Troels Myrup Kristensen (University of Aarhus, Denmark)

A recent study of Christian ‘iconoclasm’ in Late Antiquity (Eberhard Sauer, The Archaeology of Religious Hatred, 2003) makes much use of the evidence for the wilful destruction of ‘pagan’ images in Egyptian temples. While Sauer’s study acknowledges that other factors than ‘blind fanaticism’ are involved in these destructive efforts, a closer study of the evidence suggests a very complex modus operandi in the Christian response to images in Egyptian temples. It is for example quite clear that, in the majority of Egyptian cases, specific body parts of human representations have been singled out for mutilation and not merely for pragmatic reasons. Taking its cue from a recent call for a move towards understanding iconoclasm as being informed by conceptions of the body (Pamela Graves, “From An Archaeology of Iconoclasm to an Anthropology of the Body”, Current Anthropology 2008), this paper argues that late antique Christian perceptions of bodily integrity are crucial for our understanding of these attacks on images. The cohesion of image and body in early Christian thought allows us to see ‘selective destruction’ as a form of punishment similar to the treatment of human subjects in for example sharia law, where theft can be punished by amputation of the hands. Vices are thus linked to specific body parts. Similarly in late antique Egypt, sinners were believed to be subjected to body-specific punishments after death. Taking its outset within a regional context, the paper aims to construct an interpretive framework for the understanding of Christian destruction and response to images that goes beyond simplistic notions of ‘destruction’ as a purely negative act.