Iside verso l'impero: metamorfosi di una dea

In the aftermath of Alexander the Great's conquest, Egypt entered a new phase in its history, a phase in which the country ceased to be, and for a very long time, the centre of its own universe, while its millenary traditions definitively crossed the borders of the Nile Valley and the eastern Mediterranean to gradually reach the westernmost extremities of the Roman Empire. Already before the beginning of the Ptolemaic period, Isis had begun to ply the seas, reaching first Athens and then Delos, taking the road to the ports of southern Italy, penetrating from there to Rome and the rest of the Peninsula and, finally, throughout the Empire. The nature of Isis, the transformations she underwent in the most recent phases of her history (between the 4th century BC and the 4th century AD. ) and the ways in which Egyptian cults were appropriated by the peoples of the Ancient Mediterranean have been the subject, even in very recent times, of numerous analyses and studies that have clearly and precisely identified the successive ‘mutations’ of the image of Isis and the divinities connected to her and the relations that the Egyptian gods had established and entertained with the divine entities encountered locally in the host countries. The present contribution, therefore, rather than leaving the banks of the Nile to follow these already authoritatively explored routes, aims to draw a picture (albeit a synthetic one) of the ‘metamorphoses’ that Isis underwent in her homeland during the first millennium BC, with particular attention to her final phases and to offer insights into some of the epithets and emblems of the Egyptian goddess.