The Art of Queenship in the Hellenistic World

Patricia Eunji Kim examines how Hellenistic queens used—and were represented through—art and material culture across the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia from the fourth to second centuries BCE. Coins, gems, vessels, sculpture and monuments reveal royal women not simply as members of dynasties but as visible participants in the construction of legitimacy, continuity and political power.

Moving across the Hecatomnid, Argead, Ptolemaic, Seleucid and Attalid worlds, Kim compares representations of queenship in sacred spaces, public monuments, royal courts and domestic settings. Her approach brings art history, gender and political history together to show how ideals of femininity and dynastic authority were created in culturally connected kingdoms. The result is a specialist study of royal women as patrons, subjects and political actors in the Hellenistic world.