VON GÖTTERBILDERN ZU EHRENSTATUEN: KULT, ERINNERUNG UND POLITISCHE KOHÄSION IM HELLENISTISCHEN SCHWARZMEERRAUM
FROM IMAGES OF THE GODS TO HONORIFIC STATUES: CULT, MEMORY, AND POLITICAL COHESION IN THE HELLENISTIC BLACK SEA REGION

Summary/Abstract: From Images of the Gods to Honorific Statues: Cult, Memory, and Political Cohesion in the Hellenistic Black Sea Region. This article examines the development and function of honorific statues in the Hellenistic Black Sea region as complex media situated between cult, memory, and political communication. It argues that honorific statues should not primarily be understood as artistic innovations, but rather as elements of an epigraphically constituted culture of honour, in which social meaning is publicly produced, negotiated, and stabilised. Based on a corpus of 32 inscriptions, the study demonstrates that these monuments were embedded in ritual practices and operated in close interaction with their inscriptions, spatial settings, and social contexts. At its core, the article proposes that honorific statues emerge from the tradition of divine cult images, whose semantic and ritual structures they transform and relocate into the political sphere of the polis. They adopt key features of cultic imagery – visibility, durability, and ritual integration – while maintaining a structural boundary between the human and the divine. Rather than dissolving this distinction, they operate within a liminal space that underpins their communicative and normative efficacy. The analysis combines epigraphic, spatial, and iconographic approaches to show that honorific statues function as media of cultural memory, translating individual achievements into collectively binding frameworks of interpretation. At the same time, they contribute to political cohesion by embodying social values and articulating belonging within the Greek world. A methodological innovation of the study lies in its integration of traditional epigraphic analysis with AI-assisted visual reconstruction, used as a heuristic tool for modelling lost visual practices.

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