Over the past thirty or forty years, largely due to the sustained efforts of Laurent Bricault (Toulouse) and his younger co-workers, the study of the Ptolemaic and then Roman appropriations of the Egyptian goddess has acquired a new intensity and sophistication, of which this well-illustrated volume, which was awarded a first-book prize by the Midwest and South Classical Association, is yet another manifestation. The enormous accretion of published archaeological evidence, Hellenistic and Roman, from temple-complexes to small finds including lamps and coins, has led to more differentiated periodisation, notably for the High Empire, based on closer attention to period, location, social status, networks and individual choice, a shift now brilliantly exemplified by the contributions to V. Gasparini and R. Veymiers (eds), Individuals and Materials in the Greco-Roman Cults of Isis (2018). One thus prefers to speak now of ‘cults of’ Isis in the Graeco-Roman world (Bricault, Les cultes isiaques, 2013).

As an archaeologist of Greece under the Romans, Lindsey Mazurak has a professional concern with material evidence and its agency. The explicit aim of her book is to offer a ‘materially-oriented ethnic history’ of the Egyptian cults in provincial Greece over the first two centuries c.e. Ethnicity is taken, with R. Brubaker (Ethnicity without Groups, 2004), as a form of self-fashioning, that is, the sum of choices made by agents to subscribe to delimited ethnicities. M. thus attempts to go beyond the long-familiar recognition that the Graeco-Roman appropriation of the ‘Isiac family’ involved selection, re-interpretation and downright invention — here summed up in the word ‘domestication’. She suggests that the evidence for investment of resources, material, social and emotional, in local urban cults of Isis gave rise to a ‘dissonant’ or ‘minority’ ethnicity among worshippers. This ethnicity is not ascribed by legal status or descent but self-created, a transcultural identity somewhere between ‘Greekness’ and ‘Egyptian(ness)’, with the reservation that the latter is only available in forms mediated through the conventions and priorities of the former and within the larger context of Roman domination of the Mediterranean. The book thus seeks to adapt C. E. Barrett's emphasis on negotiated and multiple identities in her book on Aegyptiaca in Pompeian gardens (Domesticating Empire, 2019) to the practice of Isiac cults in Roman Greece.

The argument is set out in six chapters. The first serves as an Introduction, framing the whole within the provincialisation of Greece and its consequences for Greek identity, turning then to M.'s take on visuality, ethnicity and the affordances of objects. Ch. 2 views Isiac identity as primarily a matter of identification with the group, the several Isiac ‘communities’ understood as promoting such identification through rituals (including initiation), the sociality of constituent sub-groups, and behavioural regulation, all this eventuating in a degree of convergence between the cults of different localities. Ch. 3 moves on to transculturality, the process of ‘deterritorialising’ Isis by insisting on her universality, her polyonymy and the polysemy of her new iconography. A special point is made of the absence of aretalogies from the western Mediterranean and their specifically Greek transmutation of Isis. Chs 4–6 pursue the issues of appropriation and its communication in different ways: in the deselection of characteristically Egyptian styles in favour of Greek iconography; a discussion of the 111 Athenian reliefs and statues, mainly funerary, most of which figure women assimilating themselves with Isis by displaying the ‘Isiac knot’ (Knotenpalla) on the breast and wielding a sistrum and so affirming a transcultural identity; and the use of ‘collapsed geographies’ and archaising imagery to insinuate Greek ‘control’ over Egypt. A brief coda emphasises that it was the very marginality of the Isiac cults that allowed their adherents to claim their creatively ambivalent form of Greekness.

There is much of value here: M. has a good command of her material and the relevant bibliography, and uses case studies of individual temples, at Thessaloniki, Dium and Marathon, to ground specific claims. Her themes of visuality, affordances of objects and spaces, identity and globalisation are all topics of major current interest in the study of the religious life of the Empire. If I here focus on some questions arising, this should not distract from the wider value of her study. I had the impression that M. must already have written drafts of several chapters, notably those focused on grouping, the aretalogies and objects, divine images and the Athenian ‘portraits’, all of which focus on the creation of an Isiac identity, by the time she discovered ethnicity, which induced her to juggle with the notion of ‘Greekness’, unconvincingly identified with the Second Sophistic, as though that had any relevance for the mass of worshippers of the Egyptian cults (aside from Aristides, Εἰς Σάραπιν). The notion of ‘Egyptian cults’ is understood in extremely limited terms – where is the rest of the ‘Isiac family’? ‘Objects’ too are understood in a very restricted manner: the striking divergence between the mass of Isiac motifs on coinage in the Peloponnese and their scarcity elsewhere is never mentioned. And if this is the Greek provincial Isiac identity must we posit others too, in Asia Minor, or Hispania? Finally, one cannot overlook the number of minor errors, in Greek, Latin epigraphy, bibliographic references, and even nomenclature, such as εἰς ὁ θεός, mystes taken as plural, ‘the Iseum Campanese’, all repeated.