What do you think?
Rate this book
Isis in the Ancient World by R. E. Witt
The book is brand new and will be shipped from US.
Paperback
First published June 17, 1997
6 people are currently reading
166 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 18, 2018
No, no. Not that Isis.
This is more properly about the Egyptian goddess Isis and the spread of her cult (in the old, nice sense of the word) throughout the Mediterranean world and even beyond!
Although it is probably way more detailed than the lay reader might require, it is a fascinating turn about in syncretic religion and a welcome case study in how religions just don't spring out of nowhere. I'm looking at you Christianity, for there is much familiar in the worship of Isis-as-providing-mother that fades neatly into the Virgin Mother. That's the real strength of the book, I think: showing how one faith slowly fades into another, first by its trickling out through Alexandria, then Greece, and finally into the nascent Church.
This is more properly about the Egyptian goddess Isis and the spread of her cult (in the old, nice sense of the word) throughout the Mediterranean world and even beyond!
Although it is probably way more detailed than the lay reader might require, it is a fascinating turn about in syncretic religion and a welcome case study in how religions just don't spring out of nowhere. I'm looking at you Christianity, for there is much familiar in the worship of Isis-as-providing-mother that fades neatly into the Virgin Mother. That's the real strength of the book, I think: showing how one faith slowly fades into another, first by its trickling out through Alexandria, then Greece, and finally into the nascent Church.
November 24, 2013
A brilliant, insightful and scholarly work, Isis in the Ancient World is the definitive examination of the nature and worship of the Goddess Isis in the age of the Ptolemies. Originally published in 1971 under the title 'Isis in the Graeco-Roman world' this book explorers the spread of the cult of Isis from the banks of the Nile to the heart of the Roman empire and beyond. Obviously the work of many years of research and devotion. Dr. Witt has earned his place alongside Apuleius and Plutarch.
October 23, 2019
It’s called “Isis in the Ancient World”, not “A Comparison of Isiac and Christian Theology and Practice”, so why does he have to compare the two every other sentence? Please treat each on its own terms, and restrict the comparisons to specific chapters, like the one at the end! Very frustrating! Also he repeated himself a lot. Too much déjà vu.
March 18, 2017
This book is nearly 50 years old, but still in a lot of bibliographies on the Isis cult. It is written by somebody with a background in Egyptology, Classics and Ancient Philosophy and thus this is about the underlying philosophy, rather than the archaeological remains and the problems of the shifting evidence.
It seems to be also very much written from the perspective of a Western Christian and Freemason, which shows in some of the arguments, but which also leads some rather interesting links between the Isis-Cult and Early Christianity and especially Orthodox Marian Veneration.
Certainly worthwhile reading, not just for Isis, but possibly also as a model what may have happened between other aspects of paganism and Christianity in Late Antiquity.
It seems to be also very much written from the perspective of a Western Christian and Freemason, which shows in some of the arguments, but which also leads some rather interesting links between the Isis-Cult and Early Christianity and especially Orthodox Marian Veneration.
Certainly worthwhile reading, not just for Isis, but possibly also as a model what may have happened between other aspects of paganism and Christianity in Late Antiquity.
August 25, 2024
This book is a reissue of Isis in the Graeco-Roman World from 1971. It may still be the most readable book to describe how the cult of Isis spread across the Mediterranean. Its writing style is a bit flowery and prone to digressions, but at least it's not clogged with jargon.
Unfortunately, the book doesn't much discuss a lot of the puzzling questions about the Isis cult, like what exactly her followers meant when they said Isis was the same as other goddesses like Artemis or Aphrodite (though, to be fair, today's scholars are still trying to puzzle that one out). It also tends to treat the evidence uncritically and to take as given some outdated assumptions about the Isis cult. For instance, he thinks that the spread of Egyptian cults in Hellenistic times was deliberately driven by the Ptolemies, an idea that has now been abandoned. Writers in Roman times habitually accused cults they didn't like of sexual immorality. Conservative Romans flung these accusations at exotic cults (including Christianity), Christians flung them at pagans, and Christian sects flung them at each other. Witt takes the accusations toward the Isis cult too seriously, though when discussing the genuine sexual imagery in the Isis cult he treats it rather sympathetically. His treatments of many other subjects, such as Isis' aspect as a healer, are also prone to errors and overstatements.
In the last chapter, Witt indiscriminately lists just about every similarity and point of contact between Christianity and Isis worship. Many are, or may be, genuine points where one influenced the other, while others are clearly irrelevant. And perhaps most fundamentally, Witt assumes that imported cults like that of Isis were each trying to become the dominant one in the Roman world, but that goal was probably alien to all of them except Christianity. Overall, this book feels subtly out of date, a product of a generation of scholars—Witt was born in 1910—who didn't grasp the Isis cult or Roman religion in general as well as today's experts do.
What's frustrating is that no comprehensive look at the Isis cult has fully replaced this one. There have been two big waves of scholarship on Isis since Witt's book came out (the first in the 1970s, with this book near the beginning of the wave, and the second in the past 20 or 25 years), but most of what they've produced is not friendly to the lay reader. One of the exceptions is The Cult of Isis in the Roman Empire by Malcolm Drew Donalson, which is more up-to-date than Witt, though it's more superficial than I'd prefer. Les cultes isiaques dans le monde gréco-romain is written by Laurent Bricault, who probably knows Isis studies better than anybody alive, but it's only useful if you read French, and because I don't, I can't review it.
If you've gotten the basics about Isis from somebody like Donalson or Witt, the first place to go for detailed academic studies is the series of Isis conference volumes, edited by Bricault and Miguel John Versluys. The most useful for English-speakers is probably the third volume, Nile Into Tiber, which has more material in English than the first two volumes and covers less specialized subject matter than those that follow. Isis and Sarapis in the Roman World is also useful for countering some of the assumptions made by earlier scholars like Witt.
Unfortunately, the book doesn't much discuss a lot of the puzzling questions about the Isis cult, like what exactly her followers meant when they said Isis was the same as other goddesses like Artemis or Aphrodite (though, to be fair, today's scholars are still trying to puzzle that one out). It also tends to treat the evidence uncritically and to take as given some outdated assumptions about the Isis cult. For instance, he thinks that the spread of Egyptian cults in Hellenistic times was deliberately driven by the Ptolemies, an idea that has now been abandoned. Writers in Roman times habitually accused cults they didn't like of sexual immorality. Conservative Romans flung these accusations at exotic cults (including Christianity), Christians flung them at pagans, and Christian sects flung them at each other. Witt takes the accusations toward the Isis cult too seriously, though when discussing the genuine sexual imagery in the Isis cult he treats it rather sympathetically. His treatments of many other subjects, such as Isis' aspect as a healer, are also prone to errors and overstatements.
In the last chapter, Witt indiscriminately lists just about every similarity and point of contact between Christianity and Isis worship. Many are, or may be, genuine points where one influenced the other, while others are clearly irrelevant. And perhaps most fundamentally, Witt assumes that imported cults like that of Isis were each trying to become the dominant one in the Roman world, but that goal was probably alien to all of them except Christianity. Overall, this book feels subtly out of date, a product of a generation of scholars—Witt was born in 1910—who didn't grasp the Isis cult or Roman religion in general as well as today's experts do.
What's frustrating is that no comprehensive look at the Isis cult has fully replaced this one. There have been two big waves of scholarship on Isis since Witt's book came out (the first in the 1970s, with this book near the beginning of the wave, and the second in the past 20 or 25 years), but most of what they've produced is not friendly to the lay reader. One of the exceptions is The Cult of Isis in the Roman Empire by Malcolm Drew Donalson, which is more up-to-date than Witt, though it's more superficial than I'd prefer. Les cultes isiaques dans le monde gréco-romain is written by Laurent Bricault, who probably knows Isis studies better than anybody alive, but it's only useful if you read French, and because I don't, I can't review it.
If you've gotten the basics about Isis from somebody like Donalson or Witt, the first place to go for detailed academic studies is the series of Isis conference volumes, edited by Bricault and Miguel John Versluys. The most useful for English-speakers is probably the third volume, Nile Into Tiber, which has more material in English than the first two volumes and covers less specialized subject matter than those that follow. Isis and Sarapis in the Roman World is also useful for countering some of the assumptions made by earlier scholars like Witt.
April 15, 2012
This is another book on my "to read" list that I finished some time ago, and now use as a reference book. It's an excellent outline of the ways in which the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis was transformed over the millennium from the goddess she was to the ancient Egyptians through her cults in Greek in Roman times. It gives very good summaries of the different periods and how Isis was recognized and treated. I'd recommend this to anyone wishing to understand the various persona of this well-known goddess.
February 4, 2015
About the spread of the Isis cult in the Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman World, and it's influence on early Christianity. Mostly good, but some of his statements seem doubtful, and the references are mostly old, even for a book written in 1971.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews