Sacred Spaces and Sacred Times: Religious Travels and Pilgrimages in the Ancient Near East

Catalog description

The course will focus on the cultural and religious-historical interpretation of physical displacements among sacred places, including urban processions, visits to temples and journeys to sacred places within the context of the Ancient Near Eastern religions. We will attempt to sketch a map of the holy centers and cultic itineraries, focusing on case studies from Babylonia, Assyria and Syria from the third to the first millennium BC as well as comparative case studies from surrounding cultures. These topics will be explored with an emphasis on how written and archaeological sources can be interpreted with the help of theoretical literature.