thanks especially to Helen Dixon for retrieving some last-minute data for me on the collection at the American University of Beirut. I look forward to the comments and feedback. Thank you so much for such a stimulating talk that, as you say, raises a lot of questions. And on that note, I would like to invite anyone who's tuning in live, our YouTube audience to submit any questions or comments or responses that you might have in the chat box and then we can present that during the Q&A to our speaker. So I'll go ahead and kick this off. So it's pretty clear from the, I'd say one of the things that is quite clear from your talk. And the corpus that you presented from Umel Ahmed is that they're quite heavily weathered, they're pockmarked, they're fragmentary. Could you discuss some of the challenges that you've had with interpreting the extant evidence of dress and other characteristics of these stelae on the one hand, but on the other hand in light of the loss of important data about these objects due to the material, the stone, and how that particular material has weathered in this coastal environment. So for example, details of the sculpture as well as this presumed loss of paint. Yeah, sure. Let me just go back to kind of throw some of them back up on the screen. So I mean, I think more so than the preservation. The biggest problem is really just the posse and number. I mean, it's nice that we have this collection from Umel Ahmed, but since we don't have, we don't have a lot of examples of women in sculpture before this, it's quite hard to do any kind of comparison or to understand in the larger context. I think that's actually the biggest challenge. And the preservation here is problematic, but we can actually see a lot. Obviously, it'd be nicer if we could see more details. For example, I didn't talk that much about this one, but here it's a real shame because this one is different, I think, from the others. Even in her arm, it's pulled back further. I assume that the hand is in the similar gesture, but we can't actually tell for sure. So we don't actually know what's going on for sure with her hand. Maybe it's different. Maybe she's actually clutching at her clothing here. I'm not sure. Also, the hair and the headdresses is really damaged. So this is unfortunate. It's tantalizing, but we lose a lot of information. And there seems to be some variation, but we can't really detect. As for the issue of paint, I mean, like I said, I think surely these were painted. We saw it when I showed you some evidence of paint. How much of a difference would that make? It could make a lot of difference. We don't really know. Certainly there's paint reserved on other relief sculpture from Levant. So we see some paint on the Antipore sarcophagi, but of course, they're not representing garments so much. Not the ones in the Levant at least. There is one in Cyprus that shows a garment and paint, but that's a whole different discussion and talk, perhaps. We do see the relief sarcophagus from Siden, the Morning Women's sarcophagus. Those women, there's paint preserved on that dress. So I would assume that there's paint of a similar type on these also. But without it, it's hard to speculate kind of what we're missing, but we're definitely missing something. I'm not sure that there's a lot of missing details that would be in the paint. I assume that these feel like we're always meant to be put outdoors. So I don't think they would be putting a lot of detail on paint. I assume the paint would be used to highlight what is carved. But it would still signify something. I'm not sure that's really a satisfactory answer. But I'll do what questions you're asking, but I'll say one other thing. In this ceiling, we have this scene here, which I think does add meaning and value and interpretation of what we're looking at. Did this one have a similar scene at the bottom? Maybe. We don't know. Likewise with these ones, there could be more variation than what we're looking at. We just don't really know. So yeah, it's unfortunate. We have to deal with what we have. Yeah. Well, this is always the name of the game in archaeology anyway. Okay. So you've just mentioned some variation, but getting back to a little bit of the consistency in your answer just now, you also brought up, again, the raised right hand gesture, which is one of the consistencies that you've pointed out here across this corpus, because you talk a little bit about the wider context of this gesture and how it's distributed within the bigger chronological and geographic arena and how that might impact how you interpret it. So for example, in relation to some of the evidence that you pointed out, is the stiffness of the drapery reflected in other examples of this gesture or other distinctions between male and female figures? Yeah, those are good questions. And the short answer is, I'm not sure, but I think there are answers to those questions. I would say this, I think if you look at palm iron art, certainly you have the gesture of the hand raised, but not all the time. And a lot of images of women don't have it. But I think some of them do. To be honest, I haven't dug into that very much. I tried to dig into this just a little bit, because as I narrowed down what I was going to talk about today and realize once I realized I was going to talk mostly about this theory, I did try to look into it a bit, but did not find in my initial sweep a lot of research about this gesture. I mean, it's usually called the gesture of adoration and at least Phoenician literature. I'm not sure what it's called in other areas, but it does pop up around the Levant. I think in the Mesopotamia also, certainly in Syria, it's definitely a feature of Greco-Roman period sculpture. It's obviously a feature of Phoenician sculpture earlier, but I'm curious as to how many examples we have in the Iron Age or the Bronze Age. I have a note to look that up. I don't actually know for sure. I mean, Melissa, maybe you know. I'm sure someone listening maybe knows and maybe they'll give me a tip over to look, because I think that I think that is an important question and something, you know, is that one of the next directions I want to go in is looking at the relationship of the gesture, the clothing. Yeah. I mean, I can think of the smiting pose that's almost always in a divine context, but I see that Aaron has turned his video on and I think that means he wants to contribute to the conversation. So yeah, Aaron, what are your thoughts? I just wanted to mention that, you know, a very similar kind of pose is found on clay figurines. So obviously, you know, it's a very different artistic representation, but you may find some good parallels there. Yeah, it's definitely in the figurines. So what's interesting, of course, is that in the figurines then is the direction of viewing is different, right? As is the case, I think, for example, with the Palmyrene art is that it's frontal, and here it's profile. What's the significance of that? I'm not sure, but I think it's something to follow up on. Yeah, of course, a lot of functional differences, too, between figurines of much different scales and these. Yeah, for sure. So we have a question from Becky Martin, and if she has the multi-part questions, I'm going to ask it. I'll ask it a few at a time, or maybe one at a time here. She first wants to know if you can talk more about the clothing worn by males who have the Persian cats and the swimming girl spoons. Do you think that they were just one garment? And she's asking that because of the pleats below the belt? Okay, so I'm sorry, a long way. Yeah, I don't know. I thought about the next. I've just related to that part of her question is she's also wondering if there's an Egyptian copper random for the clothing that they wear. That's part of that whole prompt. Of the male clothing? I'm not sure if that is part of the same question. Right. Okay, well, take the male clothing first. I thought about this. If it was one garment, maybe. But it seems if so, it's really complicated. I mean, there is some debate actually in the literature about if they're wearing one garment or two garments. And I decided to go, my guess right now is two garments, although I think it'd be an interesting experiment to see if we could try to replicate with one garment what we see there, even though it's, you know, the example I have at the front is pretty beat up. This one is possibly, the one in the center, this one to me seems more plausibly one garment with a stole. But this one, I don't know. Then again, we shouldn't expect it to be realistic, right? Getting back to one of the calviata center at the beginning, it could very well be one garment, and they just chosen, you know, to represent it the way they have, but it doesn't, you know, it doesn't mean it has to be realistic. So it's quite possibly the intended one garment. As for are there Egyptian precedents for, I assume she means their male clothing? Maybe, but I just feel like, I'd say this is a good question. Maybe. But I think stylistically it's quite different. But I think if you try to break it down to its constituent parts, then perhaps. It seems like it's a lot of clothing for an Egyptian. You know, they tend to prefer things that are tighter. And, you know, I think typically more short sleeves, but it's a good idea to go and look at that corpus a bit more closely. I think most people assume that the influence is coming from Persia. I'm not sure I agree with that. But it is worth pursuing. Was there another one about the, did she ask about the swimming girl spoon, or she just was using that as a point of reference? I think she was using that as a point of reference. Did you want to elaborate? No, I was going to say, I'm sorry, I can get better answers, but she can harass me about that later. Yeah. Another characteristic that she wants to know more about, I think in terms of the stylistic influence perhaps, she's asking about the clean shave and whether you think that is about the time period post Alexander, or if it has to do with Egyptian priests or something else. Yeah, that's a good question. Because something I didn't show you, since this wasn't about, this wasn't supposed to be really about male dress, but we have an example of one of these steely from Boston Shake. It's in Zimbabwe roots. And it's very similar to this type on the left, but he has a beard. It's got the winged sunglasses and all that, and it's got the beard. It's dated by someone to I think the fifth or fourth century, but I'm not sure what that dates to be based on. But I think that's a, it is a good point. Did beards become untrendy amongst at least some of the Phoenician elite after Alexander, the clean shave and look. It's tempting to lean that way. But we have this problem of chronology, and I kind of like danced around it a bit. But there's real disagreements, I think, or impreciseness in the way that stone sculpture in Leventine and Phoenicia is dated. It's dated through kind of a combination of style and kind of what people think it should be. And so, you know, for example, let's see, you know, not this particular Egyptian, you know, statue of the Egyptian kilb. This one has an inscription, so it's pretty firmly dated to the Hellenistic period. But there's been other similar sculptures that come from Umel Ahmed that are, for example, in the Louvre, and they're dated to the fifth or fourth century, you know, on the plaques and whatnot. Even though there's not really any evidence that Umel, there's anything going on in Umel Ahmed in the fifth or fourth century. Not, you know, there's not really any very good hard evidence. And they do that just on the assumption that pre-Hellenistic, you know, that something that looks Egyptian must be pre-Hellenistic, because once you're in the Hellenistic, things should look Greek. But, you know, that's not the case. So it's really, the dating is really sketchy. So to get back to my, I mean, back his question about beard, no beard, I mean, should be used to beard as a chronological marker? I don't know, maybe. I would prefer if we had some more hard evidence, but at least it is interesting, though. That's, you know, if we take the, at least Steely from Umel Ahmed, the inscribed ones clearly indicate a Hellenistic date. There's no reason to not think they're all Hellenistic. They are all clean shaven. Then perhaps, perhaps that is our chronological marker. Thank you. Again, raising more questions and answers. Yeah, a mark of a good talk, I would say. Erin, you have a question? Sure. First of all, thank you so much for a really fascinating talk. I am embarrassed to ask, to move away from the dress, but I'm really curious about the Wing Sun Disc, which has nothing to do with dress, but I'm just wondering if you could sort of fill out any of the details that you've run across, you know, regarding that very distinct symbol. Yeah. It's used from a very early time period in Venetian arts. I want to say, I've published it about practice. I want to say the Bronze Age, but I can't exactly tell you what example proves that. We see it in, we see it in Steely. We see it on temples. Actually, at Umel Amid, we have examples about doorways. I mean, this one obviously doesn't have the wings, but there are examples with the wings. This one is just the kind of Sun Disc, and it's got some kind of, you know, flare at the top there. You can see the cobras. When you see them, I see them on Steely, on plaques, on, you know, nose. I mean, it just, it's really, really common. And, you know, I would assume that it has not a similar meaning as what it would in the Egyptian context. It indicates divinity. It indicates sacred space. It indicates protection from the gods, I would assume. And then you, and I think, you know, we see it in Western Venetian arts also. It's definitely one of these things they pick up early on. And it's an example of something that I imagine that when the Venetians, especially by the time you get to the third century, when the Venetians look at the symbol, I doubt they look at it and think this is Egyptian in the way we do. I think, you know, it's just been part of their official habit there for so long by this time. But it is, it is interesting that it's remarkably consistent over time, that they're still using it, including, you know, including the Hellenistic Steely. Does that answer your question? Yes, totally. And thank you. Yeah. Well, sorry. And let me just add to say, like, you asked if I come across anything, and people don't really talk about it that much. They say it's a Winged Sun Disc, or they just kind of list it as if it's meaning it's self evident. So I don't think it's really been discussed in much in detail in the scholarship is because people kind of take it for granted, I think. It just seems so prominent in the corpus you presented. And thank you for, you know, all the background too. That's super helpful. And it does like the, you know, well, of course, I mean, my, my focus has always been, you know, earlier in time. But, you know, to me, these are relatively late examples. But the kinds of continuities that they show along, of course, with important differences is, is remarkable. And thank you so much, because I find this to be a remarkable corpus. And I think like a lot of things, you know, it gets sort of divided up. And so for those of us who work in slightly earlier time periods, we're, we're blissfully unaware, you know, of this rich set of reliefs. So thank you. There are some related questions to Erin from Helen Dixon, one of our other organizers of this talk series. And she is wondering if you think that the long sleeves on the Egyptian wager headdress, AUB example, if those are indicative in any way. And she says that we don't get to tend to get goddesses shown in long sleeves. But that may or may not be significant. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah. Yeah, I, I completely agree. So I mean, full disclosure, I saw this one first. And then I was actually thinking, isn't that even a woman? Because I mean, the Louvre catalog, I doesn't put that in advice as a goddess. I'm like, is this a woman? Because I just all I could see was like Nami's headdress, which doesn't mean anything. But that was my initial reaction. And then I looked at this. And I thought, Oh, yes, okay, I see woman. And then I saw the sleeves. I had the same thing. I was like sleeves, big wide sleeves. Or that doesn't say goddess to me. That says priestess. There is another example from the Louvre. Sorry, I don't have it at the ready of a seated figure with wide sleeves. Without quite this headdress. She has completely different hair than what we've seen so far. She her hair, her hair is show, but it's kind of like, it's like short. It's like a bob, if you will. And she seated and has the long sleeves. And it's, you know, again, it's a fragmentary steely. And that one's also interpreted as a goddess, I think, because it's being seated in the throne. So I mean, sleeves, you know, big, sorry, big wide sleeves or not, you know, goddess or not, I don't know. I think that's another question. You know, we have all these assumptions. But I think as nations have shown us again and again and again, through all kinds of different media, we have to sometimes throw those assumptions out, because they're playing, they're playing by their own rules, which don't necessarily agree with the rules that we we've created as archaeologists, as we try to classify this material. But I'm definitely going to be thinking more about sleeves and what they designates. Thanks. Yeah, that's a great answer. So another question coming in from our YouTube audience asking if you have compared the styles depicted on the steely with the dress shown on a terracotta votive figurines, such as the Shavei Zion assemblage? That's an easy one. No. No, so I haven't. I've not haven't. Not yet. Let me put it that way. In terms of approaching this topic, you know, I started out, like I said, I didn't actually, sorry, let me go back. This is a very long answer to the question. The way I approached this topic was rather when I was invited to give a talk for this for this series, you know, I wasn't working on women or gender at all. And I thought, well, what could I possibly offer? I have been working on dress a bit, but only male dress in the context of my work on the alatino sarcophagus. And so I thought, well, why not push it on to female dress? And so I looked at a whole bunch of different images, right, possibly of women. And I thought the best way to proceed was to pick a selected corpus. And so I was looking a bit at the port sarcophagi and looking at these reliefs together, because, you know, there's a material that I'm familiar with. I did have a look at the figurines briefly, but there's there's so many of them, right? There's so many different sites. That's, you know, this at this point, I hadn't, I didn't really look at them very closely, because I feel like it has to be kind of each corpus needs to be considered on its own before you start doing like a comparative kind of work. But I think that is a good idea. I think that there should be comparison also with Karian on all the figurines there. I mean, we have these grid assemblishers collections. And I think it's worth making comparisons, but keeping in mind that these are very as already stated, right? So the terracotta figurines have a very different function and purpose and use than the steely. So, but I think, you know, this is a dialogue that needs to happen between these these different corpora, for sure. So I, you know, hopefully I or even better yet, a student will do that in the future. Great, thank you. We're almost at time here. So I'll ask one more question, also from Helen Dixon. And she knows that it's a really exciting identification that you've brought into play here about the alabastron and the spoon and those double delay. And it makes good sense as ingredients for a two person ritual. And that you mentioned possibly marriage rituals or or double burials as possible interpretations. But could this be a depiction of couples in worship, meaning symbolic of a pious household, which might speak to the purpose of the steely as photo versus other purposes, which is another issue that you've raised. Yeah, it's possible. So we do have other depictions of two individuals. So there's like this, I'm sure Helen's seen it, but there's this like, you know, four sided cheapest thing from Ulamid. It's in the baby museum and his reliefs on this figure released on two sides. And one has a single figure. And the other side is two male figures. They face the same direction. And so, you know, I do wonder if, you know, if they're if they're both but if they're both like being shown as pious towards a God, I would kind of assume that they would both be facing the same direction in the direction of the divine presence or something. But it seems like a very deliberate choice here to make them face each other. And in fact, I believe I wonder if that deliberate choice is also part of the reason why maybe she's so much shorter than he is they didn't plan well or something in the narrow spaces. But I think but I but I'm like a moment, like I say, like, I think we should make no assumptions. And it is possible that they're just showing themselves as a divine couple, rather than in some sort of marriage ceremony. But I think also these represent these these steely of the couples, I think they're they're interesting and unique, you know, for this presentation of them together. And I only honestly had not thought about them very much until this presentation. And I don't it does I can't find anywhere where people have really thought about them that much either. And I should point out that identifying these like this is not at all my own observation. Henrica make about did all this work in an article from 2014 that I highly highly recommend. But even she doesn't really go very deeply into the meaning of, you know, what's the what this pairing on here means. So I don't know, we're gonna have to think and talk about this more later. Yeah, yeah, it sounds like it. Well, thank you so much again for giving us such a thought provoking presentation. So much food for thought to chew on. This is a really excellent contribution to the series. So thank you, Jessica. And going to just ask Brooke to lead us out with an announcement about the next lecture in the series. All right, well, thank you again for your for your wonderful talk. So to end the the lecture today, I'd like to announce some of our upcoming events. So next month during March, we have three talks scheduled, the first of which will be on March 7 at 930 am again, California time, Dr. Agnes Garcia Ventura, and Dr. Maria Lopez Bertrand will be presenting on on Phoenician, Punic music and musicians agenda approach. So I'd like to invite our internet audience to to join us again next time for this talk. I'd also like to invite you all to check out our website and our social media for the body museum so that you can get information on upcoming events and lectures. Thank you.