Qualifying Project:
Berenike: A Port City and its People, Between Egypt, Africa, India and Rome. 276 BCE to Ca. 530 CE
Digital Project Requirement:
I completed the digital requirement in Deborah Krohn’s class, Exhibition as Medium: Curatorial Thinking, in the fall of 2019. I created an exhibition design about Indo-Roman Trade based on many of the objects uncovered at the Egyptian Red Sea port of Berenike. Various phases of the city’s development and changes in trade patterns were presented in order to highlight the shifting patterns and dynamics that sustained trade between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean Basins.
What was the value of this project for you?
I first became interested in trade in the Western Indian Ocean while writing my undergraduate thesis on the Gemma Augustea, a piece of Sardonyx carved in the Roman Empire out of a stone originating in India. Trading the stone’s course led to writing a section on sourcing stones from India in the early empire. During my first MA at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, I used my Thesis on the Grand Cameo of France to research a much longer section on the development of Indo-Roman trade. This digital project allowed me to focus on the life of a port and the people that participated in it, and to consider how to exhibit their 800-year local history through their material culture, while using these same objects to recontextualize the Roman Empire as an interdependent participant in the interlocking trading circuits that amount to a hemispheric network of exchange in the ancient world.
Berenike: A Port City and its People, Between Egypt, Africa, India and Rome. 276 BCE to Ca. 530 CE
Digital Project Requirement:
I completed the digital requirement in Deborah Krohn’s class, Exhibition as Medium: Curatorial Thinking, in the fall of 2019. I created an exhibition design about Indo-Roman Trade based on many of the objects uncovered at the Egyptian Red Sea port of Berenike. Various phases of the city’s development and changes in trade patterns were presented in order to highlight the shifting patterns and dynamics that sustained trade between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean Basins.
What was the value of this project for you?
I first became interested in trade in the Western Indian Ocean while writing my undergraduate thesis on the Gemma Augustea, a piece of Sardonyx carved in the Roman Empire out of a stone originating in India. Trading the stone’s course led to writing a section on sourcing stones from India in the early empire. During my first MA at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, I used my Thesis on the Grand Cameo of France to research a much longer section on the development of Indo-Roman trade. This digital project allowed me to focus on the life of a port and the people that participated in it, and to consider how to exhibit their 800-year local history through their material culture, while using these same objects to recontextualize the Roman Empire as an interdependent participant in the interlocking trading circuits that amount to a hemispheric network of exchange in the ancient world.
