Introduction: Investigating archaeological approaches to the study of religious practices and beliefs
‘The unfalsifiable supported by the undeniable yields the unquestionable, which transforms the dubious, the arbitrary, and the conventional into the apparently correct, the necessary, and the natural. This is the heart of religion and the foundation on which stand the rules, understandings, and institutions constituting human communities’ (Rappaport 1994, 342).
Introduction
Introducing a volume dedicated to the study of ancient religious practices and beliefs can be a difficult task because it needs to briefly introduce the reader to religion (i.e. how it functioned, what was is structure, how it has been studied so far, in which directions archaeological approaches can lead to its investigation with) without being repetitive, but, at the same time, trying to summarise all the previous studies on this immense topic.
To start with, religion is a phenomenon that is inseparable from human society and brings about a set of emotional, ideological and practical elements that are pervasive in the social fabric of any society and characterisable by the following features: the establishment of intermediaries in the relationship between humans and the divine (i.e. religious specialists); the construction of ceremonial places for worshipping the gods and practicing ritual performances (e.g. religious buildings); the incorporation of non-human elements into a sacred sphere (e.g. sacred landscapes); the creation of material culture used as a means for materialising religious beliefs and human devotion (i.e. ritual paraphernalia); and, finally, the transmission of cosmological stories through the use of oral/written as well as practical means (i.e. mythological stories and ritual practices).
When investigating the religious dimensions of ancient societies, however, it is quite difficult to define all these elements. In fact, confronting ancient religion has been a difficult exercise for modern scholars, especially when dealing with societies that lack textual evidences. In addition, ancient religiosity implies a complex network of cognitive and material correlates that cannot be compared to our modern religious systems, because, as pointed out by Trigger (2003, 411): ‘early civilisations do not appear to have distinguished between what we perceive as the natural, supernatural, and social realms’. In fact, if we apply a classic Cartesian-type dualism to the study of ancient religions we would end up differentiating between a mental dimension, related to religious beliefs, and a material one that is instead associated with religious practices (Droogan 2012, chap. 1). Such a distinction between religious beliefs and practices has created a strict separation between scholars able to investigate, and possibly reconstruct, ritual practices (i.e. archaeologists), and those instead interested in defining the realm of ancient beliefs (i.e. philologists and religious historians).
Thus, the aim of this book is to attempt to bridge these two dimensions (mental, on the one side, and, matter, on the other), by breaking down the existing boundaries in order to form a more comprehensive vision of religion among ancient Near Eastern societies. This approach requires that a higher consideration be given to those elements (either artificial – buildings, objects, texts, etc. – or natural – landscapes, animals, trees, etc.) that are created through a materialisation of religious beliefs and practices enacted by the members of the communities. The contributors to this volume address some of these issues by presenting data based on specific case-studies from within the Near East, covering a very broad chronological framework that dates from the Pre-pottery Neolithic to the Iron age period.
What is religion?
A philosophical interest in describing religion, as well as attempts to define religious beliefs and practices, have been known since classical times (Malefijt 1968, 16–41). However, the middle of the 19th century marks the start of a more coherent and scientific study of religion, from both an historical and anthropological perspective. In fact, it is during the last 150 years that numerous attempts to generally define these subjects have been made by anthropologists, historians, philosophers and so forth. This has been done following many theoretical approaches (evolutionary, sociological, comparative, diffusionist, psychological, phenomenological, cultural) that have characterised anthropological and religious studies over the last centuries (Doorgan 2012; Malefijt 1968). From this scenario, Edward B. Tylor emerges as one of the first modern anthropologists who, through his interest in studying ‘primitive’ societies, envisioned a social evolutionary process in types of religious behaviors (i.e. from ‘animistic’ – primitive beliefs – to ‘monotheistic’ – civilised ones: Bowie 2000, 13). Tylor also attempted a ‘minimum definition of religion’ (i.e. animism) that corresponds to the ‘belief in Spiritual Beings’ (1871, 2, 8). Since then, numerous additional efforts have been made to define religion and explain how humans relate to their religious dimensions (Bowie 2000, 18–22). In fact, almost every single scholar interested in the study of ancient and/or modern religions has tried to give a more elaborate, complex definition and explanation of religion that ‘emphasises certain aspects of the phenomenon or betrays the theoretical orientations of the authors’ (Eller 2007, 7). Theories that appear as particularly influential include the experiential theory of the holy (numinous) described by Rudolf Otto (1923), the functional aspects of religion (i.e. a means for social control) envisioned by numerous Anglo-American anthropologists, and the importance of the manifestation of the sacred through the creation of religious symbols (Bowie 2000; Eller 2007; Livingston 1993; Malefijit 1968; Morris 1987; Wallace 1966). However, two scholars in particular stand out in their efforts at framing a more comprehensive vision of human religiosity. The first is the founder of modern sociology, Emile Durkheim, who in his ground-breaking book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1965, 62) that approaches the subject from a sociological perspective, writes that religion is ‘a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set aside and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called Church, all those who adhere to them’. The second is one of the leading figures of modern anthropology, Clifford Geertz (1966, 4), for whom religion is:
‘(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely unrealistic’.
In both cases, religion is considered as a system composed of different rules and behaviors to be followed by the participants.
For the archaeologist interested in the study of ancient religious practices and beliefs, Durkheim’s statement is very useful because it emphasises the role of practice in the construction of religious beliefs following previous studies made by Robertson Smith on the ritual practices among Semitic religions (Bowie 2000, 126–127); however, both descriptions seem very vague and too generalising, and, therefore cannot be entirely useful for scholars interested in studying ancient societies and relics associated with religious practices and beliefs. Thus, it seems more fitting for the purpose of this volume to follow a different definition that has been recently stated by Sharon Steadman and that summarises some of the elements previously considered with a specific interest in the intermingling of mental and practical aspects of the religious dimension of societies. For her (2009, 23), religion is:
‘a system of beliefs that posits supernatural beings and resolves mysterious or unexplainable phenomena; it is a set of practices and associated trappings that allows believers not only to engage the supernatural world but also to demonstrate their devotion and faith in it. It is intricately intertwined with every aspect of culture that shapes social structure, while it also in turn is shaped by it’.
When looking closely at Steadman’s definition of religion, it is possible to find numerous similarities with the three dimensions of human religiosity that Jean Bottéro (1992, 203; 2001, 1–6) has highlighted in his study of ancient Mesopotamian religions. In so doing, he defined three fundamental components comprising all religions: religious sentiment – representing the emotional reaction of humans towards the unknown (either fear or attraction); religious ideology – how humans represent the numinous in the real world (i.e. religious representations); and, religious behaviour – the practical manifestation and translation of how humans interact with the numinous. These three dimensions have also been brilliantly identified by David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce (2005) in their book, Inside the Neolithic Mind, which for them are: religious experience that is a set of mental states created by the functioning of the human brain in both natural and induced conditions in the process of positing the existence of supernatural things;1 religious belief that derives from attempts to codify religious experiences in specific social circumstances; and, religious practice that includes rituals that are designed to plug into religious experience and to manifest religious beliefs.
Such an approach allows for the creation of a synergetic relationship between the mental, the social and the practical dimension of human religiosity because as stated by the two authors, the social practice of a religion is inseparable from its systemised beliefs and, thus, experience, belief and practice are an integrated whole. These three elements are also strongly embedded in the social, economic and political life of the society and, as a consequence, it is very difficult to analyse each dimension in a separate manner and without considering them as part of the whole society.
The dimensional approach to the study of religion is also a grounding aspect of Smart’s (1996) volume, Dimensions of the Sacred, in which the author defines a series of dimensions that are recognisable in most religions (i.e. ritual/practical; doctrinal/philosophical; mythic/narrative; experiential/emotional; ethic/legal; organisational/social; material/artistic; political/economic). Using this approach religion is thus envisioned ‘as a multifaceted phenomenon with overlapping spheres, rather than a single ‘thing’ that can be readily identified and studied in isolation’ (Bowie 2000, 22).
Along this path, we also encounter the famous distinction of modes of religiosity proposed by Whitehouse (2000; 2004) between imagistic and doctrinal modes of human religiosity. According to Whitehouse (2000, 1–18), a doctrinal mode of religiosity is based on ‘verbal and textual codification linked to routinisation and the establishment of large-scale, hierarchical, centralised, anonymous communities’; whereas, for the imagistic one ‘we have climatic and revelatory ritual episodes linked to sporadic transmission, intense cohesion, localism, and particularism’. This division is based on the level of emotional arousal experienced by the participants in a ritual and the frequency of ritual performances. In fact, a highly routinised ritual will slowly become a norm and/or a dogma having less effect on the participants’ emotional levels, whereas a rare and climatic ritual, such as, for example, the one performed at the Royal Cemetery of Ur during the mid-third millennium BCE (i.e. the Early Dynastic III period), will trigger and reinforce the level of episodic memory in the individual and will stimulate a ‘long-term rumination on the mystical significance of the acts and artifacts involved’ (Whitehouse and Hodder 2010, 123). Obviously, some religions based on strict dogmas and with high frequency of routinised ritual performances will also need the enactment of occasional and unique ritual performances that will enhance the emotional level and avoid the risk of boredom that is implicit in a doctrinal mode of religiosity.
In all, these perspectives emphasise the impossibility of separating the mental dimension of human religiosity from the practical one because it is through a continuous intermingling of ritual practices and beliefs in the sacred that religiosity is constructed in the cognitive schemata of the members of a given society.
For an archaeology of religion
During the last 30 years, an initial effort to define an archaeology of religion through the recognition of archaeological correlates helpful for reconstructing ancient beliefs (Renfrew 1985; 1994) has developed into a more coherent process that evinces the inner meaning of religious beliefs by identifying the relationship between the practical and cognitive dimensions of ritual practices in ancient societies (Doorgan 2012).
Within this perspective, the identification of archaeological correlates (i.e. religious architecture, votive objects, ritual deposits, icons and symbols, etc.) that can be used to define ancient ritual practices and help in the process of reconstructing modes of religiosity is of fundamental importance.2 Specific attention has to be given to the relationship between material culture, human perception, and the conceiving of divine or supernatural beings by the involved participants. Scholars have already started to work on defining elements that can help support a more coherent understanding of the relationship between religious beliefs and practices.
Initially, these two domains were carefully separated in the archaeological investigation of ancient societies because archaeologists believed that it was only the religious practice (i.e. ritual activities) that left traces that could then be excavated and interpreted; because, as highlighted by Fogelin (2007) in the brief introduction of his review of The Archaeology of Religious Ritual:
‘there is a widespread archaeological understanding that ritual is a form of human action that leaves material traces, whereas religion is a more abstract symbolic system consisting of beliefs, myths, and doctrines’.
In fact, since Hawkes’s liminal article (1954), Archeological Theory and Method: Some Suggestions from the Old World, the archaeology of religion has become a daunting and, at the same time, intriguing exercise for manipulating the data at the archaeologists’ disposal. In that study, Hawkes established a rank of inferences classified according to the ease of association between archaeological evidences and related social systems. At the bottom of this ladder are technological processes, followed by economic subsistence, social and political organisation, and finally at the top, the most complex of all, that of ‘religious institutions and spiritual life’. Thus, whenever archaeologists are confronted with archaeological records (i.e. artefacts, features, architecture) that cannot be clearly assigned to a specific domain or ‘have no functional value’, they usually claim that they were part of an inexplicable religious or ritual domain (Aldenderfer 2012, 28). In fact, the new wave of scholars that have envisioned archaeology as a social science (i.e. new or processual archaeologists) have considered religion as ‘a cultural epiphenomenon’ that is ‘materially unidentifiable’ (Droogan 2012, chap. 3). However, interesting attempts to respond to the need to interpret correlates of ancient religious practices and beliefs have been made in directions similar to those traced by both Durkheim and Geertz, who envisioned religion as a system of practices and beliefs. This is the case of Flannery and Drennan, who in the study of Formative Oaxaca villages applied a model elaborated by Roy Rappaport (1968; 1971a; 1971b) in his ethnographic study of the Tsembaga Maring of highland New Guinea, that was found useful because it:
‘ties religion to social organization, politics, and subsistence, rather than leaving it on the ephemeral plane of mental activity … [and] it breaks down religious phenomena into classes that are functionally different and have different contexts’ (Flannery 2009, 331).
According to this cognised model based on systems theory,3 religion can be envisioned as being composed of three elements connected by a circular relationship that are as follows: 1) ultimate sacred proposition (i.e. ‘a set of completely unverifiable beliefs that are held as unquestionable truths by the faithful’); 2) rituals (i.e. religious acts); and 3) religious experience induced by the performance of rituals (Drennan in Flannery 2009, 347, fig. 11.8).4
In the year 1985, the entire perspective on the archaeology of religion underwent a change. This date corresponds to the publication of Renfrew’s volume, The Archaeology of Cult: The Sanctuary at Phylakopi (1985) that is dedicated to the study of the Mycenaean sanctuary of Phylakopi (14th century BCE) on the island of Melos in the Aegean. Beginning with this study, Renfrew began developing a system for defining criteria that could lead archaeologists towards the interpretation of archaeological remains as traces of ritual activities and thereby define locales that were used in ancient times as places for religious purposes – i.e. the ‘archaeological indicators of ritual’ defined by Renfrew (1994, 51–52) in his later work on the archaeology of religion. Even though this is a fundamental move towards an archaeology of religion and an attempt to identify a cognitive relationship between the mind and the material in the construction of ancient religious belief systems, the main focus of investigation of the ‘cognitive approach’ still separates the mental (i.e. the religious mind) from the material (i.e. ritual practices) in reconstructing the religious dimension of ancient societies (Doorgan 2012, chap. 3).
In the same period, a few edited volumes (Carmichael et al. 1994; Garwood et al. 1991) based on conference proceedings, focused their attention on identifying correlates of religious beliefs and practices in the archaeological record. Among the contributions to these volumes, Barrett’s article was probably one of the most interesting for future research in this field, because it primarily focused on the multivocality of ritual practices and, particularly, on the ‘active and primary nature of material culture as an agent in religious life’ (Doorgan 2012: chap. 3), a subject that becomes fundamental in the more recent studies on the materiality of religion.
Since then, the literature on this topic has seen an increase with an enormous amount of volumes published during the last 10–15 years (Barrowclough and Malone 2007; Biehl and Bertemes 2001; Doorgan 2012; Fogelin 2007; 2008; Hodder 2010; Insoll 2001; 2004a; 2004b; 2011; Moser and Feldman 2014; Pauketat 2013; Rowan 2012; Steadman 2008; Wesler 2012; Whitley and Hays-Gilpin 2007). During these recent years, the theoretical approaches used in analysing religious practices among ancient societies have been different and range from a traditional functional perspective that, following a classical Durkheimian model, clearly distinguish between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ domains, focusing mainly on ritual and ceremonial practices (leaving the spiritual domain to the ‘historians’ who can interpret beliefs, myths, and dogmas drawing from written texts); to others, employing either phenomenological, practice-based or cognitive theoretical frameworks (Fogelin 2007; Pauketat 2013, 15–34), that have been more prone to identifying the importance of the agency of religious objects in framing the religiosity of ancient people, since, as seen before, religion does not belong only to a mental dimension, but is also constructed through a continuous interaction and intertwining of ideal dogmas and actual practices that are recognisable in the materiality of religion (Doorgan 2012, chap. 4). Thus, the most recent works in the sub-field of the archaeology of religion have moved away from a mere categorisation of religious beliefs and practices (e.g. the identification of canons to distinguish the different types of religion, Insoll 2004c)5 into a more coherent approach that focuses on what religion does in the overall society (Aldfenderfer 2012).
Within this perspective, it is of great importance to see ancient religions as phenomena built upon a complex network of connected elements (e.g. ritual paraphernalia, remains of ritual practices, built environments, sacred landscapes, sacred animals, and, when available, written texts) that shaped the cognitive dimension of the involved individuals through sensorial experiences of the numinous (Biehl 2012; Laneri 2011; Pauketat 2013). In support of such a holistic vision of the archaeological correlates of religiosity, it is also important to highlight the practical aspects of religious dogmas, myths, and beliefs in the broader contexts of the investigated societies (Aldfenderfer 2012). In other words, religion is an active element in the life of every single social group because it has to function in the real world and, as Rappaport has strongly emphasised in most of his scholarly works (e.g. 1968; 1971a; 1971b; 1999), the sacred domain (i.e. the combination of ritual practices and religious beliefs) cannot be separated from the environmental, economic, political and social dimensions of a given social group. Following this view, the sacred has to be viewed as being embedded in the social dimension of a society and composed of material (e.g. ritual practices) and nonmaterial (e.g. holy utterances) aspects that cannot be separated in the process of investigating the religious dimension of a given community, because, as correctly posed by Aldenderfer (2012, 33), ‘ritual is usually embedded within religion’.6
In fact, the truth that stays behind the sacred discourse of faith (e.g. ‘the Lord our God the Lord is one’ or ‘There Is no god but God’, Rappaport 1999, 277–281) needs to be socially validated by tangible elements (e.g. the construction of religious buildings and paraphernalia) that serve the purpose of affirming and conveying ‘the religious experience of the faithful’ in ways that ‘sanctity’ itself becomes an ‘instrument of authority’ (i.e. the sacred power) and, as a consequence, it can be used as a source of political power by the governing elites (Rappaport 1971b, 41).7
Thus, archaeology cannot separate the two aspects (i.e. the mental and the material) of human religiosity in the investigation of religious beliefs and practices among ancient societies; they are the heart and the brain of human religiosity and, consequently, the archaeologists’ aim is to connect the different material relics that served as ‘vehicles and bearers of sacred power’ (Livingston 1993, 54) into a broader discourse that reconstructs ancient religious dimensions as well as their role in structuring the social practices of ancient societies.
Archaeology and religion in the ancient Near East
Although recent theoretical approaches to the archaeology of religion have changed the way archaeologists are now confronting material culture, features, landscape and architecture related to religious practices and beliefs, only rarely have these studies attempted a coherent analysis of how to face theoretically and methodologically archaeological correlates of religiosity among ancient Near Eastern societies. This is even more evident when confronting the importance attributed to the study of ancient Near Eastern religions between the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century as is demonstrated by both Emile Durkheim’s interest in the study of ancient Semitic rituals by Robertson Smith and the literature published by Henri Frankfort on the religion of Mesopotamian and Egyptian societies.
Moreover, the trend noticeable during the second half of the 20th century has been marked by a strict separation of the analysis of ancient written sources from those dedicated to archaeological materials as demonstrated by the studies of Jacobsen, Kramer, Bottéro, Oppenheim and others on the cuneiform texts (Foster 2007; Mander 2009) and those by Hienrich, Tunca, Forest, Margueron, Lundquist and others concerned with the religious architecture of ancient Mesopotamia (Forest 1999). Regarding these latter studies, they have mostly focused on typological aspects related to archaeological discoveries rather than an attempt to combine the two elements into a more coherent work on reconstructing the relationship between remains of ritual practices and religious beliefs.
Only recently, an increasing number of studies have emphasised theoretical and methodological approaches in analysing ancient religions with perspectives different from a mere categorisation of the archaeological features (e.g. Cauvin 2000; Evans 2012; Hodder 2010; Kaniuth et al. 2013; Katz 2009; Nakhai 2001; Rowan 2012; Schmidt 2006). However, only rarely studies on Near Eastern contexts have been included in volumes dedicated to theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of ancient religions through archaeological research (see the texts mentioned in the previous paragraph); especially considering that it is in the Near East that ritual practices and religious beliefs showed pristine elements that appeared for the first time in human history, such as: the earliest examples of religious architecture in southeastern Anatolia during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (Cauvin 2000); the first forms of organised religious authorities in Mesopotamia starting from the fifth and fourth millennia BCE (Roaf 2013); and the beginning of a monotheistic religious belief that still characterises our modern world in southern Levant during the Iron Age (Nakhai 2001).
The contributions to this edited volume will thus try to fill this gap focusing their attention on the interpretation of material culture that can lead to a reconstruction of ancient religious practices within Near Eastern societies from the Neolithic until the Iron age through the investigation of specific archaeological case-studies. In addition, when available, the importance of intertwining archaeological data and written sources dedicated to religious subjects has been taken into consideration for a better understanding of the development of religiosity among ancient Near Eastern societies.
One of the most relevant topics touched on by the contributors is the complex exercise of defining the archaeological correlates that can help scholars link ritual practices to religious beliefs. Another important aspect, especially highlighted by scholars investigating contexts with written data, is the distinction between the official/public and familial/private dimensions of religious belief systems. Based on the specific subjects considered by the authors, the book has been divided into three different sections in order to facilitate future discussions on the archaeological correlates of ancient religions:
1. Sacred nature, i.e. the role of nature in creating the religious dimension of ancient societies.
2. Housing the god, i.e. the creation of architecture and/or place within the urban fabric for worshipping deities.
3. The materialisation of religious practices and beliefs, i.e. the use of material culture in the expression of religious beliefs and practices.
Sacred nature
When interpreting why ancient societies created gods, there is an axiomatic assumption that it was necessary in order to control natural events through the anthropomorphisation of the divine world, thereby giving gods a role that, as implied by the term supernatural, is above nature. The creation of supernatural creatures that controlled fundamental natural elements (water, mountains, sky, etc.) would have made humans believe that there was a way of controlling nature through the worship of these supernatural creatures. Using this perspective, it is necessary to envision a direct relationship between the religious system and the landscape in which it developed (Burkert 1996, 21), in which the relationship between the cosmic, natural and human worlds was conceived and communicated through mythological stories and ritual practices.
This element is clearly visible in the creation of the religious system of ancient Mesopotamia that envisions an attempt to control natural events as is noticeable in the ancient literature in which gods are described as ‘the motors driving the natural world’ (Trigger 2003, 419). To this we should also add that in Mesopotamia ‘the principal changes in nature’ must be accompanied by ‘appropriate rituals’ (Frankfort and Frankfort 1948, 25). Such a perspective is based on a traditional interpretation of an antagonistic relationship between nature and humans that sees humans attempting to control nature through a process of civilisation or acculturation of the wild world, as is expressed in the relationship between the ‘civilised’ Gilgamesh and the ‘wild’ Enkidu recognisable in the Sumerian tradition.
In this process of humans controlling nature through the means of the supernatural, Ingold’s vision of the history of human-animal relations is both inspiring and helpful for the purpose of this section. According to him, ‘the transition from hunting to pastoralism is marked not by the replacement of wild animals by domesticated ones, but by the movement from trust to domination in the principles of human beings’ relations with them’ (2000, 10).
In the Near East this long transitional phase linked to the domestication of plants and animals characterised prehistoric communities of the Levant, Turkey, Syria and northern Iraq and, as stated by scholars like Cauvin, Watkins, Hodder, and Verhoven, represent a period of major cognitive and symbolic transformations that Cauvin (2000) named as ‘a revolution of symbols which resulted in the invention of religion’ (Verhoven 2011, 801).
Even though this long process of transformation in human–animal relations in Near Eastern prehistory has been interpreted as a change in the way people interacted with ancestors and animal spirits and in the way human agency became central in the process of animal and plant domestication, I believe we should also emphasise how the relations between humans, nature and the numinous should be envisioned as part of a spiritual symbiosis in which preeminence is given to the agency embodied by the natural elements (Pauketat 2013, 27–42). Following this perspective, humans show respect to non-human elements by primarily embracing forms of trust and sharing and not through acts of domination and control over the environment. Again, it is in Ingold’s words (2000, 57) that we can find a clear vision of the importance of a symbiotic relationship between humans and the surrounding environment; in fact, it is:
‘through the practical activities of hunting and gathering [that] the environment – including the landscape with its fauna and flora – enters directly into the constitution of persons, not only as a source of nourishment but also as a source of knowledge’.
For example the pivotal role played by natural elements in constructing human religiosity is clearly visible in Anatolia during the Hittite period where domesticated animals are used to supplement the human diet, whereas wild animals are perceived as living in harmony with the nature. In this context, deities are usually escorted by animals and, as stated by Archi (1988, 29), ‘the archaic rituals wish the king to have those animal properties that represent symbols of power and kingship’.
Elements of symbiosis between animals and divinities can also been seen in the numerous animal representations and manifestations of ancient divinities as well as in the combination of human and animal attributes in creating fantastic figures in the iconographic and written religious traditions of numerous ancient Near Eastern societies.
As we will notice in some of the papers here presented, further elements confirming the agency embodied by animals in the religious dimension of ancient Near Eastern societies are represented by the presence of animals in funerary deposits. This is the case of Gonur Depe during the end of the third and the first half of the second millennium BCE (see Dubova) where the presence of specific animals (i.e. dogs, equids, rams) in funerary contexts can be interpreted as the result of sacrifices associated with the enactment of post-mortem rituals, but it can also be viewed as a form of connection between humans, nature and the supernatural in constructing the religious dimension of the people inhabiting the region of Margiana in Turkmenistan. The importance of animal sacrifices in the performance of religious practices is further analysed by Larke Recht who, in her analysis of role played by animal sacrifice in the creation of human religiosity among Mesopotamian societies, uses an iconographic analysis of ‘images as depicting elements of sacrificial practices’ and reinforces the importance of iconography for identifying ‘symbolic systems’ associated with ancient religious dimensions (Renfrew 1994, 53–54).
Another element that needs to be emphasised in this section is the importance of the location of religious architecture in relationship to natural elements as representations of the numinous. Thus, as pointed out by Rosen, in the Levant the creation of cult sites in the desert represent a will to artificially embed a ritual building in a landscape linking it to a cosmic event, as is the case of the summer solstice, to support the process of socioeconomic transformation that occurred during the Neolithic period. In addition, the placement of specific artificial elements within the landscape, as is the case of the Early Bronze Age Standing Stones at Dhra’ (see Andersson) could have created a ‘cognitive connection’ between sacred elements located within the settlements and ‘cultic way stations’ along important trade networks.
Housing the god
The creation of locales dedicated to the worship of the numinous is pivotal for every religion (Wesler 2012, 98–158). This place can be a natural sacred place, a building, or a combination of the two. However, the idea of housing the god in a specific enclosure can produce a stronger emphasis on the ideological control over the numinous by the elite members of a given society and thus constitute a tool for social control in societies that are leading towards higher forms of social complexity, as clearly represented by the late fourth millennium BCE Eanna complex of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia. In other contexts, ceremonial centers could have functioned as places necessary for strengthening social cooperation when cooperation was needed, for example in the case of ritual hunting.
In the case of Çatalhöyük during the Neolithic period, the presence of the numinous was entangled with the house, the domus, and the activities enacted in it. Among the Sumerians, the temple was also conceived as the ‘House of the god’. The temple was the place physically inhabited by the god and where the god was fed by worshippers. Within this landscape, the house of the god was probably conceived as part of a larger process of emerging households seeking to strengthen their power during the fourth and third millennia BCE in Mesopotamia and, thus, served the purpose of representing the centrality of the house and familial ties in the cosmic world, too.8 The anthropomorphisation of the cosmic world, in which the family is central at both the human and divine levels, is fundamental to most ancient Near Eastern societies. Therefore, it is important to investigate how the house of the god was conceived and functioned during the different chronological periods and geographical areas for the purpose of finding common grounds in defining how religious architecture served the purpose of framing the cognitive schemata of the members of ancient communities.
In most of the cases, the temple was a secluded place accessible only by the religious elites. Very useful to this perspective is the relationship between ‘sacral hierarchies’ and access to religious spaces carried out by Wightman (2007) who divides religious areas into:
1. A primary space in which the divinity is represented by the presence of the cultic statue;
2. A secondary space that is the cella and is accessible by the high clericals;
3. A tertiary space represented by chapels, porches, and religious storerooms accessed by the low clericals;
4. A quaternary space represented by the outdoor areas where the general public convened.
According to Wightman (2007, 350), the fourth and ‘lower echelon’ is the place in which ritual activities are performed and where the public is invited to ‘interact with the divine through the intermediation of a representative of the clergy’. In these outer spaces the presence of altars or libation basins might have been used for acts of ritual cleansing or purification, for votive offerings, and for the sacrificial slaughtering of animals. In addition to this, ‘ceremonial paths’ dedicated to worshippers might have been created for their participation in and observation of the ceremonies. Spaces located directly outside of the temples are pivotal in directing the experiential dimension of the participants towards the ritual activities and it is in these open spaces that ideological powers are usually materialised. Thus, these locales are the key elements in framing the cognitive schemata of the devotees and empowering their religious beliefs.
In fact, the unmistakable separation between an outdoor space where the public is invited to jointly interact with the numinous in a shared event, and a more secluded ceremonial building in which ritual activities were probably conducted only by religious specialists, creates a dichotomy between a continuous secrecy and the occasional public perception of the numinous, thereby reinforcing the strength and power of the message delivered by the specialists during the enactment of ritual performances in the outdoor space. Strangely, only rarely these spaces have been thoroughly investigated by archaeologists, who instead have focused their research on the sancta sanctorum of the religious structure.
The relationship between inside and outside spaces in the construction of ceremonial environments appears pivotal in the creation of the famous circular buildings discovered at the Pre-pottery Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe. Dietrich and Notroff debate the important theme of the ‘sacred nature’ of these buildings being supported by Renfrew’s famous archaeological indicators. In addition, they claim that there is a great need to separate the sacred from the profane in the lives of ancient people. This problematic separation of utilitarian versus ritual aspects is widely analysed in numerous contributions to this volume, calling for further investigation into the boundaries between the private (or familial) and the more public (official) religious dimensions. This theme is widely debated by Nakhai in her discussion of the role played by the Jerusalem Temple during the Iron Age, a place that was viewed as having a centralising role in constructing the Israelite identity becoming the ‘emblem of morality and priesthood’.
In order to confront this complex subject, archaeologists should implement a thorough analysis of the built environment in order to identify elements (i.e. fixed features, semi-fixed features, and informal non-fixed features) that enhanced the importance of perceptual (by the constructor) and associational (by the users) religious aspects of the built environment either in an official/public or domestic/familial environment (Moser and Feldman 2014). This type of analysis is brought about by Valentini’s contribution to this volume in his attempt to distinguish between large and visible public religious buildings and the more secluded sanctuaries (and probably linked to familial cults) in northern Mesopotamia during the third millennium BCE.
However, the location of the sacred building in relation to the settlements also needs to be taken into consideration when these kinds of religious buildings are investigated. In Mesopotamia the tradition of the ‘High Terrace’ is meant to enhance ‘public visibility’ of the natural place as well as to increase the purity of the sacred space and to further connect humans to the cosmological numinous located in the sky (see Butterlin). In a similar way, texts and archaeological data highlight the important role played by ‘external spaces adjoining the temples’ and the circumambulation around sacred precincts in enhancing the religious experience of the devotees in the Near East between the Bronze and Iron Age (see Mazzoni and Catagnoti).
Because of the extreme power embodied by religious buildings in the social environment in which they are built, at the end of their use they need to be visually and functionally eliminated through ‘termination rituals’ that can consist of votive fillings of the rooms and the detachment of all the semi-fixed and non-fixed features from their original place in the temples. The actual evidences of termination rituals have been only rarely investigated by archaeologists and, as demonstrated by the article here presented by Romano, a biographical approach to religious buildings should be further considered when excavating this type of architecture.
The materialisation of religious practices and beliefs
Since the publication of the pivotal article on the materialisation of ideology by DeMarrais, Castillo and Earle in 1996, the interest in the social engagement between people and material culture in ancient societies has resulted in numerous publications that spark a renewed interest in the relationship between objects, social practice, and human and non-human agency. Of particular note are more recent attempts to understand how archaeology can define the materialisation of ideological frameworks referring to religious practices (Droogan 2012). In order to reach this target, interested scholars should seek to establish a broader network of elements that can help define a common ground for the identification of a system of religious beliefs among ancient societies. Thus, specific sets of objects and semi-fixed features, distinctive built environments, unique landscapes, traces of sacrificed animals and votive offerings, should all be envisioned as part of cues that stimulated the cognitive schemata of the participants in the creation of a common notion of the sacred. This theoretical framework is based on a complex system of communication in which all involved elements can be envisioned as nodes; through the use of connecting ties, the nodes form a network that establishes the meanings of the material culture concerned with religious practices (Laneri 2011, fig. 10).
Thus, the ideological power of ritual acts is produced by the creation of networks of elements that gain their meaning only when part of a performance context and through their engagement with human beings. Moreover, it is through a process of enchainment between material culture, human and non-human entities that social ties are formed and established. These ties can be further reinforced (or erased) through the purposeful breakage and destruction of the involved material culture and architecture that become available to archaeologists in the form of fragments that need to be connected to give meaning to the material remains of religious beliefs.
It was also fundamental for ancient Near Eastern societies to normalise and structure religious beliefs through the creation of dogmas that can be easily traced through the reading of numerous written texts that, starting from the mid-third millennium BCE, enlighten our knowledge of Near Eastern religions. These norms give us a clear idea of how religious beliefs were conceived, but they also provide clues about the importance of intermingling religious utterances (either written or spoken) and religious practices in creating a common language for connecting with the numinous. This is, for example, the case of the ancient Mesopotamian ritual of the ‘opening of the mouth’ that was necessary to give life to cult statues and that represent the perfect combination of religious utterances and practices in giving meaning to a religious belief (Winter 1992).
The aim of this last section is therefore to investigate different forms of religious representation (iconographical, architectural, ritualistic, productive) viewed as part of a broader network of materialisation of religious beliefs in a given society. In this sense, I have found Watkin’s use of the term ‘material anchors’ for specific archaeological correlates of ritual practices as a step towards linking religious experiences to the collective memories of Pre-pottery Neolithic communities. However, as Gošić and Gilead have brilliantly highlighted in their analysis of metal production during the Late Ghassulian period in the Levant, it is difficult to distinguish a clear line in differentiating sacred/ritualistic vs. profane/mundane material culture. In fact, certain aspects of technological innovation should be interpreted as part of a process of materialisation of religious beliefs and practices. This is the case of copper production in the Levant during the fifth millennium BCE when the ritual significance of making metal objects was used as a means to demonstrate new technological expertise and control by the coppersmiths. A similar complexity in combining archaeological and textual data is recognisable when scholars aim at distinguishing domestic religious belief systems from public ones. This is a common theme that links the work of Battini and Snell in their attempts to interpret Mesopotamian case-studies.
In conclusion, I hope that the range of topics covered by the papers presented in this final section to this edited volume will represent a door for entering a broader discussion on how to create patterns for investigating the synergetic relationship between the mental, the social and the practical dimensions of human religiosity among ancient Near Eastern societies that are hidden in the archaeological data, in the iconographic representations and in the written sources.
Notes
1 Religious experience (as opposed to mental and interior aspects of human religiosity) appeared as a grounding element for numerous scholars interested in religious studies (e.g. Durkheim, Otto, James, Turner, Rappaport). This element appears clear in William James’ words who, as clearly summarized by Rappaport (1999, 375), envisioned religion ‘as based upon experience … that refers to an immediate grasp of things’; in other words, it ‘is non-discursive, a continuous “stream of consciousness” that cannot be communicated in words’. Following Rappaport, religious experience is also pivotal for Renfrew (1994, 48) in his approach to the archaeology of religion.
2 According to Aldenderfer (2012, 23), ‘for the archaeologist, religion … is only perceived when it is expressed through some act that has material consequences.’
3 In his analysis of the relationship between human beings and the environment, Rappaport envisioned two models: ‘the operational model is that which anthropologists constructs through observation and measurement of empirical entities, events, and material relations’; whereas, ‘the cognized model is the model of the environment conceived by the people who act in it’ (Rappaport 1968, 237–238).
4 It is important to emphasis that according to this model ‘ritual serves as a point of articulation between religion and socioenvironmental processes’ (Drennan in Flannery 2009, caption of Fig. 11.8).
5 As previously mentioned, in the history of religious studies there has been a particular emphasis on classifying types of religious dimensions based on the levels of social complexity (Wesler 2012, 16–29). As a consequence, we faced an initial evolutionary approach that stated clear stages of transformation (i.e. spiritualism > animism > totemism > polytheism > monotheism) or ‘types of cult institutions’ (i.e. individualistic, shamanic, communal, ecclesiastic, Wallace, 1966, 86–88), then an attempt to distinguish between traditional/primal and world/historic religions (Bowie 2000, 22–25), or between polytheism (or cosmotheism for early Near Eastern religions) and monotheism (Morris 1987; Mander 2009), or between ‘imagistic’ (related to small-scale societies) and ‘doctrinal’ (of more complex societies) modes of religiosity (Whitehouse 2000). The risk of these categorizations is to focus on the ‘container’ (what religion is) and lose track of the content, and its consequences (what religion does), of the religious dimension of a given community, because, as pointed out by Renfrew (1994, 47) ‘classifications are of value if they are put to some use once they are established.’
6 To add more to this tight relationship between ‘ritual practices’ and ‘religious beliefs’, almost 50 years ago Wallace (1966, 243) warned us that ‘ritual is determined by the beliefs with which it is associated.’
7 In fact, as correctly pointed out by Rappaport (1971b, 41), ‘coercion is expensive and difficult, and compliance and docility are achieved more easily and inexpensively through first the encouragement of religious experiences inspired by hopes of salvation in another life and, second, inculcation of the belief that the world’s evils are a result of the worshipper’s own sinfulness rather than matter of external exploitation or oppression which the worshipper could possibly resist.’
8 As correctly posed by Wesler (2012, 99) following an earlier study by John Lundquist (1982) on the role of temples in legitimizing the state and royal power among Near Eastern societies, the ‘institutionalization of the temple proceeds hand-in-hand with the institutionalization of the state’.
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