Workshop “Temples, traditions and texts: cultural production under Seleucid imperial rule”, Barcelona 16.-17. April 2026 (Reial Monestir de Pedralbes & Reial Acadèmia de Farmàcia de Catalunya). Temples, traditions and texts” brings together specialists in Assyriology, Mesopotamian archaeology, Biblical Studies, Egyptology, and the history of Hellenistic Greek culture to investigate textual production in the broader framework of Seleucid imperial rule. Our shared focus is the spectrum of cultural responses—ranging from resistance and contestation to accommodation and creative adaptation—to processes oen described as “forced” or “hegemonic” Hellenization within the societies of the ancient Near East and Egypt. By concentrating on temple milieus and their priestly corpora, the workshop aims to illuminate the role of learned elites in negotiating imperial domination, cultural pressure, and the emergence of a transregional koinè in the Seleucid and early post-Seleucid periods. At the core of our discussion stand priestly texts—ritual series, cultic instructions, commentaries, chronicles, historiographical compositions, scientific and divinatory corpora understood not as static repositories of tradition but as dynamic instruments of identity construction and cultural boundary maintenance. We will examine how these texts reconfigure older traditions in dialogue with, or in tension against, new political configurations and the encroaching presence of Greek language, institutions, and forms of knowledge. In particular, we ask how scribal strategies such as archaism, canonization, recontextualization, and selective innovation functioned as modes of discursive resistance or controlled integration vis-à-vis Hellenistic imperial culture. Sessions of the workshop: 1. Communities and festivals; 2. Temples and priests; 3. History and Memory. This workshop is organized by R. Da Riva (Universitat de Barcelona) and funded by the ICREA Acadèmia Research Award
