Canonisation As Innovation : Anchoring Cultural Formation in the First Millennium Bce

Canonisation is fundamental to the sustainability of cultures. This volume is meant as a (theoretical) exploration of the process, taking Eurasian societies from roughly the first millennium BCE (Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Jewish and Roman) as case studies. It focuses on canonisation as a form of cultural formation, asking why and how canonisation works in this particular way and explaining the importance of the first millennium BCE for these question and vice versa. As a result of this focus, notions like anchoring, cultural memory, embedding and innovation play an important role throughout the book.

Miguel John Versluys, Ph.D. (2001), Leiden University, is Professor of Classical & Mediterranean Archaeology at that university. He has published widely on the cultural dynamics of Afro-Eurasia in Antiquity, including Visual Style and Constructing Identity in the Hellenistic World. Nemrud Dağ and Commagene under Antiochos I (CUP 2017)

Damien Agut-Labordère, Ph.D. (2005), Centre national de la recherche scientifique, is Chargé de recherche in ArScAn research team based in Nanterre. He has published monographs and articles on Ancient Egyptian Literature and, in parallel, on Egypt during the Persian Achaemenid period. As specialist of the Demotic script, he is also involved in several archaeological missions in Egypt, in the Western Desert.

Contributors are: Damien Agut-Labordère, Laurent Bricault, Hervé Gonzalez, Casper C. de Jonge, André Lardinois, William Marx, John K. Papadopoulos, Alessandra Rolle, Miguel John Versluys, Greg Woolf, Marie Young.