Sculpture in the Roman Near East

As Jason notes, there is a new, very important book out on Roman sculpture in the Near East, “The Sculptural Environment of the Roman Near East. Reflections on Culture, Ideology, and Power” (Leuven 2008), edited by Yaron Z. Eliav, Elise Friedland and Sharon Herbert. It contains numerous interesting papers, and several that are of primary importance to my dissertation (a preliminary outline is now available here). I haven’t had my copy of the book for very long and thus only managed to read one paper in full so far, Kenneth Holum on the (re)display of ‘pagan’ statues in Byzantine Caesarea Maritima, a topic that I will be talking about in Leicester in November. I also look forward to reading papers by Frank Trombley, John Pollini, Yoram Tsafrir, and David Frankfurter on various aspects of the use of images in the Roman Near East and Egypt.