Books > History > World history > BCE to 500 CE
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Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity - Creation, Manipulation, Transformation (Paperback)
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Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity - Creation, Manipulation, Transformation (Paperback)
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From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes
differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes
their behaviour 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 monumentalise their sacred landscape. But
this is where the similarities end as different societies had very
different understandings, believes and practises. The aim of this
new thematic appraisal is to scrutinise 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 monumentalised - 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 analyse 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.
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