Fascination with the tiny: social negotiation through miniatures in Hellenistic Babylonia

Abstract

The tremendous diversity and variety of miniature objects in Hellenistic Babylonia reflects a social environment of intensive cross-cultural interaction and widespread change. Considering the aspect of miniaturization itself reveals how tiny things participated in this social transformation. Through their appealing and non-threatening materiality, miniatures established an intimate connection with their users that encouraged identity sharing and illusions of power over the outside world. Miniatures of performing bodies, such as musicians and theatrical masks, induced users to experiment with new enactments of Greek cultural identities. Soldiers, deities and other powerful bodies in miniature enabled fantasies of control over the wars and political upheavals endemic to Hellenistic Babylonia. Display-oriented figurines depicting interpersonal relationships encouraged self-identification and shaped new ideals of social behaviour. The miniature objects of Hellenistic Babylonia were more than just witnesses to social change; they were also participants in the processes of negotiating new identity norms for this multicultural society.

Miniature in Everything but Meaning: A Contextual Analysis of Miniature Vessels at Homol'ovi I

“…The inherent symbolism of miniature vessels likely varied based on the identity of the producer, despite the shared association with ritual upon deposition. Langin-Hooper (2015:65) suggested that interactions with miniatures take on a performative quality tied to physical intimacy between the individual and the object. As noted earlier, vessels produced by novice adults or children may accrue additional significance for the family or social group.…”

The Sacred Representation of a Miniature World: Rituals With Figurines and Small and Miniaturized Pottery at the Phoenician Cult Place of Kharayeb

“…The second case is represented by the study of the miniature objects in Hellenistic Babylonia (Langin-Hooper 2015). In this case, it is the cultural and social environments (the cross-cultural interaction between the Greek and Oriental worlds in the Hellenistic period) that provide points of comparison with the material of Kharayeb.…”

Bringing science to the study of ancient senses - archaeology and visual psychology

“…The scale of objects relative to humans can be used as a way of manipulating the world (Bailey 2005); miniaturizing things is a globally widespread practice, and while it often creates objects that are dysfunctional in the physical sense (Foxhall 2015), can be used to instil a sense of mastery over them through exaggerating our scalar relationship with them, and, by extension, the wild, such as with the clay animal figurines from Neolithic Çatalhöyük, (Meskell 2015). In Hellenistic Babylonia the rendering of soldiers and deities in miniature enabled a sense of control over the often violent upheavals endemic to the region (Langin-Hooper 2015). Chin-Ying Tseng (2021, this volume) considers the Buddhist sculptures in the Five Caves of Tan Yao in Northern China, the earliest of a number of caves excavated into the Wuzhou Mountain by the ruling family of the Northern Wei dynasty (386-534 AD: in this specific case 460-5 AD).…”