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Urban Rituals in Sacred Landscapes in Hellenistic Asia Minor pdf download

URBAN RITUALS IN SACRED LANDSCAPES IN HELLENISTIC ASIA MINOR
Book Title Urban Rituals In Sacred Landscapes In Hellenistic Asia Minor
Book AuthorChristina G. Williamson
Total Pages537
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LanguageEnglish
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Urban Rituals in Sacred Landscapes in Hellenistic Asia Minor

By Christina G. Williamson

URBAN RITUALS IN SACRED LANDSCAPES IN HELLENISTIC ASIA MINOR

Book preface

Towns in Oklahoma, where I grew up, are planned on a grid rather than natural topography, creating a curious tension between the concrete lines and the eroding bright red soil underneath.

This urban grid is punctuated by religion, now visible in the attraction of the mega ‘extra-urban churches that create new communities across municipalities, while older traditional ‘inner-city’ churches often belong to a greying congregation.

Perhaps this is what attracted me to this topic in the ancient world where, despite the obvious differences, the power of urban religion to redefine social identities and reshape sacred landscapes was at least as dynamic and complex. This is what this book is about.

Sanctuaries in the ancient Greek world have long been examined by scholars through the urban-rural dichotomy, yet Hellenistic Asia Minor poses a separate set of questions and concerns, as older ‘country’ shrines were drawn into the developing urban sphere.

Overarching issues of social and political cohesion appear to have been more important in this era than boundaries, as communities were reorganized along with the template of the Greek city. Such concerns rise to the surface on close examination of a wide range of data, rather than the imposition of a monolithic model.

This book offers a holistic approach, a framework of analysis that embraces a wide variety of sources and highlights both patterns and variations in developing relationships between sanctuaries and cities. Applied here to four such relationships as an initial probe, this framework can help identify the dynamics and agencies at work in many other cases as well. Hopefully, it will be used by many and will undergo refinement in the process.

At the base of this book is my doctoral research and dissertation at the University of Groningen which could not have appeared without the help, influence and insights of many others.

In the first place, I would like to thank Onno van Nijf for his unfailing support. Our collaboration has been fruitful and we are now co-directing the project Connecting the Greeks – multiscalar festival networks in the Hellenistic world (funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)), which has emerged in part from the research presented here. I would also like to thank Peter Attema and Martijn van Leusen, who both shaped my view of the landscape and sparked my desire to learn to work with geographic information systems (GIS).

I am indebted to Felix Pirson, who inspired my approach to the visuality of landscape, further resulting in the project Commanding Views – monumental landscapes and the territorial formation of Pergamon, 3rd to 2nd c BC (NWO and the Joukowsky Institute

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