Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros18VariaUrban Religion through the Lens o...

Varia

Urban Religion through the Lens of Urban Archaeology

La religion urbaine sous l’angle de l'archéologie urbaine
Rubina Raja et Jörg Rüpke

Résumés

Les villes et la religion sont parmi les sujets les plus intensément étudiés dans le monde classique. Pourtant, elles n'ont guère été étudiées dans leur relation plus large l'une avec l'autre. Le concept de « religion urbaine »  a proposé de changer cette situation et préconise la « formation mutuelle de la religion et de l'urbanité » en tant qu'outil applicable à l'échelle mondiale. Pour le monde antique, l'archéologie est la discipline la plus pertinente et le prisme le plus important pour une telle étude. Dans cet article, nous développons cette relation en proposant et en testant deux concepts qui nuancent davantage l'approche de la « lived ancient religion », à savoir l'éphémère et l'anomalie. Chacun d'entre eux aborde le problème de mieux rendre compte de la comparabilité et du changement en combinant des études de cas locales avec un intérêt pour l’entanglement et la comparabilité transrégionaux. Ces apports sont démontrés à travers une série de courtes études de cas.

Haut de page

Texte intégral

1. Introduction

  • 1 Christ et al. 2023.

1Cities and religion are among the most intensely studied topics relating to the classical world. Yet, they have hardly been studied as a mutually tightly knit relationship. The concept of “urban religion” has proposed to change this and is advocating the “mutual formation of religion and urbanity” as a globally applicable tool for historians of religion and scholars of the past in general.1 Such a focus on urban development addresses, of course, only more recent phases of human history and even for the last millennia only a tiny geographical segment. Yet, given our sources for the study of past religion, it is a highly important segment, paradigmatic and even causal for many subsequent developments.

  • 2 See Raja, Rüpke 2021, 2023.

2For the ancient world, archaeology is the most relevant discipline and its most important “lens” for any such study.2 In this article we underline the necessity for history of religion and (classical) archaeology to draw on each other’s (re)sources and insights for the study of urban religion. The concept of “lived (ancient) religion” offers perspectives to enrich our understanding and accounts by looking at how long-term beliefs, practices, and infrastructure are situationally appropriated, modified or replaced by individual historical actors and their material and cultural production (Section 2.). It is on this basis that a specifically urban archaeology can boost an understanding of religious change in large settlements as a not only shaping new forms of religion but also shape urbanism (3.). Focusing on case studies from Roman Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean, we develop this relationship by proposing and testing two further concepts, namely anomaly and ephemerality. Against traditions of either culturalist accounts of “religions” and “the city” and how things typically were on the one hand or on the other hand micro-historical accounts of religious acts and local urban conditions and how things happened to be in this very instance, anomaly and ephemerality address the problem of producing better accounts of comparability as well as change when combining local case studies with an interest in transregional entanglement and comparability (Section 4.). It is as a fruitful perspective imported from recent urban archaeological research, a “lens”, that anomaly is presented here, a way of looking at exceptional findings that tries to understand the conditions of exceptionality as a local normal (Section 4.1). Subsequently, ephemerality is developed as a fruitful way to see the expressions and remnants of passing moments as constituting a thick layer of evidence, a historical normal, likewise paving the way to a more dynamic and comparatively fruitful way of placing specific evidence within wider frameworks (Section 4.2). We will end on bringing together the arguments for an intensified cooperation of archaeology and religion for the field of the urban in particular (Section 5.).

2. Exploring urban religion as lived ancient religion

  • 3 In general, Hanson 2016; Zuiderhoek 2017; Woolf 2020; Cunliffe, Osborne 2005; Creekmore, Fisher 201 (...)
  • 4 E.g., Adams 2012; Altaweel, Squitieri 2018; Algaze 2008; May, Steinert 2014; Woolf 2020.

3Systemic studies of Greek and Roman urbanism explore the quick proliferation of urban settlements, their characteristics, connectivity. They include studying the establishment of and competition between single cities’ places in regional or imperial hierarchies of primary and secondary centrality and finally rural settlements, not excluding the precariousness and frequent “fall” of cities.3 Neighbouring regions, above all Mesopotamia, credited with the earliest forms of widespread and lasting urbanism, have been studied in comparative perspectives to a larger extent.4

  • 5 Coherent accounts of this line of research have been given by de Polignac 1995 and Scheid 2016; but (...)
  • 6 Discussed in Rüpke 2016a.
  • 7 Discussion in Bonnet, Rüpke, Scarpi 2006; Bonnet, Rüpke 2009.
  • 8 Rüpke 2019a; Gasparini et al. 2020; Albrecht et al. 2018; Rüpke 2012; Raja, Rüpke 2015; Rüpke, Wool (...)
  • 9 Galoppin et al. 2022; Palamidis, Bonnet 2024.
  • 10 Rüpke 2019b; Rüpke 2018.

4History of Religion, not least in its study of phenomena from the Roman Empire (to which we are narrowing down our arguments), has developed a number of conceptual tools to secure the image of a “public religion” when studying such cities. Such public religion is supposed to be shared by the ruling elite and all its subjects, normative for all inhabitants, and highly systematized in terms of an organized pantheon of divine figures, institutionalized priesthoods filled by the social and political elite, and sanctuaries neatly marked out as sacred space from the topography of the settlement. Political and religious identity support each other or, rather, are fully identical in this view. Religion is “embedded” into the political, often conceptualized as “state” and as such overarching and embedding the “city” (asty) in the form of the “city state” (polis).5 Basically, religious communication is seen as executed within this framework of such “polis” or “civic” religion or mirroring its tenets and practices on the smaller scales of gentile or family religion. For the rest, the conceptual division of religion and magic helps to exclude a lot of unaligned practices; such deviant behaviour is either – following ancient terminological distinctions – superstition or criminal.6 “Oriental cults,” grouping together phenomena of diverse origins and forms, are seen as growing on the margins. They are seen as additions of further religious options (“elective cults”) or in an evolutionary model as a new type of religion, transported from the East and slowly growing bottom-up until the collapse of the previous system.7 Here, the analytical isolation of religion is maximized, and (future) world religions – Judaism and Christianity (both conceptualized in the singular) – are ending a phase of ethnic religion(s). Focusing on the urban scale did not make a lot of sense in such a framework. Underlying the critical view presented so far is an understanding of ancient Mediterranean religion that has been termed “lived ancient religion” in recent years.8 As a consequence, religion is not to be reconstructed as some rule-based system arranging and manipulating objects with precise (even if not always reconstructable) meanings. “Religion” is first of all a perspective used and a quality ascribed in the very act of performing or planning and performing communication with those super-human and special addressees. These addressed in a highly creative syntax of terms constituting names and hence divine “beings”.9 Of course, to make such communication more successful, to prepare it, and commemorate it, temporary use and ascription are easily turned into permanent elaboration, giving new forms and meanings to objects and developing new and even (just on first sight!) crazy forms of vessels, instruments, speech, and settings.10 What calls attention from the intended addressees and what differentiates the religious from the ordinary are as important as to show that this vessel relates to drinking also in ordinary life, this knife is about cutting, this way of speaking is laudatory, and this houses a god in the same way that another building houses a human. On the level of the academic observers, this analytical perspective is served neither by quick classifications nor by rejecting any possibility of talking about standards and generalizations. Such reflections are not restricted to questions of urban religion, but they neatly tie in with methodological preferences of an urban archaeology.

  • 11 On the concept: Berg 2019; applied to the problem of urban pluralism in Bloomfield 2006.
  • 12 Lévy 2013.
  • 13 See Hallett 2021 on Rome.

5When reflecting on urban religion, we are well aware that urbanity is not simply a question of complexity. The urban seems to be characterized by a general ambivalence at least in four dimensions. In a social dimension, urban practices and discourses are typically advocating unity and diversity at the same time (even if not by the same agents): a graspable unity of social actors, on the one hand, and allowing for a different and not mutually reducible ranking of groups of actors, a heterarchy and pluralism, on the other. A parallel observation can be made regarding the spatial dimension. The density of population and space and the multi-functionality of nearly all available space results in an overlap of different kinds of administrative place-making,11 projecting of political spaces of power, metrics of economic exchange, and so on. Sometimes, there are regulated transitions from one space to the other (co-spatiality in the precise sense, as defined by Jacques Lévy),12 sometimes they simply co-exist and are only seen by the trained eye of the historical observer, a phenomenon that might be called dys-spatiality. The same holds true for the different temporalities or even super-diverse temporalities of calendar time, historical recollections of various depth, and the different futures projected by different individual and collective agents, materialized in their own media and spaces. Even in the ecological dimension, marked presence and absence – of materials and objects worked or exchanged in local and connected economies, of “nature” in the form of trees or gardens,13 of imperial or religious places of reference – are important and in tension in urban as well as religious practices and imaginations.

  • 14 E.g., Hall 1997; McGuire 2008.

6Lived religion is dis-embedded or re-embedded into such tensions. Religion’s difference to other cultural practices and their (implicit) knowledge is its very raison d’être, rendering its use so precarious – the relevance of religious communication, of involving gods into urban procedures, can be denied or forcefully excluded (for instance by disregarding omens) – and powerful at the same time, when situationally super-human support of a human actor is accepted. Yet, such practices marked off as religious can also be made to overlap with and blend into other social strategies; it can be made to coincide with economic (rarely, given the widespread lack of monetization and hence full comparability between individuals) or political hierarchies, to mark out urban publics, to go along with the temporalities of family lives from birth through marriages to death and surviving individual death as a collective. Here, lived ancient religion conceptually goes beyond the concept of “lived religion” as applied to contemporary phenomena.14 In the use of the latter, such phenomena are classified as being outside of, and only individual appropriations of, organized religious traditions – that is, religions or churches. Instead, lived ancient religion includes all religious action, regardless of whether it is a momentaneous resort in a critical situation or whether it is meant to be a visible element in the attempt to build religious authority and to further processes of institutionalization. Thus, in the framework of an urban settlement, such practices might be part of processes of standardization and homogenization as much as part of a largely invisible (and perhaps consciously invisible) diversity or even opposition – to just refer to the first, the social dimension. It is against this backdrop that the conceptual and methodological tools of urban archaeology need to be mobilized to go beyond historical accounts of ancient religions that arrange sets of religious phenomena in evolutionary sequences without taking into account the ambivalences and un-coordinated changes in the dimensions of the social, spatial, temporal, and ecological captured by the concepts of heterarchy, co-spatiality, co-temporality, and mediation.

  • 15 Rau, Rüpke 2020b; Rau, Rüpke 2020a.
  • 16 Appadurai 2001; for Heliopolis and Doliche, Blömer 2017; restricted to Greece, Beck, Kindt 2023.
  • 17 In general: Lanz 2019; Rau 2020; Selle 2011; Stercken, Schneider 2016.

7Urban religion has been established as a concept to investigate religious change, not just in cities but in its entanglement with strategies of local societies to live as urban societies or to make specific central settlements places of a particular “urban” character, different from the areas where the vast majority of ancient populations lived.15 It is just building on and going beyond the analytical concepts of locality and localism.16 Religious practices and ideas are part of such strategies; they are also reactions to the results of such strategies, are employed by people appropriating such urban space, accommodating to such urban life, resisting the centripetal forces of the urban. Thus, they also change what we might call urbanity. Such “urbaneness” as an analytical category is not about an inherent or acquired quality of individuals but about situational claims and ascriptions.17

  • 18 For Antiquity: Lätzer-Lasar et al. 2021; Urciuoli 2020; Urciuoli 2021; Lätzer-Lasar et al. 2021.
  • 19 A classical study, based on Wirth 1938; Mumford 1961. Religion cannot be treated as a historical ob (...)
  • 20 Miranda, Raja 2022. See Hanson 2016 for an approach taking sizes as a point of departure.

8While the reconstruction of “the religion of the Romans” (or Tusculans, Athenians, Alexandrians, etc.) can easily rely on archaeological findings, simply qualified as referring to a city by virtue of GPS locations or geographical references (indications of origins or destinations, for example) and hence result into “religious topographies” or “pantheons”, investigation into the processes of change considered to constitute “urban religion” here is much more difficult and even more in need of refined archaeological methods that are being proposed under the heading of “urban archaeology.”18 Studying urban religion cannot simply rely on criteria like size, density, cultural complexity, and technical advance (e.g., in writing)19 but takes human and material interaction as seriously as the attribution of urbanity to its spatio-temporal setting.20

3. What can urban archaeology offer urban religion?

  • 21 But cf. Cowgill 2004; Smith 2011; Raja, Sindbæk 2020a; for fundamental concepts: Smith ebd. See als (...)
  • 22 Raja, Sindbæk ebd.; Smith 2016.
  • 23 Raja, Sindbæk 2020a; Smith et al. 2016.
  • 24 Smith et al. 2016; Raja, Sindbæk 2018.

9While classical archaeologists have worked on urban sites and settlements for more than a century, no concept existed until recently defining urban archaeology as a field of research in its own right and in a global perspective.21 On the one hand, urban archaeology as a conceptual field did not exist since it is, per se, very broad in nature and reframes what constitutes an urban site or a settlement with urban qualities. Focusing on the hotspots of cultural innovation and exchange between humans, an urban archaeology demands thoughts on and rethinking of the comparability of sites and regions across time, while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of bundle criteria development.22 On the other hand, the global reach of urban archaeology also demands a focused methodological framework, which however must be adaptable to the local and regional situations.23 Thus, urban archaeology differs significantly from location to location and from period to period. The archaeology of Rome cannot, at first glance, be compared to that of Viking-Age Danish Ribe, medieval Kyoto, early modern East African Ungujaa Ukuu, or even Roman-period Gerasa or Palmyra. However, methodological considerations about what constitutes the urban nature of various sites, what makes them comparable across very different parameters and how they may be compared despite different archaeologies, heighten our possibilities to, for example, push forward issues in History of Religion of what constitutes urban religion and, within the framework of archaeology, how we can study urban religion through an urban archaeology.24

  • 25 E.g. Raja, Weiss 2015.
  • 26 E.g. Frenkel 2016; Gordon 2016; Rüpke ebd, Rieger 2017; Petridou, Rüpke 2021.

10Basically, Urban Archaeology as just delineated takes the ephemeral character of a lot of religious action and their material expressions and remnants into full account and is not interested in shedding anomalies for the sake of postulating and reconstructing some normative or even standard “public religion”. In short, it is willing to look into the details of “lived (ancient) religion”.25 Compared to the study of polis religion, a much wider range of actors is under scrutiny.26

  • 27 Maier, Urciuoli 2020; Fonrobert 2020.
  • 28 Ehmig 2016.

11The superimpositions of practices of very different visibility and temporal extension but constituting the same or an embedded or overlapping space come into focus. In the overdetermined urban space, not only the temporality of a calendar of publicly financed festivals and of monumentalized reminders of past heroic actions become prominent. The shared short past and short future of members of streets and neighbourhoods might be detected in evidence that is taken seriously despite its characterization as ephemeral.27 Short episodes of natural variation can be analysed in their short-term impact and reflection in the execution of rituals or even popping up of new gods.28

12An archaeology trained towards the detailed recording of data sequences and variation is a precondition for likewise well-dated accounts of religious change in all its different forms and social loci. For changes in the social status of religious agents or in the breadth of a group, having data is as important as the growth or shrinking of spaces sacralized in numbers or extension. Likewise, periods of continuities or speed of change might be recorded to give a more precise image of the co-temporalities of any given moment. Last but not least, ecological change that might already affect and change religious strategies of marginal groups while still being buffered for the well-to-do is important data for a history of religion. All in all, anomalies offer a lens on such complex forms of change that allow us to fully contextualize religious change in urban change and the entanglement of the two.

  • 29 Critical: Osborne 2014.
  • 30 Typical are monographs on architecture identified as sanctuaries or small finds, epigraphic objects (...)
  • 31 E.g. Albrecht et al. 2018.

13Staying within the framework of the Roman Empire, where cities and religion have taken central places in research for a long time, there is still much to be done in terms of opening new perspectives. As we have shown, through its frequently monumental physical manifestation religion is often studied separately from the rest of the urban environment, giving particular and special place to religion – above and beyond many other aspects of urban life.29 Since religion was often present, both on a small and on a monumental scale, in the ancient urban fabric, it has developed into a field which archaeologically has been studied on its own, with the consequence that a detachment from the overall picture of the urban landscape has often been produced.30 At the same time, it has been acknowledged that religion and what comes with it were central to the constitution of urban societies in the Mediterranean region in the Roman period.31 Here, urban archaeology might offer a new perspective on urban religion, in that it insists on an integration of the various spheres of urban life being reintegrated through the study of the urban settings in its most broad sense.

4. Testing new approaches in urban archaeology for the study of urban religion

14The two approaches briefly profiled as important accents in lived religion might prove useful to lay out new paths for research agendas. We suggest that by applying anomaly as a lens employed by urban archaeology and the study of urban religion and ephemerality as a characteristic of their objects, these two realms of study can be brought into closer interaction with each other. With a view to testing methodological advances, we present case studies highly diverse in terms of material – from the monumental through large-scale inscriptions to the small finds; chronology – from the late republic to the later Roman Empire; and place – from the Western Mediterranean to the Eastern borders of the Roman Empire.

4.1 Anomaly – as a lens

  • 32 Raja, Sindbæk 2022.
  • 33 Hanson 2016; Smith 2019.

15Much work on urban societies has taken its point of departure in comparisons. This is in many ways a natural thing, since comparing offers the possibility for detecting communalities as well as differences. However, through generalizations we also sometimes lose our view for the detail or for the different perspective and tend to simplify the narrative with the danger of seeing it in a purely evolutionary perspective. Recently Raja and Sindbæk introduced the concept of the Anomalocivitas32 – taking its cue from the Anomalocaris, not so much in order to focus just on the odd or the weird in urban societies, but just as much in order to create a space for the aspects of and in urban societies which have often been overlooked in urban research, in particular due to the highly comparative approaches applied in settlement archaeology.33 While comparison allows for seeing patterns in a broader perspective – over time and space – looking for anomaly might, in fact, allow for the same sort of perspective, just on the basis of entirely different data. Accepting that urban archaeology will never have a complete and comprehensive palette of data comparisons will therefore always be based on incomplete and erroneous data collections. Looking for the odd one out as a different way of observing patterns or the lack thereof might prove a fruitful way of embedding control cases into narratives about urban sites and the religious lives of their societies as well.

The Temple of Artemis in Gerasa

  • 34 Raja 2009; Brizzi 2018.

16In the Decapolis city of Gerasa, located in modern northern Jordan, one of the largest sanctuaries in the Roman world was constructed in the second century CE (Fig. 1).34

Fig. 1. Map of Gerasa (© The Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project)

Fig. 1. Map of Gerasa (© The Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project)

1. Extramural arch (‘Hadrian’s Arch’) | 2. Church of Bishop Marianos | 3. Hippodrome. 4. Sanctuary of Zeus Olympios | 5. South Gate| 6. Water Gate | 7. City walls | 8. Shops and structures along the South Gate street | 9. South Theatre | 10. Southeast Gate (blocked) | 11. Procopius Church | 12. ‘Oval Piazza’ | 13. Roman house or church (after Schumacher 1902) | 14. ‘Camp Hill’ (location of modern museum) | 15. Byzantine villa (after Seigne and Zubi 1997) | 16. Agora (‘Macellum’) | 17. Area of the House of the Blues | 18. South Bridge | 19. Possible South-West Aqueduct | 20. East Baths | 21. Mortuary Church | 22. Late Antique and early Islamic structures | 23. South Tetrapylon | 24. Church of Sts Peter and Paul | 25. Side street (‘South Decumanus’) | 26. Mosque | 27. Main Street (‘cardo’) | 28. Early Islamic domestic quarter | 29. Cathedral complex | 29. ‘Temple C’ (after Fisher 1938: pl. I) | 30. Church of St Theodore and Fountain Court | 31. Nymphaion | 32. Buildings west of the Wadi | 33. Small Eastern Baths | 34. Chapel of Elia, Mary and Soreg | 35. South-West Gate | 36. Churches of Sts. George, John, Cosmas and Damian | 37. Approximate location of ‘House of the Poets and Muses’ | 38. Ecclesiastic complexes and Baths of Placcus | 39. Propylaea Church | 40. Church of Bishop Genesius | 41. Ottoman House | 42. West Baths | 43. Large rock-cut cistern | 44. Sanctuary of Artemis | 45. North Theatre | 46. Spring (Ain Karawan) | 47. Synagogue/Church of the Electi Iustiniani | 48. Church of Bishop Isaiah | 49. Side street (‘North Decumanus’) | 50. North Tetrapylon | 51. Hall of the Electi Iustiniani | 52. Umayyad houses | 53. Middle Islamic hamlet (and large courtyard) | 54. Church of the Prophets, Apostles, and Martyrs | 55. Large open area (‘forum’) and basilica | 56. Roman edifice and cistern | 57. Middle Islamic structures | 58. Circassian house | 59. North-West Aqueduct | 60. Early modern water channel | 62. North Gate | 63. Chrysorrhoas/Wadi Jerash

  • 35 Lichtenberger, Raja 2016a.

17The sanctuary of Artemis was laid out on a heavily sloping terrain on a set of artificially constructed terraces towards the river Chrysorrhoas, and the propylea of the sanctuary even spanned towards the river ending in a bridge crossing it – the most central bridge spanning the two sides of the city (Fig. 2).35

Fig. 2. Profile of Gerasa (After Schumacher 1902)

Fig. 2. Profile of Gerasa (After Schumacher 1902)

18In the vast temenos on the western side of the river stood a monumental temple dedicated to the city’s Tyche, Artemis (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3. Temple of ArtemisSean Leatherbury/Manar al-Athar)

Fig. 3. Temple of Artemis (© Sean Leatherbury/Manar al-Athar)
  • 36 I.e Brizzi 2018, 88, 96-97 for the newest summary of evidence for this.
  • 37 See Lichtenberger 2008; Kaizer 2008, for the hypothesis of a tension between the supporters of the (...)
  • 38 For an example of such failed public building projects, one might mention Pliny’s letter to Trajan (...)

19The temple was an octastyle temple placed on a high podium with massive substructures. It was well built and decorated. However, as far as we can tell from the archaeological evidence, the temple might have received a roof over the cella, but not over the peristasis but was nonetheless in use in the Roman period.36 How can this be? And what does this anomaly indicate and inform us about when it comes to urban religion? There can of course have been various reasons for not finishing the temple building. The most obvious one would have been lack of funding for finishing the project or lack of labor specialization, or it could have been because of a natural disaster or an epidemic. However, it was one of the largest sanctuaries in the Roman world (which of course did not necessarily mean that it had many visitors from outside the city), and one would have expected that such a prestige project, which it must have been for the city, would have been finished off one in way or the other. Maybe the lack of continued interest in the cult – both within the city and outside. The city might have been reliant on attracting visitors from outside. Maybe the sanctuary did not receive sufficient funds from donors and visitors for some reason.37 If this is the case, the lack of roof would have been an expression of the social reality of the city’s society and, perhaps most of all, an expression of the weak ties of the sanctuary, potentially indicating a donor who died, disappeared, or decided not to fund the sanctuary anymore, for example.38 It could also be an expression of a temporal concern, such as an unexpected event (i.e., a decease which cost the society money to fight; a catastrophe like an earthquake or the like; or another event which would have drained the city for public/private funds, such as a war/conflict, i.e., the second Jewish War). No written sources tell us about the non-finishing of the temple, but plenty of inscriptions attest to the importance of the cult, such as inscribed altars and sculptural material all dating to the 2nd c. CE and later. The temple was highly visible in the urban fabric; however, whether the lack of parts of the roofing would have been visible from afar is an open question, and perhaps it did not matter very much. But certainly, it would have been visible when one was standing in the temenos. In an urban framework, this example highlights the complexities in dealing with archaeological evidence of anomalies and their meanings: are we looking at punctual meanings or time-deep situations and what would this have meant to the visitor and user of the location?

The Temple of Bel in Palmyra

  • 39 Raja 2022a; Raja 2022b.

20Another example of an anomaly in an urban religious context is that of the Temple of Bel in Palmyra. Palmyra was an oasis city in the Syrian Desert (Fig. 4).39

Fig. 4. Map of Palmyra and the region (Courtesy of Eivind Heldaas Seland. Basemap © ESRI 2014)

Fig. 4. Map of Palmyra and the region (Courtesy of Eivind Heldaas Seland. Basemap © ESRI 2014)
  • 40 Seland 2016.

21It flourished in the first three centuries CE and became rich off the long-distance trade, which its elite was an integrated part of organizing – both over land and overseas.40 The city was vastly expanded during the course of these centuries and at its largest covered about 120 ha (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5. Map of Palmyra (After Schnädelbach 2010)

Fig. 5. Map of Palmyra (After Schnädelbach 2010)

22Numerous monumental building projects were undertaken in the city over these centuries, of which the Sanctuary of Bel is prominently known (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6. Temple of BelJane Chick/Manar al-Athar)

Fig. 6. Temple of Bel (© Jane Chick/Manar al-Athar)
  • 41 Raja 2022b, 42-44.

23The monumental temenos measured about 200 by 200 m, and the Temple of Bel, in plan and design, is close to the Temple of Artemis in Magnesia in Asia Minor and certainly took its inspiration from it.41 However, the internal design was quite different, with adyta placed in each short end of the temple (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7. The North adyton of Temple of BelAndrew Wilson/Manar al-Athar)

Fig. 7. The North adyton of Temple of Bel (© Andrew Wilson/Manar al-Athar)

24The main entrance was on the long side of the temple, which faced the propylon of the sanctuary (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8. Temple of Bel, view to the entrance of the temple from the inner courtyard (© Ross Burns/Manar al-Athar)

Fig. 8. Temple of Bel, view to the entrance of the temple from the inner courtyard (© Ross Burns/Manar al-Athar)

25So when entering the temenos, one was confronted with the long side and the entrance placed on this side – not centrally on the long side. Certainly, the orientation of the temple was intentional, and there would have been no obvious reason that would have forced the planners to place it with the long side facing the entrance. Usually, we would expect the short side to have faced the entrance, and that the temple entrance would also have been placed on the short side. The urban anomaly, in the case of the Temple of Bel, pertains to the deliberate decision to let the long side face the entrance and to place the entrance on the long side – and not even centrally on the long side. What lies behind such a decision? Potentially the decision was motivated by a desire to display the monumentality of the building to an even greater extent than would have been possible if it has been seen from the short side upon entering the temenos. Certainly, cultic reasons could also have played a role. Adyta are placed in each short end of the temple. The case of the temple might well interlink the perspectives of the social and the spatial, in that the temple was located in space, and that the decision was made by planners or sponsors in a social setting. The orientation might be based on religious grounds, or it could have been based on a desire to display the temple as monumentally as possible for visitors.

Procedures or single events?

  • 42 The material of this case study is presented in detail in Rüpke, Glock 2008.
  • 43 CIL 6.32445.
  • 44 CIL 6.31034.
  • 45 CIL 6.52.

26Within just two years, two inscriptions show up in the vast epigraphical record of Rome that are exceptional by all standards: anomalies.42 The first, from 101 CE, is a dedication of a collegium calatorum pontificum et flaminum to the emperor Trajan, most probably attached to a meeting place on the Forum Romanum of such subaltern “herolds” of the members, pontiffs and flamens, of one of the highest-ranking priestly colleges in the city of Rome, naming 36 persons.43 The second, from 102 CE, is a dedication by a person of certain means and otherwise unknown, who names 27 calatores as having granted permission to his restoration of a cult building for the Syrian Sun god in the socially less well-reputed quarter of Trastevere.44 A century later and close by, a second inscription quoting such a permission was found.45

  • 46 Chausson 1995, 665.
  • 47 CIL 6.40684.

27The standard interpretation of this evidence is that it documents a standard procedure whereby – on an unknown legal basis – the calatores had to be approached for certain types of dedications.46 Through the lens of anomaly, we come to a very different result. First, in a loose group of people without any internal organization (the calatores), defined by being individually attached to members of an institutionalized group (the priests), a senior individual took the unique opportunity of his master being the most senior priest to present himself and his colleagues to an urban audience in a medium that suggested public service. This new-born visibility was taken up by somebody in a different location of the city. This Iulius Anicetus interpreted his religious activities as being part of an urban religion and used the make-shift institution to further his own religious authority. A century later, somebody who was acting in the vicinity of the latter inscription, repeated this move, claiming without giving any details the same kind of authorization.47 It is not without interest that the very same Anicetus had put up another inscription that explicitly forbade attaching unauthorized inscriptions or graffiti to the wall of his sanctuary “on command of (God) Sun.”

The Carmen Arvale

  • 48 Text (and French translation) in Scheid 1998, no. 100a, 32-38. Reconstruction: Broise, Scheid 1987.
  • 49 Piva 1993. Preceding literature: Scheid 1990b, 644-646.

28A well-known anomaly in the archaeological and, more precisely, epigraphic record is the full quotation of an archaic prayer in the so-called Acta Arvalia, the annual, edited transcription of the minutes of a prestigious Roman priesthood in the sanctuary of a Dea Dia on the outskirts of the city of Rome, already a few km into the countryside on the Tiber.48 The inscriptions, starting around 30 BCE, are not fully preserved, but there is no reason to assume that the prayer containing forms of Archaic Latin, which had been sung from papyrus scrolls handed to the priests for at least 300 years, was inscribed into marble slates before then. Generations of philologists have taken the text as one of the earliest Latin and Roman religious texts preserved, and this is not the place to discuss this. Explanations for the publication of the text in the year 218 CE have been sought with regard to the emperorship of Heliogabalus, for instance as an attempt of preservation and documentation in the face of massive religious changes or, to the contrary, as an innovation by this very emperor, inserting magical formulas into the text.49 Yet, we need to look wider for an explanation.

  • 50 MacMullen 1982.
  • 51 For details: Scheid 1975; Scheid 1990a.

29The song to be sung and accompanied by dancing is part of a highly detailed description of what happened throughout the year. And that account is written in a period when the production of inscriptions reached a peak in Roman epigraphic culture.50 What is evident here is that a general trend of creating an urban public, an audience of anonymous but local readers, is also followed by an elitist priesthoods (whose growing and receding social status can be measured in high resolution in its membership thus documented) on the outskirts of Rome.51 The ritual performances moved between the center of Rome, the Capitol Hill, attracting a large audience, the intimacy of the annual magister’s (certainly spacious) home, and the sanctuary at the “fifth milestone” from Rome that was open to and attracted some visitors.

  • 52 On the development: Wallraff 2013.
  • 53 See for other such examples Blömer 2023.

30Such epigraphy is parallel to a proliferation of books, papyrus rolls and more and more codices52 featuring not only religious narratives but also supposedly verbatim quotation from secret revelations. In very different ways, this created overlapping fixed (by epigraphy) or movable (by books) communicative spaces, a co-spatiality connected by polemic references between items (and authors). Such texts also created a complex co-temporality, allowing readers to participate in past performances and the pasts referred to in such performances, up to the point of reading an earlier version of one’s own language that was partly beyond understanding. In the case of the Arval acts, the anomaly in a long temporal series actually points to a long continuity in the development of multiple and heterogeneous, often competing, discourses that were decidedly urban, insofar as they addressed a local audience fully acquainted with the urban technique of reading. The anomaly lies in the local positioning of such urbanity, clearly outside of the continuous urban space proper.53 But this again is a regularity sharing the characteristic innovativeness of religious action, always legitimized by its intended and pretended aim of asking for the attention of those constitutively different divine actors.

4.2 Ephemerality – as a characteristic

31Urban societies and their urban fabric often come across as defined by continuity, persistence, and resilience – including the bouncing back after disasters and being built and rebuilt over time – despite the fact that we know and acknowledge that they also changed profoundly over centuries and millennia. Through such a focus on the continuance – despite internal changes – we often construct narratives of sustainability and focus on the urban core. It remains difficult in urban archaeology to tease out, even to see the small changes and even harder to understand what they meant in the bigger picture, when they are recognized. Archaeological research, however, has in the last years tried to change this. Much work has focused on material groups, such as locally produced pottery, imported glass and metals from urban contexts. Such studies help us develop different ways of approaching urban development and change. In this context, based on the study of material groups, we want to add ephemerality as a characteristic that might help us to investigate urban settings and the archaeology it comes with in a different perspective. Ephemerality is neither an expression of continuity nor of change, but rather a situation that can be observed in archaeological records and a concept which could be developed into a way of theoretically working with blurred/unclear situations, such as objects in inexplicable settings, building phases that seem out of place, or archaeological situations that cannot be explained in any obvious manner. By allowing for the concept of ephemerality to enter the discussions as a way to characterize situations, we open the floor to examinations and discussions of such situations within their physical and temporal settings, which in turn allows us to detach them from an evolutionary narrative.

Festivals vs. temples

  • 54 Orlin 1997.
  • 55 Wissowa 1912; massively improved in Ziolkowski 1992.
  • 56 See Rüpke 2018, Rüpke 2020.
  • 57 E.g. Rüpke 2006; Favro, Johanson 2010; Latham 2016; Lätzer-Lasar, Urciuoli 2021.

32It is a good test of the relevance of the ephemeral to refer to the findings of Eric Orlin in his study of Roman republican temples being dedicated after military victories.54 This amounts to a long list, cited and analyzed in many accounts of religion at Rome, starting in the handbook of Georg Wissowa.55 Historians of religion reconstruct on such a basis a permanent pantheon and enduring basic characteristics of Roman religion. Focusing on the list easily hides the fact that, statistically, only 1 out of 20 victorious generals opted for investing the part of the booty which they could legitimately use for such purposes. As Orlin showed, 19 out of 20 opted for ephemerality; that is, investing comparable sums into lavish (but also short-lived) games, and memories related to those rather than memories constantly relating afresh to long-lasting buildings. The archaeological record is dominated by the latter and turned into maps that show a “sacred geography” or “religious landscape.” Yet, permanent sacralizations are just one end of a broad range of temporary, ephemeral sacralizations56 of space, of streets, places, and buildings otherwise used differently. For urban religion as lived, as a practice of the experience, appropriation, and construction of urban space the reconstruction of processions and ephemeral festive space through archaeological methods is crucial.57

The scroll amulet from Gerasa

  • 58 Hoffmann Barfod et al. 2015; Baum et al. 2021; Larsen et al. 2016; Baum et al. 2021.
  • 59 Lichtenberger, Raja 2016b.

33A small rolled-up silver scroll from Gerasa was some years ago digitally unfolded, yielding evidence of a magical tradition drawing on Graeco-Roman magical traditions but firmly placed within an early Islamic context.58 The scroll was found in a house that was destroyed in the earthquake that hit large parts of the Levant in January 749 CE.59 When digitally unfolded, the scroll turned out to hold a line of Greek letters – so-called characteres – often found to open magical texts in the Roman period. However, the scroll continued with 17 lines of Arabic letters in haphazard combination, none of which added up to any readable words. This was in many ways not surprising since we know from the Graeco-Roman and Semitic traditions that magical texts were not always meant to be readable – but rather meant not to be readable – since this was part of their magic. If the scroll had not been digitally unfolded, the conclusion would most likely have been that it stemmed from an earlier period and had been passed down to the owners of the early Islamic-period house. However, with the unfolding it became clear that this magical tradition of using spells continued – and was also in use in domestic contexts far beyond Late Antiquity and well into the 8th c. CE. However, the ephemerality of the find, which could only be understood in its proper context through digital unfolding, shows that even small finds – which give away their religious contexts just by their size and shape – might, in fact, have entirely different, broader societal and therefore religious contexts than we expected when just looking at the “outside” of the find.

34While the magic spell revealed by the digital unfolding signifies the long tradition of using magic spells in the region, the act of the writing and rolling the lamella is an ephemeral one. Possibly also ephemeral is the reason behind its existence: Since it held pseudo-Arabic letters, it is tied to the last owners of the house, it indicates a form of disruption that necessitated the creation of the spell. This would not have been an event that took place over several years but rather something that would have happened within a specific timeframe. The scroll in its contexts underlines the ephemerality of an individual appropriation of an ancient tradition of producing such texts, but now adding one’s own scripture/alphabet. It is the fact that we can understand the context and the find so well that it connects to the temporal perspective. It is the exact dating of the find, confirmed by 14C datings of materials from the house, which firmly places it in an early Islamic context. Whether the inhabitant was Muslim or not, we do not know, but at least we know that the amulet used Arabic letters – so at least the maker of the text worked within this cultural context and potentially the buyer of the scroll as well. The second perspective would be the social, since the scroll gives information about the domestic religious traditions in place at this point in time in a highly urban context.

The banqueting tesserae from Palmyra

  • 60 Raja 2016; Raja 2022b.
  • 61 Ingholt et al. 1955 for the corpus of the tesserae then known, more than 1100 types.
  • 62 Al-As’ad, Briquel-Chatonnet, Yon 2005.

35The so-called banqueting tesserae from Palmyra are small objects, usually made from clay and measuring only a few cm in diameter. They are rich in religious symbolism, and many hold inscriptions in Palmyrene Aramaic.60 The tesserae were produced in series, and more than 1,100 different series exist.61 One complete series was found buried in a clay pot in the Sanctuary of Baalshamin.62 This pot contained 125 tesserae from the same series, which had either never been distributed or been collected upon entry to the sanctuary. Otherwise, the tesserae are found in the drains of the banqueting hall in the Sanctuary of Bel and scattered across the site. The tesserae’s iconography spans from depicting Palmyrene priests, who financed the banquet, to deities to whom these banquets were dedicated, and holds a wide range of religious symbolism (Fig. 9).

Fig. 9. Tessera with a reclining priest. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, IN 3208 (© Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen/Anders Sune Berg)

Fig. 9. Tessera with a reclining priest. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, IN 3208 (© Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen/Anders Sune Berg)
  • 63 Raja 2022b; Raja 2022c; Raja 2023.

36These small objects provide important insight into the religious world of Palmyra, but not too much into the rituals that accompanied the religious life. Most likely the tesserae were simply used to gain access to the religious banquets, and thereafter they seemed to have lost their purpose, since so many of them were simply discarded in the sanctuaries. In this context, the tesserae can be viewed as ephemeral objects, which by coincidence give us insight into the rich religious life of the city. They connect to the perspectives of the social (inclusion and exclusion of individuals and groups), the spatial (usage to enter), the temporal (the event to which they gave access took place at a certain point in time), and even the ecological (since they testify to the diverse use of foodstuff and drink in Palmyra). While we still struggle to chronologically locate them any better than just the first three centuries CE, more is being done to understand their chronological span, which might, in turn, add to our understanding of their temporal importance in terms of the history of Palmyra in a regional and imperial context.63

5. Conclusion

5.1 Studying urban religion

  • 64 Durand, Scheid 1994; Marchand 2003.
  • 65 Usener 1907; Norden 1966; Michela Sassi 1983; Schlesier 1995; Kany 2004.
  • 66 Religion in the Roman Empire, Tübingen 2015–; Religion and Urbanity, Berlin 2020–.
  • 67 Urciuoli 2020.
  • 68 Lefebvre 1974; Lefebvre 1991; Harvey 1981.

37The study of ancient religion has often been shaped by contemporary issues. Some 19th-c. scholars were looking for the (national) state they longed for; others were interested in finding the very opposite of what Christianity could offer, collective ritual rather than individual belief.64 Later decades show an interest in inserting a classical antiquity that has become a very close predecessor of one’s own rationality and morality into a far broader scheme of humankind’s evolution, focusing on the aniconic and Sondergötter rather than life-like anthropomorphic statues and philosophical theology.65 Functionalism and structuralism, reactions to an increasingly untransparent and diverse world, focused on unintended achievements of keeping society together despite excessive competition and the formal rationality and performative aesthetics of rule-based ritual behavior. No wonder that in a world dominated by the celebration of urbanism as the solution to many problems and as a key to global progress, dominated by the dire realities of life for many in those urban contexts, cities have become prominent areas of research. As before, applying questions of today to cultures separated from us in most respects for about two millennia requires us to find adequate sources – not to get exhaustive answers but to at least reformulate questions adequately. Approaches like polis religion and performative studies have each developed their heuristics and methodologies, and lived ancient religion and now urban religion are likewise struggling to do so, combining conceptual nuancing with methodological proposals and even dedicating journals to these endeavors.66 For the study of ancient urban religion or, as has been proposed also, the citification of ancient religion,67 conceptual tools from Lefebvre’s espace perçu, conçu and vécu to Harvey’s “spatial fix” have been invoked,68 leading to a focus on literary texts and authors’ reflections on urban living conditions and the topography of the monumental. As we have tried to show in this article, we need not stop there.

5.2 Studying urban archaeology

38While the archaeology of settlements has been a focus for more than a century, urban archaeology has not existed as a field in its own right – on the one hand, due to the vast amounts of settlements and the ranging archaeological expressions of these on a global scale, and, on the other hand, since a strictly comparative perspective might not have brought much to the table without focus. While this has recently changed, and methodological considerations taking urban archaeology as a field of its own have been put forward, urban archaeology has still suffered. In the end, it has simply worked as a catalyst for a range of other more specific case studies, regionally comparative studies, or the development of wider generic theoretical approaches in which the eye for detail is often lost. Through methodological attempts such as the present, aiming at bringing out the strengths of focused interdisciplinary approaches in which two directions/fields engage with each other – not only capitalizing on the data from one field, applying it to the other, and using it as a backdrop for examples – we force ourselves to leave the comfort zones of the well-known empirical data and apply it in entirely different contexts.

Fig. 10. Tessera with two busts of gods. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, IN 3193 (© Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek/Anders Sune Berg)

Fig. 10. Tessera with two busts of gods. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, IN 3193 (© Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek/Anders Sune Berg)

5.3 Merging the fields

39While urban archaeology and urban religion are two fields that have emerged as research perspectives over the last years, these fields have not been acknowledged as interconnected, which they, in fact, are. What we have attempted here is to pitch a first methodological take on how we believe that we can bring together these fields of study, furthering a fruitful dialogue that applies a broad – but still streamlined and focused – take on understanding religion in an urban context through the wide range of sources available to us, bringing archaeology, epigraphy, and literary sources into a closer dialogue with each other, while at the same time acknowledging that despite the fact that these stem from very different realms, they were part of one cultural koine during the Roman-imperial period. Through a systematic approach, but at the same time a broader study (which this approach allows for) of urban religion through urban archaeology, we hope to have shown here that new angles and insights into the workings of societies, groups, and individuals can be gained by taking on board the concepts of anomaly and ephemerality in an urban-archaeology based study of urban religion.

Haut de page

Bibliographie

Adams 2012: R. M. Adams, “Ancient Mesopotamian Urbanism and Blurred Disciplinary Boundaries”, Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012), 1-20.

Albrecht et al. 2018: J. Albrecht et al., “Religion in the Making: The Lived Ancient Religion Approach”, Religion 48 (2018), 568-593.

Algaze 2008: G. Algaze, Ancient Mesopotamia at the dawn of civilization: The evolution of an urban landscape, Chicago 2008.

Altaweel, Squitieri 2018: M. Altaweel, A. Squitieri, “The changing nature of cities and other settlements”, in Revolutionizing a World (From Small States to Universalism in the Pre-Islamic Near East), London 2018, 124-159.

Appadurai 2001: A. Appadurai, “The production of locality”, in P. Beyer (ed.), Religion im Prozeß der Globalisierung, Würzburg 2001, 99-123.

Baum et al. 2021: D. Baum et al., “Revisiting the Jerash Silver Scroll: A new visual data analysis approach”, Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage 21 (2021), e00186.

Beck, Kindt 2023: H. Beck, J. Kindt, The local horizon of ancient Greek religion, Cambridge 2023.

Berg 2019: A. L. Berg, “From Religious to Secular Place-making. How does the Secular Matter for Religious Place Construction in the Local?”, Social Compass 66 (2019), 35-48.

Blömer 2017: M. Blömer, “Revival or Reinvention? Local Cults and their Iconographies in Roman Syria”, Religion in the Roman Empire 3 (2017), 344-365.

Blömer 2023: M. Blömer, “Urban Religion beyond the City Limits: Tghree Case Studies from the Roman East”, Religion in the Roman Empire 9 (2023), 425-443.

Bloomfield 2006: J. Bloomfield, “Researching the Urban Imaginary: Resisting the Erasure of Places”, in G. Weiss-Sussex, F. Bianchini (ed.), Urban Mindscapes of Europe (European Studies 23), Amsterdam 2006, 43-61.

Galoppin et al. 2022: T. Galoppin et al. (ed.), Naming and Mapping the Gods in the Ancient Mediterranean, Berlin 2022.

Bonnet, Rüpke 2009: C. Bonnet, J. Rüpke (ed.), Les religions orientales dans les mondes grec et romain = Die orientalischen Religionen in der griechischen und römischen Welt (Trivium: Revue franco-allemande de sciences humaines et sociales/Deutsch-französische Zeitschrift für Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften 4), Paris 2009.

Bonnet, Rüpke, Scarpi 2006: C. Bonnet, J. Rüpke, P. Scarpi (ed.), Religions orientales - culti misterici: Neue Perspektiven - nouvelle perspectives - prospettive nuove (Potsdamer altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge 16), Stuttgart 2006.

Brizzi 2018: M. Brizzi, “The Artemis Temple Reconsidered”, in A. Lichtenberger, R. Raja (ed.), The Archaeology and History of Jerash: 110 Years of Excavations (Jerash Papers 1), Turnhout 2018, 87-110.

Broise, Scheid 1987: H. Broise, J. Scheid, Recherches archéologiques à la Magliana: Le balneum des frères arvales (Roma antica 1, Rome 1987.

Chausson 1995: F. Chausson, “Vel Iovi vel Soli: quatre études autour de la Vigna Barberini (197-354)”, MEFRA 107 (1995), 661-765.

Christ et al. 2023: M. Christ et al., “Entangling Urban and Religious History: A New Methodology”, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 21 (2023), ##-##.

Cowgill 2004: G. L. Cowgill, “Origins and Development of Urbanism: Archaeological Perspectives”, Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004), 525-549.

Creekmore, Fisher 2014: A. T. I. Creekmore, K. D. Fisher (ed.), Making Ancient Cities: Space and Place in Early Urban Societies, Cambridge 2014.

Cunliffe, Osborne 2005: B. Cunliffe, R. Osborne (ed.), Mediterranean Urbanization 800-600 BC (Proceedings of the British Academy 126), Oxford 2005.

De Grummond, Edlund-Berry, Bagnasco-Gianni 2011: N. T. De Grummond, I. Edlund-Berry, G. Bagnasco-Gianni (ed.), The archaeology of sanctuaries and ritual in Etruria [papers based on a session held at the 109th Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Chicago, January 3-6, 2008] (Journal of Roman archaeology: Supplementary series 81), Portsmouth, RI. 2011.

Durand, Scheid 1994: J.-L. Durand, J. Scheid, “"Rites" et "Religion" remarques sur certains préjugés des historiens de la religion des Grecs et de Romains”, Archive de Sciences sociales des Religions 85 (1994), 23-43.

Ehmig 2016: U. Ehmig, “Der „Erdbebengott Neptun“ und die „unbestimmten Erdbebengötter“ in lateinischen Inschriften”, in J. C. Borsch, LAura (ed.), Erdbeben in der Antike, Tübingen 2016, 37-59.

Favro, Johanson 2010: D. Favro, C. Johanson, “Death in Motion: Funeral Processions in the Roman Forum”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 69 (2010), 12-37.

Fonrobert 2020: C. E. Fonrobert, “Sabbath in the Courtyard”, Religion in the Roman Empire 6 (2020), 206-225.

Frenkel 2016: L. M. Frenkel, “Individual Christian Voices in the Narratives of Late Antique Acclamations”, Religion in the Roman empire 2 (2016), 196-226.

Gasparini et al. 2020: V. Gasparini et al., “Pursuing lived ancient religion”, in V. Gasparini et al. (ed.), Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World: Approaching Religious Transformations from Archaeology, History and Classics, Berlin 2020, 1-8.

Gordon 2016: R. Gordon, “Negotiating the Temple-Script: Women's Narratives among the Mysian-Lydian 'Confession-Texts'”, Religion in the Roman Empire 2 (2016), 227-255.

Hall 1997: D. D. Hall, Lived religion in America: Toward a history of practice, Princeton 1997.

Hallett 2021: C. H. Hallett, “The Wood Comes to the City: Ancient Trees, Sacred Groves, and the 'Greening' of Early Augustan Rome”, Religion in the Roman Empire 7 (2021), 221-274.

Hanson 2016: J. W. Hanson, An urban geography of the Roman world, 100 BC to AD 300 (Archaeopress Roman archaeology 18), Oxford 2016.

Harvey 1981: D. Harvey, “The Spatial Fix: Hegel, von Thünen, and Marx”, Antipode 13 (1981), 1-12.

Hoffmann Barfod et al. 2015: G. Hoffmann Barfod, J. M. Larsen, A. Lichtenberger, R. Raja, “Revealing text in a complexly rolled silver scroll from Jerash with computed tomography and advanced imaging software”, Scientific Reports 5 (2015), 17765.

Kaizer 2008: T. Kaizer, The variety of local religious life in the Near East in the Hellenistic and Roman periods (Religions in the Graeco-Roman world 164, Leiden 2008.

Kany 2004: R. Kany, “Hermann Usener as Historian of Religion”, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 6. Band (2004), 159-176.

King 2013: R. King, “The Copernican Turn in the Study of Religion 1”, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 25 (2013), 137-159.

Lätzer-Lasar et al. 2021: A. Lätzer-Lasar et al., “Intersecting religion and urbanity in late antiquity”, Urban Religion in Late Antiquity (Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten 76), Berlin 2021, 1-13.

Lätzer-Lasar, Urciuoli 2021: A. Lätzer-Lasar, E. R. Urciuoli (ed.), Urban Religion in Late Antiquity (Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten) Berlin, Boston 2021.

Lanz 2019: S. Lanz, “Urbane Religion - religiöse Urbanität: Zum Boom neuer religiöser Gemeinschaften und Bewegungen in den Städten”, in C. Zarnow, B. Klostermeier, R. Sachau (ed.), Religion in der Stadt: Räumliche Konfigurationen und theologische Deutungen (Theologisches Labor Berlin 1), Berlin 2019, 119-143.

Larsen et al. 2016: J. M. Larsen et al., “An Umayyad period magical amulet from a domestic context in Jerash, Jordan”, Syria: Archéologie, Art et Histoire 93 (2016), 369-389.

JLatham 2016: J. A. Latham, Performance, Memory, and Processions in ancient Rome: The Pompa Circensis from the Republic to Late Antiquity, New York 2016.

Lefebvre 1974: H. Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, Paris 1974.

Lefebvre 1991: H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Blackwell, UK 1991.

Lévy 2013: J. Lévy, “Cospatialité”, in J. Lévy, M. Lussault (ed.), Dictionnaire de la géographie et de l’espace des sociétés, Nouvelle éd. revue et augmentée ed, Paris 2013, 236-237.

Lichtenberger 2008: A. Lichtenberger, “Artemis and Zeus Olympios in Roman Gerasa and Seleucid religious policy”, in T. Kaizer (ed.), The Variety of Local Religious Life in the Near East in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods (Religions in the Graeco-Roman world 164), Leiden 2008, 133-154.

Lichtenberger, Raja 2016a: A. Lichtenberger, R. Raja, “Living with and on the River-Side: The example of Roman Antiochia-on-the-Chrysorrhoas-formerly-called-Gerasa”, in J. Kuhlmann Madsen, N. Overgaard Andersen, I. Thuesen (ed.), Water of Life: Festschrift for Peder Mortensen (Proceedings of the Danish Institute in Damascus 11), Copenhagen 2016a, 98-117.

Lichtenberger, Raja 2016b: A. Lichtenberger, R. Raja, “A Newly Excavated Private House in Jerash: Reconsidering Aspects of Continuity and Change in Material Culture from Late Antiquity to the Early Islamic Period”, Antiquité Tardive 24 (2016b), 317-359.

MacMullen 1982: R. MacMullen, “The Epigraphic Habit in the Roman Empire”, American Journal of Philology 103 (1982), 233-246.

Maier, Urciuoli 2020 = H. O. Maier, E. R. Urciuoli (ed.), Religion of Quarters (= Religion in the Roman Empire 6,2), Tübingen 2020.

Marchand 2003: S. L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970, Princeton 2003.

May, Steinert 2014: N. N. May, U. Steinert (ed.), The fabric of cities. Aspects of urbanism, urban topography and society in Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome (Culture and history of the ancient Near East 68), Leiden [u.a.] 2014.

McGuire 2008: M. B. McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life, Oxford 2008.

Michela Sassi 1983: M. Michela Sassi, “Dalla scienza delle religioni di Usener ad Aby Warburg”, in G. Arrighetti (ed.), Aspetti di Hermann Usener filologo della religione, Pisa 1983, 65-91.

Miranda, Raja 2022: A. Miranda, R. Raja, “Urban Religion in Palmyra”, Religion in the Roman Empire 8 (2022), 159-170.

Mumford 1961: L. Mumford, The city in history: Its origins, its transformations, and its prospects, New York 1961.

Norden 1966: E. Norden, “Geleitwort: Hermann Usener, Götternamen”, in E. Norden (ed.), Kleine Schriften zum klassischen Altertum, Berlin 1966, 662-663.

Orlin 1997: E. M. Orlin, Temples, Religion and Politics in the Roman Republic (Mnemosyne Suppl. 164), Leiden 1997.

Osborne 2014: J. F. Osborne, Approaching monumentality in archaeology (IEMA proceedings 3), Albany 2014.

Palamidis, Bonnet 2024: A. Palamidis, C. Bonnet (ed.), What’s in a Divine Name? Religious Systems and Human Agency in the Ancient Mediterranean, Berlin 2024.

Petridou, Rüpke 2021: G. Petridou, J. Rüpke, “People and Competencies”, in J. Rüpke, G. Woolf (ed.), Religion in the Roman Empire (Religionen der Menschheit 16,2), Stuttgart 2021, 107-140.

Piva 1993: R. Piva, “Neue Wege zur Interpretation des Carmen Arvale: Ein Zeugnis fingierter Mündlichkeit”, in G. Vogt-Spira (ed.), Beiträge zur mündlichen Kultur der Römer, Tübingen 1993, 59-85.

Raja 2009: R. Raja, “The Sanctuary of Artemis in Gerasa”, in T. Fischer-Hansen, B. Poulsen (ed.), From Artemis to Diana: The Goddess of Man and Beast (Acta Hyperborea 12), Copenhagen 2009, 383-401.

Raja 2012: R. Raja, Urban development and regional identity in the Eastern Roman provinces, 50 BC - AD 250 : Aphrodisias, Ephesos, Athens, Gerasa, Copenhagen 2012.

Raja 2016: R. Raja, “In and Out of Contexts: Explaining Religious Complexity through the Banqueting Tesserae from Palmyra”, Religion in the Roman Empire 2 (2016), 340-371.

Raja 2022a: R. Raja, Pearl of the Desert: A History of Palmyra, Oxford 2022.

Raja 2022b: R. Raja, “Revisiting the Palmyrene banqueting tesserae. Conceptualisation, production, usage, and meaning of the Palmyrene tesserae – perspectives for a new corpus”, in R. Raja (ed.), The Small Stuff of the Palmyrenes: The coins and tesserae from Palmyra, Turnhout 2022, 5-68.

Raja 2022c: R. Raja (ed.), The Small Stuff of the Palmyrenes: The coins and tesserae from Palmyra, Turnhout 2022.

Raja 2023: R. Raja, “Coining Urban Religion: Reflections on Roman Civic Coins Depicting Sanctuaries in Urban Settings”, Religion in the Roman Empire 9 (2023), 346-366.

Raja, Rüpke 2015: R. Raja, J. Rüpke, “Appropriating Religion: Methodological Issues in Testing the 'Lived Ancient Religion' Approach”, Religion in the Roman Empire 1 (2015), 11-19.

Raja, Rüpke 2021: R. Raja, J. Rüpke, “Introduction: Urban Archaeology”, Religion in the Roman Empire 7 (2021), 217-220.

Raja, Rüpke 2023: R. Raja, J. Rüpke (ed.), Urban Representations of Religion = Religion in the Roman Empire 9 (2023), 301-443.

Raja, Sindbæk 2018: R. Raja, S. Sindbæk, “Urban Network Evolutions: Exploring Dynamics and Flows through Evidence from Urban Contexts”, in R. Raja, S. Sindbæk (ed.), Urban network evolutions: Towards a high-definition archaeology, Aarhus 2018, 13-18.

Raja, Sindbæk 2020a: R. Raja, S. M. Sindbæk, “Urban Archaeology. A New Agenda – Editorial”, Journal of Urban Archaeology 1 (2020a), 9-13.

Raja, Sindbæk 2020b: R. Raja, S. M. Sindbæk, “Urban Networks and High-Definition Narratives: Rethinking the Archaeology of Urbanism”, Journal of Urban Archaeology 2 (2020b), 173-186.

Raja, Sindbæk 2022: R. Raja, S. M. Sindbæk, “Anomalocivitas”, Journal of Urban Archaeology 5 (2022), 13-18.

Raja, Weiss 2015: R. Raja, L. Weiss, “The Role of Objects: Meanings, Situations and Interaction”, Religion in the Roman Empire 1 (2015), 137-147.

Rau 2020: S. Rau, “Urbanity (urbanitas, Urbanität, urbanité, urbanità, urbanidad…): An Essay”, Religion and Urbanity online (2020), 1-8.

Rau, Rüpke 2020a: S. Rau, J. Rüpke, “Religion and Urbanity”, Religion and Urbanity online (2020).

Rau, Rüpke 2020b: S. Rau, J. Rüpke, “Religion und Urbanität: Wechselseitige Formierungen”, Historische Zeitschrift 310 (2020b), 654-680.

Rieger 2017: A.-K. Rieger, “Loose Bonds and Porous Boundaries among Mobile People as Religous Agents in the Greco-Roman Arabian Desert”, Religion in the Roman Empire 3 (2017), 11-49.

Rüpke 2006: J. Rüpke, “Triumphator and ancestor rituals between symbolic anthropology and magic”, Numen 53 (2006), 251-289.

Rüpke 2012: J. Rüpke, “Lived Ancient Religion: Questioning ‘Cults’ and ‘Polis Religion’”, Mythos 5 (2012) 191-204.

Rüpke 2016a: J. Rüpke, Religious Deviance in the Roman World: Superstition or Individuality, Cambridge 2016.

Rüpke 2016b: J. Rüpke, “The Role of Texts in Processes of Religious Grouping during the Principate”, Religion in the Roman Empire 2 (2016b), 170-195.

Rüpke 2018: J. Rüpke, “Religious agency, sacralisation, and tradition in the ancient city”, Istrazivanya 29 (2018), 22-38.

Rüpke 2019a: J. Rüpke, “Lived Ancient Religion”, Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Religion (2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.633.

Rüpke 2019b: J. Rüpke, “Ritual objects and religious communication in lived ancient religion: multiplying religion”, in M. Fuchs et al. (ed.), Religious Individualisations: Historical Dimensions and Comparative Perspectives, Berlin 2019, 1201-1222.

Rüpke 2020: J. Rüpke, “Ritual Objects and Strategies of Sacralization within Religious Communication”, in M. Stürzebecher, C. D. Bergmann (ed.), Ritual Objects in Ritual Contexts (Erfurter Schriften zur jüdischen Geschichte 6), Jena 2020, 236.

Rüpke, Glock 2008: J. Rüpke, A. Glock, Fasti sacerdotum: A prosopography of Pagan, Jewish, and Christian Religious officials in the city of Rome, 300 BC to AD 499, Oxford 2008.

Rüpke, Woolf 2021: J. Rüpke, G. Woolf (ed.), Religion in the Roman Empire (Religionen der Menschheit 16,2), Stuttgart 2021.

Scheid 1975: J. Scheid, Les frères arvales: Recrutement et origine sociale sous les Julio-Claudiens (Collection de l'École Pratique des Hautes Études, sciences religieuses 77, Paris 1975.

Scheid 1990a: J. Scheid, Le collège des frères arvales: Étude prosopographieque du recrutement (69-304) (Saggi di storia antica 1), Roma 1990.

Scheid 1990b: J. Scheid, Romulus et ses frères: Le collège des frères arvales, modèle du culte public dans la Rome des empereurs (Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d'Athènes et de Rome 275), Rome 1990.

Scheid 1998: J. Scheid, Commentarii fratrum Arvalium qui supersunt: Les copie épigraphiques des protocoles annuels de la confrérie arvale (21 av.-304 ap. J.-C.). Avec la collaboration de Paola Tassini, Jörg Rüpke (Roma antica 4 - Recherches archéologiques à La Magliana), Roma 1998.

Schlesier 1995: R. Schlesier, “"Arbeiter in Useners Weinberg": Anthropologie und antike Religionsgeschichte in Deutschland nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg”, in H. Flashar (ed.), Altertumswissenschaft in den 20er Jahren: Neue Fragen und Impulse, Stuttgart 1995, 329-380.

Segal 2013: A. Segal, Temples and Sanctuaries in the Roman East: Religious Architecture in Syria, Iudaea/Palaestina and Provincia Arabia, Oxford 2013.

Seland 2016: E. H. Seland, Ships of the Desert and Ships of the Sea: Palmyra in the World Trade of the First Three Centuries CE, Wiesbaden 2016.

Selle 2011: K. Selle, “„Urbanität“ - was ist das?”, PNDonline (Planung neu denken) 2011 (2011), 2-16; 2-15; 1-15.

Sinn 2005: U. Sinn, “Tempel I. Typologie und Funktion”, Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum 4 (2005), 87-100.

Smith 2011: M. E. Smith, “Empirical Urban Theory for Archaeologists”, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 18 (2011), 167-192.

Smith 2016: M. E. Smith, “How Can Archaeologists Identify Early Cities? Definitions, Types, and Attributes”, in M. Fernández-Götz, D. Krausse (ed.), Eurasia at the Dawn of History: Urbnaization & Social Change, Cambridge 2016, 153-168.

Smith 2020: M. E. Smith, “Definitions and Comparisons in Urban Archaeology”, Journal of Urban Archaeology 1 (2020), 15-30.

Smith et al. 2016: M. E. Smith et al., “Comparative Methods for Premodern Cities”, Cross-Cultural Research 50 (2016), 415-451.

Smith 2019: M. L. Smith, Cities: The First 6,000 Years, London 2019.

Stambaugh 1978: J. E. Stambaugh, “The Functions of Roman Temples”, ANRW II.16,1 (1978), 554-608.

Stercken, Schneider 2016: M. Stercken, U. Schneider (ed.), Urbanität. Formen der Inszenierung in Texten, Karten, Bildern (Städteforschung, Köln 2016.

Szabó 2015 [2020]: C. Szabó, “Sanctuaries of Roman Dacia: A Catalogue of Sacralised Places in Shared and Secondary Spaces”, Jahrbuch des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz 62 (2015 [2020]), 257-340.

Urciuoli 2020: E. R. Urciuoli, “Citification of Religion: A Proposal for the Historical Study of Urban Religion”, Religion and Urbanity online (2020).

Urciuoli 2021: E. R. Urciuoli, La religione urbana: Come la città ha prodotto il cristianesimo, Bologna 2021.

Usener 1907: H. Usener, “Philologie und Geschichtswissenschaft”, in H. Usener (ed.), Vorträge und Aufsätze, Leipzig 1907, 1-35.

Wallraff 2013: M. Wallraff, Kodex und Kanon: Das Buch im frühen Christentum (Hans-Lietzmann-Vorlesungen 12), Berlin 2013.

Willet 2020: R. Willet, The Geography of Urbanism in Roman Asia Minor, Sheffield 2020.

Wirth 1938: L. Wirth, “Urbanism As A Way of Life”, American Journal of Sociology 44 (1938), 1-24.

Wissowa 1912: G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer (Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft 5,4) München 1912.

Woolf 2020: G. Woolf, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History, New York 2020.

Ziolkowski 1992: A. Ziolkowski, The Temples of Mid-Republican Rome and their Historical and Topographical Context (Saggi di Storia antica 4), Roma 1992.

Zuiderhoek 2017: A. Zuiderhoek, The ancient city (Key themes in ancient history), Cambridge 2017.

Haut de page

Notes

1 Christ et al. 2023.

2 See Raja, Rüpke 2021, 2023.

3 In general, Hanson 2016; Zuiderhoek 2017; Woolf 2020; Cunliffe, Osborne 2005; Creekmore, Fisher 2014; Roman East: e.g. Willet 2020; Raja 2012.

4 E.g., Adams 2012; Altaweel, Squitieri 2018; Algaze 2008; May, Steinert 2014; Woolf 2020.

5 Coherent accounts of this line of research have been given by de Polignac 1995 and Scheid 2016; but cf. Kindt 2009.

6 Discussed in Rüpke 2016a.

7 Discussion in Bonnet, Rüpke, Scarpi 2006; Bonnet, Rüpke 2009.

8 Rüpke 2019a; Gasparini et al. 2020; Albrecht et al. 2018; Rüpke 2012; Raja, Rüpke 2015; Rüpke, Woolf 2021.

9 Galoppin et al. 2022; Palamidis, Bonnet 2024.

10 Rüpke 2019b; Rüpke 2018.

11 On the concept: Berg 2019; applied to the problem of urban pluralism in Bloomfield 2006.

12 Lévy 2013.

13 See Hallett 2021 on Rome.

14 E.g., Hall 1997; McGuire 2008.

15 Rau, Rüpke 2020b; Rau, Rüpke 2020a.

16 Appadurai 2001; for Heliopolis and Doliche, Blömer 2017; restricted to Greece, Beck, Kindt 2023.

17 In general: Lanz 2019; Rau 2020; Selle 2011; Stercken, Schneider 2016.

18 For Antiquity: Lätzer-Lasar et al. 2021; Urciuoli 2020; Urciuoli 2021; Lätzer-Lasar et al. 2021.

19 A classical study, based on Wirth 1938; Mumford 1961. Religion cannot be treated as a historical object simply given: King 2013; Hanson 2016

20 Miranda, Raja 2022. See Hanson 2016 for an approach taking sizes as a point of departure.

21 But cf. Cowgill 2004; Smith 2011; Raja, Sindbæk 2020a; for fundamental concepts: Smith ebd. See also Journal of Urban Archaeology for a new focus on urban societies across the globe from the perspective of archaeology.

22 Raja, Sindbæk ebd.; Smith 2016.

23 Raja, Sindbæk 2020a; Smith et al. 2016.

24 Smith et al. 2016; Raja, Sindbæk 2018.

25 E.g. Raja, Weiss 2015.

26 E.g. Frenkel 2016; Gordon 2016; Rüpke ebd, Rieger 2017; Petridou, Rüpke 2021.

27 Maier, Urciuoli 2020; Fonrobert 2020.

28 Ehmig 2016.

29 Critical: Osborne 2014.

30 Typical are monographs on architecture identified as sanctuaries or small finds, epigraphic objects or iconographic objects identified as being of religious use or narrative contents. See e.g. Stambaugh 1978; Sinn 2005; De Grummond, Edlund-Berry, Bagnasco-Gianni 2011; Segal 2013; Szabó 2015 [2020].

31 E.g. Albrecht et al. 2018.

32 Raja, Sindbæk 2022.

33 Hanson 2016; Smith 2019.

34 Raja 2009; Brizzi 2018.

35 Lichtenberger, Raja 2016a.

36 I.e Brizzi 2018, 88, 96-97 for the newest summary of evidence for this.

37 See Lichtenberger 2008; Kaizer 2008, for the hypothesis of a tension between the supporters of the Artemis cult and those of the cult of Zeus Olympios.

38 For an example of such failed public building projects, one might mention Pliny’s letter to Trajan (Ep. 10.37) as a parallel, in which Pliny records two massive failings of public building works (aqueducts) of immense costs.

39 Raja 2022a; Raja 2022b.

40 Seland 2016.

41 Raja 2022b, 42-44.

42 The material of this case study is presented in detail in Rüpke, Glock 2008.

43 CIL 6.32445.

44 CIL 6.31034.

45 CIL 6.52.

46 Chausson 1995, 665.

47 CIL 6.40684.

48 Text (and French translation) in Scheid 1998, no. 100a, 32-38. Reconstruction: Broise, Scheid 1987.

49 Piva 1993. Preceding literature: Scheid 1990b, 644-646.

50 MacMullen 1982.

51 For details: Scheid 1975; Scheid 1990a.

52 On the development: Wallraff 2013.

53 See for other such examples Blömer 2023.

54 Orlin 1997.

55 Wissowa 1912; massively improved in Ziolkowski 1992.

56 See Rüpke 2018, Rüpke 2020.

57 E.g. Rüpke 2006; Favro, Johanson 2010; Latham 2016; Lätzer-Lasar, Urciuoli 2021.

58 Hoffmann Barfod et al. 2015; Baum et al. 2021; Larsen et al. 2016; Baum et al. 2021.

59 Lichtenberger, Raja 2016b.

60 Raja 2016; Raja 2022b.

61 Ingholt et al. 1955 for the corpus of the tesserae then known, more than 1100 types.

62 Al-As’ad, Briquel-Chatonnet, Yon 2005.

63 Raja 2022b; Raja 2022c; Raja 2023.

64 Durand, Scheid 1994; Marchand 2003.

65 Usener 1907; Norden 1966; Michela Sassi 1983; Schlesier 1995; Kany 2004.

66 Religion in the Roman Empire, Tübingen 2015–; Religion and Urbanity, Berlin 2020–.

67 Urciuoli 2020.

68 Lefebvre 1974; Lefebvre 1991; Harvey 1981.

Haut de page

Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1. Map of Gerasa (© The Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project)
Légende 1. Extramural arch (‘Hadrian’s Arch’) | 2. Church of Bishop Marianos | 3. Hippodrome. 4. Sanctuary of Zeus Olympios | 5. South Gate| 6. Water Gate | 7. City walls | 8. Shops and structures along the South Gate street | 9. South Theatre | 10. Southeast Gate (blocked) | 11. Procopius Church | 12. ‘Oval Piazza’ | 13. Roman house or church (after Schumacher 1902) | 14. ‘Camp Hill’ (location of modern museum) | 15. Byzantine villa (after Seigne and Zubi 1997) | 16. Agora (‘Macellum’) | 17. Area of the House of the Blues | 18. South Bridge | 19. Possible South-West Aqueduct | 20. East Baths | 21. Mortuary Church | 22. Late Antique and early Islamic structures | 23. South Tetrapylon | 24. Church of Sts Peter and Paul | 25. Side street (‘South Decumanus’) | 26. Mosque | 27. Main Street (‘cardo’) | 28. Early Islamic domestic quarter | 29. Cathedral complex | 29. ‘Temple C’ (after Fisher 1938: pl. I) | 30. Church of St Theodore and Fountain Court | 31. Nymphaion | 32. Buildings west of the Wadi | 33. Small Eastern Baths | 34. Chapel of Elia, Mary and Soreg | 35. South-West Gate | 36. Churches of Sts. George, John, Cosmas and Damian | 37. Approximate location of ‘House of the Poets and Muses’ | 38. Ecclesiastic complexes and Baths of Placcus | 39. Propylaea Church | 40. Church of Bishop Genesius | 41. Ottoman House | 42. West Baths | 43. Large rock-cut cistern | 44. Sanctuary of Artemis | 45. North Theatre | 46. Spring (Ain Karawan) | 47. Synagogue/Church of the Electi Iustiniani | 48. Church of Bishop Isaiah | 49. Side street (‘North Decumanus’) | 50. North Tetrapylon | 51. Hall of the Electi Iustiniani | 52. Umayyad houses | 53. Middle Islamic hamlet (and large courtyard) | 54. Church of the Prophets, Apostles, and Martyrs | 55. Large open area (‘forum’) and basilica | 56. Roman edifice and cistern | 57. Middle Islamic structures | 58. Circassian house | 59. North-West Aqueduct | 60. Early modern water channel | 62. North Gate | 63. Chrysorrhoas/Wadi Jerash
URL http://journals.openedition.org/mythos/docannexe/image/7307/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,5M
Titre Fig. 2. Profile of Gerasa (After Schumacher 1902)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/mythos/docannexe/image/7307/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 300k
Titre Fig. 3. Temple of ArtemisSean Leatherbury/Manar al-Athar)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/mythos/docannexe/image/7307/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 848k
Titre Fig. 4. Map of Palmyra and the region (Courtesy of Eivind Heldaas Seland. Basemap © ESRI 2014)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/mythos/docannexe/image/7307/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 443k
Titre Fig. 5. Map of Palmyra (After Schnädelbach 2010)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/mythos/docannexe/image/7307/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 319k
Titre Fig. 6. Temple of BelJane Chick/Manar al-Athar)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/mythos/docannexe/image/7307/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 571k
Titre Fig. 7. The North adyton of Temple of BelAndrew Wilson/Manar al-Athar)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/mythos/docannexe/image/7307/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 520k
Titre Fig. 8. Temple of Bel, view to the entrance of the temple from the inner courtyard (© Ross Burns/Manar al-Athar)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/mythos/docannexe/image/7307/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 471k
Titre Fig. 9. Tessera with a reclining priest. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, IN 3208 (© Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen/Anders Sune Berg)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/mythos/docannexe/image/7307/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 917k
Titre Fig. 10. Tessera with two busts of gods. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, IN 3193 (© Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek/Anders Sune Berg)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/mythos/docannexe/image/7307/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 754k
Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Rubina Raja et Jörg Rüpke, « Urban Religion through the Lens of Urban Archaeology »Mythos [En ligne], 18 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 octobre 2024, consulté le 14 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/mythos/7307 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12hzb

Haut de page

Auteurs

Rubina Raja

Centre for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet) and Dept. of History and Classical Studies, School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Moesgård Allé 20, 4230-230, DK-8270 Højbjerg – Rubina.raja(at)cas.au.dk

Jörg Rüpke

Max-Weber-Kolleg für kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien, Universität Erfurt, Max-Weber-Allee 5, D-99089 Erfurt– joerg.ruepke(at)uni-erfurt.de

Articles du même auteur

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search