What is in a Vase? Materiality and semiotics of cinerary vases in Egyptian stone and vase shapes in Roman domestic and funerary contexts. (original) (raw)

2021, in R. Berg, A. Coralini, A. Koponen, R. Välimäki (eds) Tangible Religion. Materiality of Domestic Cult Practices from Antiquity to Early Modern Era

The chapter focuses on vases and vase shapes to explore their materiality and semiotics in Roman domestic and ritual contexts. To this end, I focus on a group of Julio-Claudian cinerary vases in coloured stone that present a double-handled hemispherical body resting on a short foot and with a lid with a pear-shaped finial. Due to the striking resemblance to a (modern) soup bowl, I called this shape “tureen”. Previous scholars had noticed these urns’ “atypical” design, which appeared random if compared to the other known types of Roman cinerary containers and with no obvious funerary connection. Instead, I suggest that the tureen’s ‘unconventional’ shape was symbolically charged, and thus meaningful. I further argue that it resulted from the synthesis of a series of more ancient ritual vases connected to both the domestic and ritual spheres. I start from the observation that the choice of a given shape for a cinerary container could not be made randomly, but on the account of its perceived familiar, sacred character or semiotic reference to the cultic sphere. To illustrate this point, I discuss the tureen shape’s hybrid ancestry by recalling the use and function of its architypes considering recent debates on material culture, memory and skeuomorphism. Although no tureens have been found in “physical” form in Roman domestic contexts, there is evidence from visual representations that the iconography of the shape itself could have played an important role in domestic religion and in everyday life. I shall thus set the discussion further against the images of vases, of which the tureen seems to be the materialisation, featuring in Roman domestic frescoes to speculate upon its potential connection with Roman domestic cults. By discussing the ritual meaning of these painted objects within their scenes, I aim to demonstrate that they are not simple parerga or accessories but meaningful visual symbols that acting upon the senses made the sacred a tangible reality in everyday life. Furthermore, the evidence emerging from the creation and use of the stone tureens compels us to frame this phenomenon further in the early Imperial cultural and ideological climate. The tureens do not in fact come into use as urns until the Augustan period. I argue that this is more than a chronological coincidence, but possibly the material actualization of the Augustan visual and religious syntax. Within the framework of lived religion and sensory studies, the aim is to extrapolate the ritual role of the tureen and other vase shapes in Roman religious and domestic contexts to shed further light on the relationship between the sacred and materiality in antiquity.