Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning ‘condemnation of memory’ The phrase was not used by the ancient Romans, and first appeared in a dissertation written in Germany in 1689. The term is used in modern scholarship to cover a wide array of official and unofficial sanctions through which the physical remnants and memories of a deceased individual are destroyed.
About Damnatio memoriae in brief
Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning ‘condemnation of memory’ The phrase was not used by the ancient Romans, and first appeared in a dissertation written in Germany in 1689. The term is used in modern scholarship to cover a wide array of official and unofficial sanctions through which the physical remnants and memories of a deceased individual are destroyed. The practice is seen as long ago as the aftermath of the reign of the Egyptian Pharaohs Akhenaten in the 13th century BC, and Hatshepsut in the 14th centuryBC. In ancient Rome, the practice of damnatio Memoriae was the condemnation of elites and emperors after their deaths. If the senate or a later emperor did not like the acts of an individual, they could have his name erased and his statues reworked.
Because there is an economic incentive to seize property and rework statues, historians and archaeologists have had difficulty determining when official damnatiomemoriae actually took place. Compounding this difficulty is the fact that a completely successful damnatioMemoriae– in the full and total erasure of the subject from the historical record– is very rare. In contemporary cases, even where the individual in question was not even in question, the obliteration of the person’s existence and actions would continue like in the past. By design, evidence of this practice is scarce, so it seems to have been quite rare.
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This page is based on the article Damnatio memoriae published in Wikipedia (as of Jan. 10, 2021) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
