When Isis first arrived on Greek shores in the 3^rd century BCE, her new followers had to build sanctuaries appropriate to an Egyptian goddess. In the process of imagining a place for their Greek Isis to dwell, devotees came up with a wide range of eclectic solutions that intertwined local needs, imperialist fantasy, and fantastical chronology. These sanctuaries do not draw from contemporaneous Egyptian art and architecture, but rather from Greek stereotypes about Egypt and the Nile River. Isis’ Greek temples, as argued by Mazurek, allowed Greek devotees to imagine Egypt in a way that responded to their own experiences as provincial subjects of the Roman Empire.

About the speaker: Dr. Lindsey Mazurek (PhD Duke University) is an Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at Indiana University. Her research explores questions of ethnicity, religion, landscape, and change in the Roman provinces, particularly how the inhabitants of Rome’s provinces reconfigured their own ideas of themselves and their world in response to Roman rule. Her new book, Isis in a Global Empire: Greek Identity Through Egyptian Religion in Roman Greece (Cambridge University Press 2022) looks at the worship of Egyptian deities like Isis, Sarapis, and Anubis in Greece during the Roman period and examines how local devotees reconfigured traditional ideas about Greekness in response to their religious practices.