Tracing the Tigris

House of Cilicia (2nd century CE) in situ, detail. 1937. Courtesy of the Princeton Archive

“Tracing the Tigris,” an essay about mosaic fragments from the House of Cilicia by principal investigator Jennifer Stager, is now out in a special issue of World Art! “Artiplaces: Ecological and Ontological Entanglements of Ancient Artworks,” edited by Benjamin Alberti and Christopher Watts, developed out of a session at Theoretical Archaeology Group 2023 and brings together scholars working across the Ancient Mediterranean, Western Asia, and the Americas to explore questions of place. Tracing the Tigris explores a series of topograpic personifications in mosaic from a structure named for one of these personifications by the excavators—the House of Cilica.

Abstract: Mosaic floors from the House of Cilicia at Seleucia Pieria, a port near Antioch-on-the-Orontes, depict topographical personifications of the territory of Cilicia framed by those of the rivers Tigris and Pyramus, among other personifications that are now damaged. Fitted together from colorful cut stones, these figural assemblages draw together place-based materials and the personhood of topographical elements. Drawing on legacy data from mosaics excavated in the 1930s and dispersed to institutions across North America, this essay argues that the afterlives of these mosaics remap the environments that they personify in modernity and, thus, craft hyperreal networks of relation to enact forms of distributed personhood.