Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Isis/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted by Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 23:57, 30 June 2018 [1].

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Isis

Nominator(s): A. Parrot (talk) 14:34, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

Isis is the ancient Egyptian deity with the greatest impact outside her home land. She lies near the center of many puzzling questions about Greek and Roman religion and still shows up in odd places in modern Western culture. This is the most thoroughly researched article I've written, so it should meet the criteria.

For source-checkers: I use academic sources in nearly every case, but when discussing Isis' impact in modern culture, that's not always possible. The source I'm least comfortable with is Forrest 2001, which is mostly a devotional book for modern worshippers of Isis. I used its least subjective chapter to support a couple of statements about Isis' modern followers that are pretty obvious but hard to find citations for elsewhere. Another difficulty is that the article cites sources in French and German, languages I do not speak. I copied fairly long passages from most of those sources and had them translated (special thanks to User:Iry-Hor and User:Nephiliskos). In Bricault 2001 the information is drawn from the maps, so I only needed enough French to read a map key. A. Parrot (talk) 14:34, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

It must be Egyptian Women's Month, with Cleopatra below. Johnbod (talk) 15:54, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

Image review

• File:David_Roberts_Temple_Island_Philae.jpg needs a US PD tag. Same with File:Pompeii_-_Temple_of_Isis_-_Io_and_Isis_-_MAN.jpg, File:Isiac_water_ceremony.jpg, File:Figure-6-Fresco-of-Isis-lactans-at-Karanis-fourth-century-CE-Karanis-Tran-Tam-Tinh.png

• File:ThebanTomb335.png: reproduction of a 2D artwork garners no copyright for the author under US law

• File:Temple_of_Isis,_Delos_02.jpg needs an explicit copyright tag for the original work. Same with File:Marble_statue_of_Isis,_the_goddess_holds_a_situla_and_sistrum,_ritual_implements_used_in_her_worship,_from_117_until_138_AD,_found_at_Hadrian's_Villa_(Pantanello),_Palazzo_Nuovo,_Capitoline_Museums_(12945630725).jpg

I have added US public-domain tags for all of the above, although I'm not completely sure I used the correct ones or, in the case of the statue and the temple, formatted them correctly in relation to the other license templates. A. Parrot (talk) 16:24, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

• File:Auguste_Puttemans_Isis_2.jpg: what is the copyright status of the sculpture? Nikkimaria (talk) 15:03, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

As I understand it from this Commons page, the statue was "published" when it was first displayed in a venue where it was free to photograph. That would have been either 1922, when it was installed at the Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery, or, if the gallery didn't allow photographs, 1939, when it was moved to its current open-air site. I can find no copyright notices for the statue in the records for either 1922 or 1939. Should I use {{PD-US-no notice}}? A. Parrot (talk) 16:24, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

Assuming there is no copyright notice on the statue itself, and you can add a ref for its display history to the image description, yes. Nikkimaria (talk) 18:47, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

I didn't find any sign of a copyright notice on the statue. Done. A. Parrot (talk) 20:21, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

From FunkMonk

• I'll review soon, some initial points below. FunkMonk (talk) 21:19, 27 May 2018 (UTC)
• There is a good deal of duplinking, perhaps try this script:[2]

I've removed some, but the few that remain (Behbeit el-Hagar, veil of Isis, and Hermes Trismegistus) are terms that appear a long way apart in the article. I've always been skeptical of the hard link-only-once rule, believing that readers who want to click a link shouldn't have to scroll up through two thousand words of text to find the last place the linked term showed up. I can see removing the second occurrence of the veil link because it's also linked, though less transparently, in an adjacent image caption, but I think removing the other two would be, to be blunt, silly.

• What is the infobox image based on? A specific ancient depiction, or is it some original amalgam based on various sources? Either way, this should be stated in the Commons description, and perhaps even in the infobox caption.

User:Jeff Dahl's images of Egyptian deities are composites. By eyeballing them, not because of anything he himself said, I can tell they lean heavily on the imagery from the tomb of Nefertari. In this case, everything except the ankh and papyrus staff corresponds very closely to a pair of images from that tomb (visible here in the third and fourth clickable images). I've added something to that effect to the Commons description.

• "Philae as seen from Bigeh Island in the early 19th century" I think exact date and artist should be given here.

Done. A. Parrot (talk) 22:46, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

• "Coptic form ⲎⲤⲈ (Ēse) and to her Greek name Ἰσις" No transliteration for the Greek?

Given that it's just "Isis", I wasn't sure whether to include it. Do you think it should be added?

The reader doesn't know, so probably good to include in parenthesis. FunkMonk (talk) 03:18, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

Done.

• "The Egyptian term for a throne" Which is what?

Also st. I've added it to the text.

• Several writers are mentioned, but only a few are presented. I wonder if it might be good to present them all by occupation.

I'm never sure how to handle this problem, especially because the least wordy way to do it is to use the contentious false title. In a section like the first, where several scholars from the same discipline are named close together, it only seems necessary to use it for the first of them (where I've just added it). Because this article draws on multiple disciplines, it gets more complex in later sections. I'll mull how to handle them.

• "Isis took the active role in Horus's conception by stimulating her inert husband" What is meant by "stimulating" here?

I changed it to "sexually stimulating", as that's what's meant, but there might a better way to word it.

• "apotropaic power" Explain this uncommon term in parenthesis.

It felt awkward to do that, so I changed the wording to "protective magical power", with the link destination the same. A. Parrot (talk) 03:33, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

• I'll review the rest of the article once the structural issues discussed below are resolved, so I don't end up reading a soon outdated version of the article. FunkMonk (talk) 03:18, 4 June 2018 (UTC)
• "Isis Pelagia developed an added significance" Shouldn't the name be in italics here too, like at the previous mention?

I've italicized the second mention too. A. Parrot (talk) 01:36, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

• "as priestesses in the many of the same" Seems "the" is not needed.

Yes. Just a typo, now fixed. A. Parrot (talk) 01:36, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

• Nature is capitalised inconsistently.

I think I capitalized it when thinking of nature as a personification, but I didn't think too hard about it. I've made it consistently lowercase. A. Parrot (talk) 01:36, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

• Support - everything looks good to me now. FunkMonk (talk) 01:54, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Comment by Nergaal

• Why isn't this article split into 1) Egypt and neighbors; 2) Greco-Roman world; 3) After/elsewhere? Nergaal (talk) 07:26, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

Support by Squeamish Ossifrage

This is pretty cursory at the moment.

• First off, I have concerns about the overall structure of the article, which might be solved by restructuring the existing sections underneath broader categories, as suggested by Nergaal above. For example, right now, you have "§Relationships with other gods" and "§Adherents and priests". Those names are location-neutral, and so one might expect to see a discussion of both Egyptian and Greco-Roman aspects of those topics in those sections. But that's not how the article is constructed; those are exclusively Greco-Roman material. It doesn't help that the Egyptian and Greco-Roman material are not organized into exactly parallel section structures.

Nergaal, Squeamish Ossifrage: The major reason I didn't use overarching sections on Egypt vs. the Greco-Roman world is that the current subsections would have to be dropped down to Level 4 (i.e., ====Mother goddess====). I don't think Wikipedia renders level 4 headings visually distinct enough from Level 3; I often don't recognize the difference between them when reading and lose track of the article structure. If it's necessary, though, it would be easy to add new top-level headings. If I do that, do you think the section on Christianity should be put into the larger Greco-Roman section (given that any possible influence was in ancient times) or kept separate?

I thought about including an Egyptian "relationships with other gods" section, but Isis's connections with other Egyptian deities are tied very tightly to her roles, so I considered it redundant. An Egyptian "adherents and priests" section wouldn't make sense because Isis was just a regular part of the religious landscape in Egypt. If there was anything distinctive about the people who worshipped her or who served as her priests, other than what's already mentioned in passing in the article, it hasn't been studied. In Greece and Rome, on the other hand, the demographics of her worship are easily studied (the evidence for individual religious behavior being much more abundant) and scholars have discussed fairly extensively who was attracted to this cult that started out on the religious fringe.

Well, I'm not wedded to Nergaal's proposal of Egyptian / Greco-Roman / Other as the organizational guideline. But I do think something needs to be done. You've got top-level sections that don't actually contain top-level content, and that's confusing for the reader, to say the least. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 03:15, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

• I think that a tighter look at structure might also help with the prose in general. There are some, well, clunky bits. On a cursory examination, I especially noticed that discussion of patients being identified symbolically with Horus in order to benefit from healing spells dedicated to Isis appears in §Roles in Egypt > Mother goddess ... but then appears again in very similar form in §Worship in Egypt and Nubia > Popular worship.

I'll work on this over the weekend.

• There's some leeway about whether chapter title and journal articles should be presented in Title Case or Sentence case (my preference being the latter, but you're welcome to ignore me); in any case (rimshot), there's some inconsistency in which is used here.

I've capitalized them all—except in a couple of quotations that are included in article titles, and in the case of French titles. I'm not sure how to handle these two cases, as French uses capitalization much less often. (In Brill's multilingual volumes, for instance, titles of studies in English are in title case and those in French are sentence case.) For that matter, I'm not even sure how to capitalize French book titles. Any advice would be appreciated!

• You are not consistent about how you cite edited works that include chapters with separate authorship. Compare the Bodel (2008) and Cruz-Uribe (2010) (and other) sources with any of the times you list the edited work in §Works cited, while referencing the specific chapter only in §Notes and citations > Citations.

I've never been sure how to handle studies within books. (Right now the books in which more than one study has been cited are listed as books, whereas single studies are listed by themselves. Arbitrary and finicky, I know.) If all the individual studies in this article were listed separately, as they are in at least some FAs, the works cited list, already very long, would be made much longer. Is it acceptable to just list the books in the works cited and relegate the listings of studies to the citations?

Personally, when I'm dealing with a book that contains a number of published studies (and/or just chapters with distinct authorship), I use {{cite book}} to just point at the material written by each author I reference, individually. If that means I've got two or three sources in the same book, well, so be it. That has the advantage of letting me point sfn tags at the actual author who I'm referencing, without a lot of extra clutter. Now, that said, Wikipedia is nothing if not permissive with referencing styles so long as there are consistent rules being applied. I'm ... not sure I've seen anyone else draw the line quite where you have here. It's not what I would do. But it is a consistent decision, so it's (probably) copacetic with regard to the FA criteria. On the other hand, don't ever worry about a Works cited / reference list being too long if that's what's needed to reference an article (you can probably kick that Works cited list to 30em columns for a little more compact presentation). Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 03:15, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

• Journal references (such is Bianchi) should ideally include the page numbers of the article cited.

Done.

• Book-format sources that lack ISBNs (like Griffiths (1960) and several others) should ideally have an OCLC identifier.

Done.

• In §Further reading, I assume the Bergen source is in French?

The studies in the book are in different languages: French, English, German, and Italian. If there's an established way to reflect that in a citation template, I'd be happy to add it.

Cited individually, that's easy, of course. I'll need to give some thought to how you'd do that if you opt to retain your current practice. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 03:15, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

Though the volume by Berger et al. is in the further reading, not the works cited, so addressing studies individually wouldn't make a difference there. A. Parrot (talk) 03:27, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

• Bricault is cited quite a bit in the article itself; what warrants giving him four entries worth of further reading also?

Many of the Bricault volumes, both in the works cited and the further reading, are edited by Bricault but largely written by others. The study of Isis in the Greco-Roman world is becoming almost its own sub-discipline, and Bricault is its hub. The article text has only three citations to works actually written by Bricault, because, not speaking French, I wasn't able to use his work very extensively. Regarding the two books in the further reading that are fully his: Bricault 2005 is the definitive collection of epigraphic references to Isis's cult, and Bricault 2013 is a much longer and (one hopes) thoughtful and thorough overview of the subject than the two rather superficial English-language overviews (Witt 1997 and Donalson 2003) that I was able to cite. A. Parrot (talk) 02:10, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

I know how it goes when you need to rely heavily on the major experts in a narrow field. That said, even if he's central to current scholarship on the topic, you might opt to pare down the Further reading to the essentials (perhaps those 2005 and 2013 works?). That does raise an interesting question though – whether you should redlink him and/or kick out a stub for him, if his scholarly contributions are significant enough to garner him notability in the project's sense. He does have articles at the French and German Wikipedias, although neither are really the sort of quality to get excited about. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 03:15, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

I'll try to return for a more diligent pass later in the process, although the structural issues are a significant barrier to support at the moment. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 16:30, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

Squeamish Ossifrage: I've created overarching sections for Egypt and G-R, and it works better than I thought it would. I hope it helps with the problems you raise. I cut the one passage you pointed out as a problem and tried to look for other redundancies or passages that might better be placed differently, but I didn't see many. I've been steeped in this article for so long that it's hard for me to see whatever flaws there may be. A. Parrot (talk) 04:26, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

Support. Apologies for the slow response time here. Travel and Wikipedia rarely combine well. I think the new structure is a substantial improvement, although, perhaps pedantically, I would move §Adherents and priests under §Worship. Others may (and do) have a different opinion there. I also still think you're better served citing works with individual authorship separately, even if there is more than one such work cited from a single edited compilation; the established rule (that multiple such citations warrant a reference to the larger work, with the individual authorship defined in the note) strikes me as somewhat challenging from a maintenance perspective. But, again, I do think that your standard is probably FACR-compliant, and the FAC process isn't about making me happy! Regardless of whether or not you fiddle around with either of those considerations, I don't see any reason why this wouldn't satisfy the criteria. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 15:18, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

Squeamish Ossifrage: I think I will separate out the works cited entries sometime in the next few days. Thank you very much for your critiques and your support. A. Parrot (talk) 01:27, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Support by PericlesofAthens

@A. Parrot: I am quite happy to support this article for Featured status. It is obviously well researched and utilizes a wide variety of reliable scholarly sources, with a seemingly large representative sample of academic material on the subject. It is well written and relatively easy to digest despite covering a large amount of topics. I disagree with reviewers above about structural issues; I think the article is reasonably formatted and organized in a logical manner. The images are well sourced and as of now they don't seem to violate any licensing rules. If this is not an example of quality FA material on Wikipedia, then what is? Pericles of Athens^Talk 13:10, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

Support by Jens Lallensack

Fascinating topic, happy to see it here (I used the opportunity to improve on my poor knowledge on the topic by reading related FA and GA articles as well). The article is high quality overall, and I found it difficult to pinpoint any concrete issues. I however agree with the above reviewers that the structure could be improved on. I tried to provide suggestions below, but I'm not sure at all if this would be feasible, and I certainly see the logic of your current structure.

• I can imagine there might be very good reasons against it, but I still wonder why not dissolve the headings "In Egypt and Nubia" and "In the Greco-Roman world" completely. I feel that you cannot strictly separate these two categories anyways, also because Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt can be argued to belong to both categories. If topics like "Iconography" and "Roles" would be discussed for both categories together, it would be easier for the reader to follow, and to understand the long-term evolution of the cults. This would result in a completely different structure, as, e.g., 1) "Names and Origins", 2) "Mythology", 3) "Spread", 4) "Iconography", 5) "Roles", 6) "Worship", 7) "Possible influence on Christianity", 8) "Influence in later cultures".

Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt are a sticking point because they're both Egyptian and Greco-Roman, but the Greco-Roman cult was too radical a transformation to be lumped in with the original form in Egypt. As the "spread" section of the article states, the cross-cultural worship of a deity by a small but personally devoted minority of the population was not only a dramatic departure from the customs in Egypt; it was an entirely new phenomenon in world history at the time. Combining these sections would obscure that distinction. That aside, the sections on worship really can't be combined with each other. With the exception of daily temple rites, Isis's worship was dramatically different in the two cultures. A. Parrot (talk) 21:51, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

• I had the impression that the "In Egypt and Nubia" is pretty much centralized around the separate roles of the deity. Other important aspects, most importantly the mythology, is treated within the sub-sections of the separate roles as a mere side note. Also, a lot of information given in the "roles" section is not strictly about the roles. I understand that these roles are extremely important; still I was surprised to find it organized in this way, as I would have expected a stronger focus on the sources and the mythology before discussing the roles. Also, isn't the mythology (at least the Osiris myth) also of relevance for the "In the Greco-Roman world" section? What speaks against having a section on the mythology, which, e.g., focuses on Isis's role in the Osiris myth, and also discusses different variants of the myths, before the section "Roles"?

For one thing, every book that has separate entries on Egyptian deities integrates deities' actions in myth with their roles, rather than covering the two separately. (The larger entries in Wilkinson 2003 have sections titled "Mythology", but they're really about roles. Most deities didn't have any myths about them.) Greek myths are elaborate stories that often don't have much of a religious meaning, so it makes sense to have mythology sections in articles on Greek gods. Egyptian myths are rarely narrated as continuous stories, and nearly everything about them has a religious meaning. Egyptian gods are what they do: their mythical behavior is the prototype for their interactions with humans. Isis's roles truly are outgrowths of her actions in the Osiris myth, which is why the article covers the relevant parts of the myth in the related subsections of "Roles".

Moreover, Isis doesn't play a significant part in the two or three other major groups of Egyptian myth, so a separate section on her mythology would be a not-quite-complete retread of the Osiris myth article. Perhaps the link to the Osiris myth article in the body should be replaced by a Template:Further at the beginning of the "Roles" section, to make it more prominent? A. Parrot (talk) 21:51, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

For now, I have two more minor notes:

• I miss something about the Iconography in the lead.

I've added it. A. Parrot (talk) 21:51, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

• The image caption "Isis and Nephthys standing over the deceased during embalming, 13th century BCE. A winged Isis appears at top" did not specify which is Isis and which is Nephthys, that would be helpful to know. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 10:05, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

Done. A. Parrot (talk) 21:51, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

• Thanks for the convincing answers. There is no more to add for me – great work. Supporting now. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 18:17, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Support Comments by Johnbod

• A fine piece of work. Structure now seems fine and natural.
• I was rather surprized by "In Roman times, temples to Isis in Egypt could be built either in Egyptian style, in which the cult image and the daily offering rites were out of public view, and in a Greco-Roman style in which the cult image was freely visible to the public.[99] Yet Greek and Egyptian culture were highly intermingled by this time, and there may have been no ethnic separation between Isis's worshippers.[100] The same people may have prayed to Isis outside Egyptian-style temples and in front of her statue inside Greek-style temples.[99]" - which I think overstates the difference between the two styles of worship, making the Greek & Romans sound like Catholics of recent centuries, which they were not. Most Roman worshippers also stayed outside the temple, and sacrificed at altars in the precinct, rather than praying to statues. Some cult images were tourist attractions in the modern style, but it is often unclear who could access others, and when. But I'd need to research that a bit more.

I see the problem, but I'm not sure what to do about it. Dunand is vague about who might have been allowed into these temples. Aside from Naerebout, who doesn't discuss the accessibility issue, she's the only one who really deals with the ethnic/cultural implications of this type of temple in Egypt. A. Parrot (talk) 03:26, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

This has several useful pages on access in the Greek world, evidently very varied, and generally fairly poorly evidenced, it seems. I think it might be enough to tone down the language here though. Or there's this which other books refer to, & I don't think I can access. Mind you this pp. 212-220 supports fairly general access & praying before statues. Maybe our Greek temple needs rewriting somewhat. Johnbod (talk) 03:14, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

The first link you provided isn't accessible to me, but I looked at the entry for Greece in the "Sacred Times and Spaces" section in Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide. Page 269 says: "Ordinarily, the cella was open for worshipers who wished to pray to or touch the image; some images that were too precious for this (such as the gold and ivory Zeus in Olympia) or attracted the fervor of too many worshipers (such as the images of the healer Asclepius) were protected by a low balustrade. Other activities were strictly forbidden; a sacred law from the Athenian Acropolis explicitly bans cooking meat from the interior the temple—sacrificers were supposed to prepare the meat outside." It also mentions that the adyton was restricted to priests or other specific classes of people, but the adyton wasn't where the cult image was and not every temple even had one. The corresponding section for Rome doesn't specify who was allowed in temples, but it says: "In principle, one only entered the cella only in connection with worship, public or private." That seems to imply that people were at least sometimes allowed to worship in the cella for personal reasons. If really perplexed, we benighted non-classicists can ask Haploidavey.

In any case, I've toned down the language of this passage a bit in case the cult statue wasn't free for just anybody to see. A. Parrot (talk) 04:29, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

• Both the iconography sections could do with a mini-gallery of 1-2 rows showing iconographies mentioned and not illustrated otherwise. The article seems generally under-illustrated (though the images are nicely chosen), with very long gaps at the insanely small default px size. We have a plethora of good images on Commons.

A fair point (and I agree about the default size!). I'll look for some examples of the iconographies mentioned in the text, although my initial poking around suggests many of them will be inconvenient to find. I definitely want this for the gallery, as the winged Isis image needs more prominence in the article and I've wanted a good photo of that end of the sarcophagus for years. A. Parrot (talk) 01:51, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

• the current images 2&3 look off the page.

If you don't mind, I'd prefer not to move them. Left-aligned images can look kind of awkward with section headings below second level, as they often separate the headings from the text that follows and there's no horizontal line to extend the heading across the page. I think the MoS discouraged the combination back when I was learning how to handle image layouts, but that's changed now. A. Parrot (talk) 01:51, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

• "Before that time, cults tied to a particular city or nation had been the norm across the ancient world" - a big hmmm there. While cults were certainly localized, the Greek Twelve Olympians, and then Dionysus in particular had broken those bounds before Alexander, surely?

True, and Woolf does mention a fair amount of trans-Mediterranean religious contact in classical Greek times. I'll have to come up with a more nuanced way of conveying what he says. His article is crucial—its subject may be the most important one touched upon in this entire article—but it's hard to boil down into a few sentences. A. Parrot (talk) 03:26, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

• "Many Roman temples instead used a jar of water, a hydreios, that was worshipped as a cult image or manifestation of Osiris.[222]" - is this different from the situla Isis carries in G/R images, which was supposed to contain Nile water?

It is, but upon reexamining Wild 1981 I realized a problem. For the record, this is a statue of Osiris Hydreios (that is, Osiris in the form of a water jar), and the thing in this priestess's left hand is a situla. However, the pitcher in the hand of the Capitoline Isis statue probably shouldn't be labeled a situla, even though Tiradritti calls it that. According to Tiradritti, the pitcher was added in a 17th-century restoration based closely on a vessel described in The Golden Ass XI:11. But Wild, when discussing that passage of the novel, never calls this type of vessel a situla. He says instead that it was the cultic water pitcher that took the place of the fixed cisterns. The Osiris Hydreios statues are statues of this pitcher with the head of Osiris set atop them to indicate that Osiris is present in the jar. What a mess. I meant to write an article on the hydreios, but now I'll have to examine Wild's terminology very carefully to figure out what to call that article. For now, I think I'll just use "pitcher" in the caption for the image of the Capitoline Isis and in the paragraph on veneration of water. Situlae seem to be more bucket-like than pitcher-like. A. Parrot (talk) 03:06, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

• "Images of Isis with Horus in her lap are often suggested as the basis for the iconography of Mary" - I don't know what the sources say, but there is actually rather a long gap between the end of the cult of Isis and the appearance of the classic Virgin and Child image. The Virgo Lactans, apart from one early Egyptian papyrus, only really gets going after 1000.

Well, it is often suggested, regardless of whether it's true, albeit more often in anti-Catholic and anti-Christian polemics than in academia. That one papyrus apparently isn't the only example, though. According to Higgins 2012, Tran Tam Tinh's extensive 1973 study didn't find any images of Maria lactans from Egypt before the seventh century, whereas the latest of Isis lactans date to the fourth. Although (says Higgins) a few more early Maria lactans images have been discovered since then, the chronological range hasn't been extended any further back. However, Tran Tam Tinh still apparently acknowledged a limited amount of influence from Isis lactans. I don't know his exact reasoning, but images of Isis may still have been extant in some places at the time the first images of Mary nursing were created. Mathews and Muller make a much more ambitious argument, claiming stylistic similarities between the third- and fourth-century frescoes and panel paintings of Isis and several non-lactans images of Mary, including the sixth-century enthroned Mary of Sinai. Their argument is complicated to explain, so I haven't done it in the article, but as it's one of the more recent opinions on the subject and they apparently reiterate it in a recent book that I don't have, I thought it worth mentioning. A. Parrot (talk) 01:26, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

The Sinai icon, usually taken as pretty much the start of the surviving V&C depiction, is usually dated around 600 - "sixth or early seventh century", so that's still a fair gap. Johnbod (talk) 03:25, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Yes, the article should mention the gap. I'll figure out an adjusted wording for the section tomorrow. A. Parrot (talk) 05:07, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

That's it. Johnbod (talk) 23:54, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

• Switched to support; all comments sufficiently addressed. A very fine piece. Johnbod (talk) 01:33, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

Sources review

In general the sources seem to be presented in exemplary fashion. I have not spot-checked (there's very little online that I can reach) but the range of the sources used certainly suggests comprehensive coverage. I have a few nitpicks:

• Multiple citations should be in ascending order: see Note 1

Fixed. I looked for other examples of this problem but didn't find any.

• There are several instances where "p." should b "pp." See 23, 51, 113 and check for others
• Likewise, a few "pp." should br "p.": 269, 290

I've fixed these, looked over the other refs, and found and fixed a couple more examples. I don't see any more.

• Ref. 78 returns a harv error

This is odd. My citation-checking script doesn't show any errors, and when I look at ref 78 I can follow the links through to the citation and the cited source.

• Wendrich source: ref 13 provides a link to the cited article. Refs 69 and 111 give page refs, but on examining the source it appears to have about 10 subsections, so it's not clear to me where the cited page numbers are to be found. Can you clarify?

I apologize; I thought I linked each of those articles. Links have now been added for the other two. In each case, the page numbers apply to the individual articles.

Otherwise, sources appear to be consistently formatted and of the appropriate quality and reliability. Brianboulton (talk) 18:30, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

Thank you very much, Brian. A. Parrot (talk) 03:25, 23 June 2018 (UTC)

Support by Katolophyromai

This is an excellent article; it is well-written, meticulously cited to reliable sources, well-organized, a good length, and illustrated with plenty of insightful images. Though I have tried, I simply cannot really find any faults in it that I would consider significant enough to possibly hinder its promotion to "Featured Article" status. I think this is definitely suitable for "Featured Article" status beyond a doubt. Excellent work! --Katolophyromai (talk) 05:28, 23 June 2018 (UTC)

Support by Modernist

Excellent job; long overdue. Interesting, informative and an important Featured Article addition...Modernist (talk) 11:16, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

Nominator comment. Nikkimaria, Brianboulton: In response to Johnbod's suggestion of a gallery, I've added a few images to the article and rearranged some references in the iconography section. The new images are [3], [4], [5], [6], and [7], and as far as I can tell they are all appropriately licensed. The reshuffled text includes what used to be ref 78, on which Brian saw a harv error but my citation-checking script didn't; the ref is now 77, and I still don't see an error in it or in any of the other references in the article. I thought it best to notify you of these changes so you have a chance to check them. Many thanks to everyone who has reviewed this FAC. A. Parrot (talk) 17:45, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

The harv error seems to have gone away – maybe it was a glitch in my checking routine. All well now. Brianboulton (talk) 17:57, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

Images look fine. Nikkimaria (talk) 17:57, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

Support by Cas Liber

Well done - nothing strikes me as desperately needing improvement Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 08:41, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

Nominator comment: Ian Rose, is there anything else that needs to be done here? A. Parrot (talk) 23:38, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

Tks for the ping, I think we're good to go. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 23:56, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

• Closing note: This candidate has been promoted, but there may be a delay in bot processing of the close. Please see WP:FAC/ar, and leave the {{featured article candidates}} template in place on the talk page until the bot goes through. Ian Rose (talk) 23:57, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.