Seleucid-Parthian Figurines From Babylon in the Nippur Collection: Implications of Misattribution and Re-Evaluating the Corpus

Abstract

This article formally documents an important correction to the provenance attribution of three reclining female figurines from Babylon that reside in the Nippur collection at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and were published with that corpus. Few scholars have noticed the misattribution of these figurines, and the problem has not been formally documented for scholarship. Through historiographical analysis of the late nineteenth century Nippur Expeditions and early twentieth century cataloguing and publication of the Nippur corpus, this article reconstructs how and why these three reclining figurines have been continually misassociated with Nippur, and traces the continued impact of this confusion on scholarship's understanding of the Nippur figurine tradition. Most critically, the publication of these three figurines as Nippur objects lent credence to the testimony of an antiquities dealer who sold an additional eight reclining figurines “from Nippur” to the Harvard Semitic Museum; these figurines continue to be regarded as Nippur objects. This article casts doubt upon that provenance. The figurine tradition of Seleucid-Parthian Nippur is reevaluated in light of the absence of securely-provenanced reclining female figurines at that site. An art historical evaluation of these figurines is undertaken, which links these figurines to the general use of hybrid Greek-Babylonian imagery in Seleucid-Parthian figurines, and connects the specific motif of the reclining figure to Greek banqueting imagery. It is proposed that the Nippur community's lack of interest in reclining female figurines can be correlated with a disinterest in pan-Hellenistic ceramic tablewares; together, these lacunae indicate Nippur's non-participation in negotiated Greek-Babylonian banqueting practices. These differences in cross-cultural interaction between Nippur and the neighboring Babylonian communities have not been fully recognized nor explored, due to scholarship's misunderstanding of the use of reclining female figurines at that site. It is this confusion that this article attempts to resolve.