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Staff profile

Overview

Giuseppe Delia

Affiliations
Affiliation
Member of the Department of Archaeology

Biography

Before joining Durham University for my PhD, I completed a BA in Cultural Heritage Preservation and an MA in Archaeology and History of Art at the University of Tuscia, Viterbo (Italy). My academic journey has been shaped by a multidisciplinary approach, integrating studies in hieroglyphs, Greek and Latin language and literature alongside archaeology and art history. This broad foundation has allowed me to explore the interplay between textual, visual, and material culture across historical periods ranging from Predynastic Egypt to the Middle Ages.  

During my undergraduate studies, I participated in the excavation of Ferento, an ancient site near Viterbo where Etruscans, Greeks, Romans, and Christians interacted until the 12th century CE. This hands-on experience provided me with practical archaeological skills while deepening my understanding of cultural exchange across millennia. My BA dissertation, *The role of Ἂκραι in the expansion of Syracuse", examined religious interactions between Greeks and Sikeliotes through the spatial organization of temples and cults. I argued that Akrai’s inhabitants strategically located their gods’ cults within city walls while accommodating foreign deities like Cybele in the countryside, fostering both religious diplomacy and cultural integration.  

Building on this foundation, my MA research expanded into Graeco-Roman Egypt and the Middle Ages. As part of an international project between Italy and Egypt aimed at reopening the Graeco-Roman Museum of Alexandria, I compiled and analyzed extensive data on its collections and history. My dissertation, "From the excavation to the museum: The Graeco-Roman Museum of Alexandria in Egypt", explored Alexandria’s pivotal role as a cultural crossroads where Egyptian traditions influenced Greek, Roman, and Christian civilizations. This research highlighted how Alexandria acted as a bridge between Egyptian iconography and Mediterranean visual culture—a theme that continues to shape my academic pursuits.  

My fascination with comparative religions, mythology, and visual culture has driven me to investigate how Egyptian iconography influenced Mediterranean religions from the 1st millennium BCE to the 7th century CE. By tracing the adaptation and reinterpretation of Egyptian divine imagery across Greek, Roman, and Christian contexts, I aim to uncover how these visual narratives shaped religious identities and practices across cultures.

This research examines how Egyptian religious traditions influenced Mediterranean religions through visual representations that transcended cultural boundaries. Interactions between Egypt and Greece began as early as the 7th century BC with Naucratis but intensified under Alexander the Great’s conquest, leading to syncretism in art and religion centered in Alexandria. The Ptolemaic rulers adapted Egyptian traditions to legitimize their rule among native Egyptians—a strategy later adopted by Romans across their empire.  

Christianity also absorbed elements of Egyptian iconography during its formative phases in multicultural environments like Alexandria. Despite efforts to suppress other religions after gaining power, Christian liturgy retained significant debts to Egyptian visual traditions for conveying theological messages effectively.

Material evidence from Alexandria and other Mediterranean sites will be analyzed to identify when, where, how, and why specific Egyptian images were adapted for new religious contexts.

Research Topic

My research aims to reconnect Egyptian iconography and religion to the Aegean area, Rome and its territories, and the formative phases of Christianity. The process of Egyptianisation of the other civilisations would not probably have been just a one-way path nor an evolutionary-linear one with Christianity as the end point, but a complex exchange of information in which each culture gave and received in terms of the narration of myths through the powerful and effective mean of images. In fact, images usually have been the easiest and most direct way to convey messages of any sort, especially religious ones.

Abstract

Research title: Imagines deorum, imago dei. The impact of Egyptian iconography on Mediterranean religions between the 1st millennium BC and the 7th century AD.

The aim is to highlight the substratum in which various aspects of Egyptian religious traditions have converged in Greek, Roman and Christian religion or, more discreetly, in mysterious cults and rituals. They, somehow and with some degree of adjustments, still survive nowadays unrecognised and unchallenged by the general public who perceive them as part of their own age-old traditions and identity.

What archaeological studies suggest is that interactions among Greeks and Egypt, although present from the beginning of the 1st millennium B.C., increased considerably when Greeks founded Naucratis and had the right to trade within Egypt in the 7th century B.C.. However, the conquer of Egypt by Alexander the Great was the revolutionary event that led to a syncretism between the Classical and the Egyptian culture, represented also in the leading role of Alexandria in Egypt in almost all the fields of human knowledge and arts.

The Romans, both sailing and traveling in the Mediterranean Sea and thanks to Greeks and Etruscans that lived in the Italian peninsula and in Sicily, had the chance to be fascinated by Egypt and its traditions, ending allowing oriental cults in their pantheon and, later, acquiring Egypt as a vital part of their Empire. Ptolemies managed to learn and reuse the Egyptian religious traditions, with the aim of legitimate their power amongst the native Egyptian population, and Romans decided to share those traditions with all the Empire creating a set of images and symbols that have been used, for example, to express power since then.

The diffusion of Christianity inside the Roman Empire is also connected with Egyptian divine images’ translations since Christians are supposed to merge some Egyptian and Classical ideas and representations of divinity to build their own liturgy. That may have happened in city such as Alexandria, were the Christian community and many others lived together in such a multicultural environment. Even after that Christians acquired power and decided to destroy any other religious beliefs, they still own a great debt to the Egyptian religion in term of effective and easy-to-remember images.

Therefore, the material evidences for the research come, mostly, from Alexandria, compiled in a database from my previous research project, and from the area of the Mediterranean Sea. This will point out where, when, how and why some Egyptian divine representations were adapted and adopted to serve as carriers of religious and moral habits for other populations and religions that were in touch with Egypt, between the 1st millennium B.C. and the 7th century A.D., when Arabs conquered Egypt. Specific ‘iconic’ images, as case studies, will help narrowing the research such as the iconography of: Anubis-St. Christopher or St. Menas, Horus-Cadmus-Iason-St. George, Sphinxes (Egyptians/Greeks and god Tutu), Hathor-Io, Bes-Gorgons, Isis-Aphrodite-Virgin Mary and Prometheus-St. Antony.

Conference Contributions
  • 2019: ‘If he looks like Anubis and lived where Anubis lived, who is he? Preliminary considerations regarding the iconography of St. Christopher in the Eastern Orthodox Christianity inspired by images of Anubis (or Hermanoubis).​’ Graduate Archaeology at Oxford. Annual International Conference 2019. Cause, Process and Impact of Interaction in Ancient Cultures. 11th March-12th March 2019, Ioannou Centre, University of Oxford.

Research interests

  • •Egyptian archaeology from the Predynastic Period through the Roman Era and beyond, providing a broad chronological understanding of the historical, socio-political, literal, and religious contexts.
  • •Cross-cultural interactions between Egypt, the Mediterranean world, and Asia in respect to explorations and trade routes.
  • •The study of ritual practices, religion, and funerary archaeology in the ancient world, and their impact on past and current practises.
  • •Connecting academic research with public engagement and cultural heritage management, to broaden the access to scientific research to the widest audience possible.

Publications

Conference Paper