The George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation

Project Title: Inventing Epiphany: Miniature Arts in Hellenistic Babylonia

Stephanie Langin-Hooper is a scholar of ancient Mesopotamian and ancient Greek art history. Her primary research concerns the role of miniature objects – figurines, seals, coins, and jewelry – as instruments of identity creation and mediators of social relationships in the multicultural environment of Seleucid-Parthian Babylonia (southern Iraq, after the conquests of Alexander the Great, c. 330 BCE – 224 CE). Her first book, Figurines in Hellenistic Babylonia: Miniaturization and Cultural Hybridity, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. Her articles have appeared in publications such as the American Journal of Archaeology, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, IRAQ, World Archaeology, Pallas: Revue d’Études Antiques, and Oxford Journal of Archaeology. Along with Becky Martin, she co-edited The Tiny and the Fragmented: Miniature, Broken, or Otherwise Incomplete Objects in the Ancient World, published by Oxford University Press in 2018.

The Howard Foundation fellowship will fund the completion of her second book project, entitled Inventing Epiphany: Divine Manifestation, Scale, and Sensory Experience in the Miniature Arts of Hellenistic Babylonia. This project explores how divine beings – gods and goddesses, supernatural creatures, constellations and other astronomical phenomena – were shown to appear, move, and interact with humans in the miniature artworks from Hellenistic Babylonia. These small-scale revelations of the gods were a more personal expression of the concepts of divine manifestation underpinning the official priestly practice of Babylonian zodiac astrology. A significant contribution of this project will be to trace how Babylonian religious frameworks and the miniature artworks that embodied them were an inspiration and catalyst for the development of Hellenistic belief in divine epiphany.