Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity

Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity
Author :
Publisher : Oxbow Books
Total Pages : 465
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781789253344
ISBN-13 : 1789253349
Rating : 4/5 (349 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity by : Ralph Haussler

Download or read book Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity written by Ralph Haussler and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2020-07-31 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behavior while it is often felt that deities responsible for both natural benefits and natural calamities (such as droughts, famines, floods and landslides) need to be appeased. We presume that, in many societies, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people have also felt the need to monumentalize their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practices. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinize carefully our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multi-disciplinary approach. More than 30 papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people’s sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were ‘rewritten’, adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people’s understandings. A key question is how was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalized – especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly ‘non-natural’ landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyze the complex links between landscape, ‘religiosity’ and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.


Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity Related Books

Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity
Language: en
Pages: 465
Authors: Ralph Haussler
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-07-31 - Publisher: Oxbow Books

GET EBOOK

From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behavior while it is
Urban Rituals in Sacred Landscapes in Hellenistic Asia Minor
Language: en
Pages: 537
Authors: Christina G. Williamson
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-08-04 - Publisher: BRILL

GET EBOOK

In Urban Rituals in Sacred Landscapes in Hellenistic Asia Minor, Christina G. Williamson examines the phenomenon of monumental sanctuaries in the countryside of
Sacred Space and Sacred Function in Ancient Thebes
Language: en
Pages: 220
Authors: Peter Dorman
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2007 - Publisher: Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures

GET EBOOK

This volume presents a series of papers delivered at a two-day session of the Theban Workshop held at the British Museum in September 2003. Due to its political
Valuing Landscape in Classical Antiquity
Language: en
Pages: 511
Authors:
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-05-18 - Publisher: BRILL

GET EBOOK

‘Where am I?’. Our physical orientation in place is one of the defining characteristics of our embodied existence. However, while there is no human life, cu
Landscapes of Dread in Classical Antiquity
Language: en
Pages: 328
Authors: Debbie Felton
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2018-04-27 - Publisher: Routledge

GET EBOOK

Over the last two decades, research in cultural geography and landscape studies has influenced many humanities fields, including Classics, and has increasingly