[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
In recent decades, a number of interdisciplinary working groups have come together to interrogate established concepts that underlie the study of ancient religion, such as the Sanctuary project, which aims to investigate the very concept of “Sanctuary.” This volume is the product of a 2019 conference held by this group. It brings together a number of disparate case studies on topics across time and space in the Mediterranean, examining everything from the phenomenology of Egyptian temples to urban religion in Greek Sicily to the creation of sacred spaces in the Roman Danubian provinces. The studies focus on a range of archaeological and literary evidence, but all share, to some extent, similar methodologies.
The introduction, written by the editors, reviews the previous literature on sanctuaries and religion that has influenced this project, notably its co-director Jörg Rüpke’s work on Lived Ancient Religion, and lays out the goals of the project.[1] It aims to investigate “how sanctuaries formed human experience and religious knowledge” (16) by focusing on the intersection of different forms of engagement with ritual as well as the participation of different communities. The chapters of the volume address this theme in different ways with some combining the study of spaces, artifacts, and participants and others focusing on just one site or type of evidence. They are arranged roughly in chronological order, beginning with a chapter on Egyptian temples and ending with temples in Roman Hispania. In order to draw out thematic connections, chapters are discussed out of order in this review.
Given the influence of Lived Ancient Religion on the project, it is appropriate that the first chapter is written by Rüpke himself. He analyzes processes of religious communication and agency, arguing that objects were used as focal points for communication as well as the creation of sacred space. Rüpke suggests that altars, specifically miniature ones, in ancient Rome played important roles in the construction of the divine while maintaining a certain degree of flexibility that allowed for focus to be placed on the act of divine communication rather than the divinity itself.[2]
Four chapters focus on the influence of sacred architecture on experience. First, Thomas Gamelin examines how Egyptian temple architecture influenced the movement of priests during religious ceremonies. He argues that the architecture, together with inscriptions and images on the temple walls, created an atmosphere within the temple that had an emotional impact on ritual performers. In another chapter, Csaba Szabó offers a new taxonomy for the sacralization of sacred space in ancient Rome. Using the Danubian provinces during the Principate as a case study, he suggests that sacralizing space facilitated not only the communication between humans and the divine, but also the interaction between micro-, meso–, and macro-spaces. The other two chapters cover Roman era temples. Dominic Dalglish suggests that the construction of temples influenced the understanding of the gods they belonged to, arguing that, for example, in the second phase of the construction of the temple of Jupiter at Baalbek/Heliopolis, the name Jupiter Optimus Maximus Heliopolitanus became associated with the god. He observes that this is the first known instance of the combination of “Jupiter Optimus Maximus” with a toponymic name and posits that this marks a significant reconceptualization of the god in the landscape of Heliopolis.
In the fourth chapter that focuses on temples, Jaime Alvar Ezquerra and José Carlos López-Gómez argue that the acknowledged decline of the epigraphic habit in Roman Hispania between the 2nd and 4th centuries CE is symptomatic of a larger shift in religious experience that began with the abandonment of temples. This argument is interesting in and of itself, but the authors also coin new terminology to discuss religious practices in the public sphere. Ezquerra and López-Gómez suggest the use of the phrase “administered religion” in lieu of “civic religion.” Administered religion encompasses all religious acts that were dictated by laws, the calendar, political and social institutions, as well as “non-explicit norms capable of modulating” the ritual act being performed (442). This term moves beyond the institutions that structured religious activities and includes the behaviors of the individual actors. For instance, rather than lay blame solely at the feet of the “crisis of the 3rd century,” the authors connect the abandonment of temples in Hispania with the cessation of this “administered religion,” arguing that local elites stopped funding public religious rituals and festivals, leading to a collapse of the temple system and thus creating the social instability that characterized the 4th century. It should be noted that these processes could also have led to the decline of epigraphy in the region. It would be valuable to apply this approach to the religious activities of other Roman provinces during this period, or even further afield such as the religious changes that happen with the decline of the Greek polis in the Hellenistic period.[3]
Another four chapters explore human experiences at sanctuaries of Apollo. One of the chapters, by Erika Angliker, Yannos Kourayos, and Kornilia Daifa, uses archaeological and visual evidence to examine the roles that dance and travel play in the worship of Apollo at Despotiko and in the Cyclades in general. The other three chapters employ literary evidence. Esther Eidinow uses the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi as one of her two case studies on relational networks in sanctuaries. She argues that sacred spaces and the buildings within them emerged as a result of networks among human/human and human/object relations. Elena Franchi moves forward in time and examines how Roman Greeks experienced Delphi through social memories preserved in sacred spaces. Framing her chapter with a dialogue by Plutarch that describes a group’s conversation as they walk through the sanctuary to the temple of Apollo, she discusses how the act of walking requires people to make bodily adjustments for their surroundings as they gain new knowledge of their environments. She argues that walking through the sanctuary would have been not only a religious but also an intellectual and philosophical experience as the visitor was confronted with all the memories of the past embodied in the monuments of the sanctuary. In her chapter, Georgia Petridou examines the experiences of individuals in the sanctuaries of Asclepius at Pergamon and Demeter at Eleusis through the Hieroi Logoi and three orations of Aelius Aristides. She argues that Aristides mapped his lived experience of the healing cult of Asclepius onto the mysteries of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis, leading him to experience the cult of Asclepius as a type of mystery cult. Petridou suggests that there is precedence for Aristides’ mapping of illness and incubation onto initiation in the close connections drawn between the two cults as they existed in Athens.
Pre-Roman Italy is addressed in three chapters. Turning to Greek Sicily, Marco Serino analyzes the archaeological evidence for the “Sacred House” in Himera, addressing the phenomenon of the “Hiera Oikia” in Magna Graecia and specifically the distribution of ritual artifacts within the Himera house. He interrogates the public/private divide that pervades much of the discussion of Greek ritual by focusing on the “grey area” of the Sacred House, a place not completely private but also never fully public. Camilla Norman also explores scholarly boundaries in her chapter on Daunia in Archaic Italy, notably the blurring of the divide between the “sacred” and the “profane.” Methodologically, Norman complements the “Lived Religion” approach used by most authors in this volume with “Ritual Ecology,” which emphasizes the reciprocal nature of the relationships among people, places, animals, and things, even including the weather, the season, and the human and non-human life cycle (90). Ancient Daunia is poorly understood due to a lack of systematic excavation and extensive looting, but it appears that there were generally no separate sacred spaces. Therefore, Norman investigates Daunian ritual practices through an examination of stelae, of which about a quarter of the approximately 1400 existing examples have figural imagery. This imagery ranges from weaving to sacrifices to komast dancing. She examines the imagery on the stelae before concluding that performance was the determining factor of ritual space presumably because the ritual scenes on the stelae depict actions such as processions and feasting. Finally, the chapter by Giovanni Mastronuzzi, Davide Tamiano, and Giacomo Vizzino focuses on Apulian Italy. The authors survey the evidence for sanctuaries in the Archaic and Hellenistic periods, paying specific attention to the archaeobotanical evidence and the remains of dining vessels. This study makes significant use of digital technologies to study dining practices, such as digitally calculating vessel capacities. The clear explanation for this methodology is a major strength of this chapter.
Two chapters address themes of foreignness and sacred space. Ilaria Bultrighini’s chapter examines the cult of Artemis Amarysia in Attica, an especially timely contribution given the recent identification of the cult’s archaeological remains in Euboea.[4] Bultrighini argues that the Athenians deliberately and faithfully reproduced the topography of the Eretrian cult in Attica, linking together the asty and chora through ritual just as it was in Eretria. In her chapter, Julietta Steinhauer studies the experience of foreign women on Delos through the lens of the sanctuary of the Syrian gods. Rightly pointing out that female citizens, non-Greek, non-citizen, and enslaved women have long been dismissively classified under the simple category of “women,” Steinhauer illuminates the social and family lives of Levantine women by reconstructing their relationships from the archaeological and epigraphic data for dedications in shrines of Levantine gods, especially the sanctuary of the Syrian gods. She contextualizes this data with analyses of the grave monuments of non-Athenian and non-Delian women at Rheneia. Finally, she contrasts the ranges of experiences of foreign women on Delos, many of whom were independent, with that of citizen and foreign women in late-Classical and Hellenistic Athens, the former who were generally sequestered at home and the latter who were excluded from civic religion, suggesting that the ethnically diverse society of Delos allowed for a more balanced religious community and diverse socio-religious experience.[5]
Images and their relationship to sanctuaries and the people who moved within them are the topic of two other chapters. Rita Sassu, Katja Sporn, and Marlis Arnhold focus on images in sanctuaries. Sassu examines the different types of dedications made in sanctuaries, from private offerings made in connection with rites of passage to large buildings like the Philippeion built in sacred spaces as propaganda. Relatedly, Anna-Katharina Rieger focuses on how religious pathways were constructed in the urban fabric of Pompeii using images of both mortal women (mainly as priestesses) and goddesses put up in both public and private spaces.
Finally, Julia Kindt concludes the volume with a summary chapter emphasizing the importance of the Lived Ancient Religion approach both explicitly and implicitly employed by the contributors. She also draws out a number of themes that run through the volume’s chapters: focalization and sacralization, embodiment, communication, and memory and storied religion.
As suggested by Kindt in her closing remarks, the main importance of this work is in showcasing familiar material in new ways and making comparisons among materials not often considered together (471). The volume as a whole is written for a specialist audience, but it is understandable across disciplines through the shared methodology including Lived Ancient Religion and spatial-experiential approaches. The volume is richly illustrated with a substantial quantity of color images, although there are some places, such as the chapter on ancient Daunia, where even more images would have been appreciated. There are a few mistakes that should have been caught in copyediting, such as mismatches between citations in footnotes and in the bibliography, but they do not detract from the comprehensibility of the text. Overall, this is a valuable contribution to the study of the “sanctuary” and makes major strides in illuminating the way sacred spaces were experienced by the individual.
Works Cited
Barrett, C.E. 2024. “The Affordances of Terracotta Figurines in Domestic Contexts. Reconsidering the Gap between Material and Ritual.” In The Stuff of the Gods. The Material Aspects of Religion in Ancient Greece, edited by M. Haysom, M. Mili, and J. Wallensten, 59:111–32. Acta Instituti Atheniensis Regni Sueciae 4. Stockholm: Swedish Institute at Athens.
Fachard, S., A.G. Simosi, T. Krapf, T. Saggini, O. Kyriazi, J. André, C. Chezeaux, S. Verdan, and T. Theurillat. 2024. “Fieldwork of the Swiss School of Archaeology in Greece 2023.” Antike Kunst 67:95–109.
Gasparini, V., M. Patzelt, R. Raja, A.-K. Rieger, J. Rüpke, and E. Urciuoli, eds. 2020. Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World. Erfurt: De Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110557947. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/37602.
Harland, P. 2006. “The Declining Polis? Religious Rivalries in Ancient Civic Context.” In Religious Rivalries in the Early Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity, edited by L.E. Vaage, 21–49. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Nevett, L.C. 2013. “Towards a Female Topography of the Ancient Greek City: Case Studies from Late Archaic and Early Classical Athens (c. 520-400 BCE).” In Gender and the City Before Modernity, edited by Lin Foxhall and Gabriele Neher, 86–106. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Rask, K.A. 2023. Personal Experience and Materiality in Greek Religion. New York: Routledge.
Reber, K., S. Fachard, A. Karapaschalidou, and A.G. Simosi. 2023. Das Heiligtum Der Artemis Amarysia in Amarynthos. Athens: Swiss School of Archaeology in Greece.
Smagh, H. 2022. “Religion in the Classical Greek House: Sacred Spaces and Social Practices.” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University.
Authors and Titles
Introduction (Greg Woolf, Iliaria Bultrighini, and Camila Norman)
Sacralization and Focalization: Agentic Perspectives on Sanctuaries (Jörg Rüpke)
How Does Architecture Help One Feel Part of the Divine World? Looking for Movements and Perceptions in Egyptian Temples (Thomas Gamelin)
Experiences and Individual Practices at the Sanctuary of Apollo at Despotiko: A Case of Dances and Travelling (Erica Angliker, Yannos Kourayos, and Kornilia Daifa)
The Ritual Ecology of Archaic Italy: A View from Daunia (Camilla Norman)
Food Offerings and Ritual Meals in pre-Roman Apulia Contexts (Giovanni Mastronuzzi, Davide Tamiano, and Giacomo Vizzino)
‘Travel Stories’: Some Semantics of Ancient Sacred Space (Esther Eidinow)
Iera Oikia: Archaeological Evidence of Religious Experience in a ‘Sacred House’ of a Sicilian Greek Colony (Marco Serino)
Worshipping Imported Deities in Attika: The Case of Artemis Amarysia (Ilaria Bultrighini)
The Human Dimension of Divine Space: Some Remarks on Worshippers’ Religious and Secular Actions Performed inside Greek Sanctuaries (Rita Sassu)
The Sanctuary of the Syrian Gods on Delos and the Experience of Female Foreigners (Julietta Steinhauer)
Private Portraits in Temples: Greek and Roman in Comparison (Katja Sporn)
Images of Gods in the Sanctuaries of Imperial Rome (Marlis Arnhold)
Pathways of Religious Experience in the Urban Fabric of Roman Pompeii (Anna-Katharina Rieger)
Making Delphi Happen: Walking, Memories, and Intellectual Experience in Roman Central Greece (Elena Franchi)
Between Pergamum, Athens and Eleusis: Illness and Initiation in Aelius Aristides (Georgia Petridou)
God and Temple: Jupiter Optimus Maximus Heliopolitanus at Baalbek (Dominic Dalglish)
Sacralisations of Space in the Danubian Provinces during the Principate (Csaba Szabó)
The First Slump in Temple Building in Roman Hispania (Jaime Alvar Ezquerra and José Carlos López-Gómez)
Afterthought: Sacred Space, Sanctuaries, and Religious Experience in the Ancient World (Julia Kindt)
Notes
[1] Gasparini et al., 2020.
[2] The flexibility enabled by small objects like miniature altars has been discussed in recent literature focused on material culture in Greek religion, see Smagh 2022; Rask 2023; Barrett 2024.
[3] Some scholars vehemently argue against the decline of the polis (e.g., Harland 2006).
[4] Reber et al, 2023; Fachard et al., 2024; https://www.esag.swiss/amarynthos/
[5] The degree to which Athenian citizen women were sequestered at home is under debate. See Nevett 2013.