“Lack of Boundaries, Absence of Oppositions: the City-Countryside Continuum of a Greek Pantheon.” In City, Countryside, and the Spatial Organization of Value in Classical Antiquity, edited by R. Rosen and I. Sluiter (Leiden, 2006), 61-92. (original) (raw)

Extra-urban Sanctuaries in Classical and Hellenistic Crete

G. Deligiannakis and Y. Galanakis (eds.), The Aegean and its Cultures. Proceedings of the first Oxford-Athens graduate student workshop organized by the Greek Society and the University of Oxford Taylor Institution, 22-23 April 2005. Oxford: Archaeopress 2009, 59-67

Society and Economy or Rural Sanctuaries in Roman Lydia and Phrygia

Epigraphica Anatolica 35, 2003, 77-101

In his oration Pro templis (written c. 386) addressed to the Emperor Theodosius, amid vigorous protests against wanton destruction of pagan shrines by predatory monks, Libanius offers a vivid metaphor of shrines as the soul and the fountain of all hopes for the country people (9-11): So they sweep across the countryside like rivers in spate, and by ravaging the temples, they ravage the estates, for wherever they tear out a temple from an estate, that estate is blinded and lies murdered. Temples, Sire, are the soul of the countryside: they mark the beginning of its settlement, and have been passed down through many generations to the men of today. In them the farming communities rest their hopes for husbands, wives, children, for their oxen and the soil they sow and plant. An estate that has suffered so has lost the inspiration of the peasantry together with their hopes, for they believe that their labour will be in vain once they are robbed of the gods who direct their labours to their due end. 1 In rural Lydia and Phrygia during the Roman period the centre of the cult was the sanctuary with its temple and divine statue(s). The temple housed the cult statue in a central shrine and more often than not provided space for other deities. It also must have had rooms for storage and the activities of various personnel who worked there, both cultic and noncultic functionaries. The sanctuary was not only a simple place of cult but a pre-state ethnological entity founded on a patrimonial base: in the beginning, the god was the ruler and master, his were the lands, his the people, animals, waters, harvest, etc. The sanctuary dominated the material life of neighbouring populations and the people of the sanctuary themselves were perhaps originally completely slave and parts of the patrimony (hieroi douloi); then they slowly developed into various statuses (hieroi, hierodouloi and sim.), remaining tied to the sanctuary in a kind of symbiosis. Many villages and some cities grew up as settlements around temples. It is thus no surprise that the god is frequently thought of as a supreme ruler (basileÊvn) or possessor, occupier of a certain place (kat°xvn). 2 * Thanks are due to Professor Elizabeth A. Meyer (University of Virginia) for correcting my English and for offering many useful suggestions on the subject of this paper.

Review of Ch. Williamson, Urban Rituals in Sacred Landscapes in Hellenistic Asia Minor, Leiden 2021

ARYS, 2023

This book provides an interdisciplinary discussion of the life of four sanctuaries in ancient Caria and their relationship with the cities that came to exert control over them in the Hellenistic period. The main purpose of the book is summarised by the question of "why autochthonous, local or regional sanctuaries were so vital to the development of poleis in Hellenistic Asia Minor even though they were located at great distances from the urban center" (p. 411). This implies envisaging city-sanctuary relationships as bidirectional, considering both the way cities appropriated and functionalised peripheral sanctuaries and their administration within a civic framework and how these sanctuaries contributed, both physically and symbolically, to the process of development and identity building of a growing city. The selected case studies-Mylasa WILLIAMSON, CHRISTINA G.

Public space beyond the city. The sanctuaries of Labraunda and Sinuri in the chora of Mylasa

in C.P. Dickenson & O.M. van Nijf, eds, Public Space in the Post-Classical Greek City. Caeculus 7, 1-36 , 2013

When we think of public space we generally interpret it as urban space. This paper examines the role of remote, or 'extra-urban' sanctuaries in Hellenistic Asia Minor as public spaces far removed from the city. Through their festivals and processions these sanctuaries obviously had a very public role, albeit for a very specified public. Taking the Karian city of Mylasa and the related sanctuaries of Labraunda and Sinuri as a case study, this paper examines how these sanctuaries came to shape civic identity, not only through their festivals, but also through their architectural space and the placement of monuments and inscriptions.

Urban religion beyond the city limits

Religion in the Roman Empire, 2023

In ancient cities, space, social organisation, and religion were closely intertwined. Religion shaped space and space shaped religion. Density, concentration, and rapid exchange were key factors in this process and distinguished the urban environment from the non-urban. Yet, we must consider the fact that in many cities the major sanctuaries were located outside the perimeter of the city walls. They were extraurban. Examples are legion. The distance between a city and her main sanctuary could be so substantial that frequent or spontaneous visits were impossible. Extraurban cults played an important role in the religious life of many cities and were crucial for the forging of urban identity, but the dynamics of interaction between urban dwellers and sacred space differed from the dynamics we see in intra-urban sanctuaries. Therefore, an urban archaeology of religion needs to include extra-urban sanctuaries and consider the distinctive ways in which they interacted with the distant urban space. In this contribution, three prominent cities of Roman Anatolia and North Syria with major extra-urban sanctuaries are discussed: Antioch on the Orontes, Amaseia in Pontus, and Caesarea in Cappadocia.

Urban Rituals in Sacred Landscapes in Hellenistic Asia Minor

Urban Rituals in Sacred Landscapes in Hellenistic Asia Minor, 2021

In Urban Rituals in Sacred Landscapes in Hellenistic Asia Minor, Christina G. Williamson examines the phenomenon of monumental sanctuaries in the countryside of Asia Minor that accompanied the second rise of the Greek city-state in the Hellenistic period. Moving beyond monolithic categories, Williamson provides a transdisciplinary frame of analysis that takes into account the complex local histories, landscapes, material culture, and social and political dynamics of such shrines in their transition towards becoming prestigious civic sanctuaries. This frame of analysis is applied to four case studies: the sanctuaries of Zeus Labraundos, Sinuri, Hekate at Lagina, and Zeus Panamaros. All in Karia, these well-documented shrines offer valuable insights for understanding religious strategies adopted by emerging cities as they sought to establish their position in the expanding world. https://brill.com/view/title/60038

Loading...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

City as Sacred Space - Sacred Spaces in the City: a Response

Städte im lateinischen Westen und im griechischen Osten zwischen Spätantike und Früher Neuzeit. Topographie – Recht – Religion, Mihailo Popović, Martin Scheutz, Herwig Weigl and Elisabeth Gruber (eds) (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung 66), 2015