Beth Shean Studies

In Beth Shean Studies, Irene Bald Romano and Kyle W. Mahoney focus their research on a Hellenistic inscribed stele fragment and a Roman marble portrait of Alexander the Great, excavated at the site of Beth Shean (Israel), ancient Nysa-Scythopolis, in 1925 by the Palestine Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Both objects were found in a cistern on the tel, just south of a Roman temple, probably dumped there in the fifth or early sixth century CE. Until this publication, neither artifact had received the attention it deserved as important evidence for the Hellenistic and Roman history and cult activities of Scythopolis and the region. Mahoney's interpretation of the inscription provides a detailed historical narrative of Scythopolis in the politically fraught second century BCE. The name of the Seleucid King Demetrios II was, moreover, erased, and the stele thus exhibits an early example of damnatio memoriae, a tradition whose history is further explored here. Romano probes the various ways the image and myths associated with Alexander the Great were manipulated and appropriated long after his death--as a role model by Roman emperors, a mythical founder of Roman cities in the region, the divine son of Zeus and half-brother of Dionysos, the probable focus of veneration in a Roman cult at Scythopolis, and as an anti-Christ by Christian zealots who mutilated his portrait head. Using an object-biography approach, the modern history of the portrait of Alexander is also traced, with its movements mirroring the history of the creation of museums in Jerusalem.