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The studies in this volume share a focus on religion in the ancient
Mediterranean world: how ritual, myth, spectatorship, and travel
reflect the continual interaction of human beings with the richly
fictive beings who defined the boundaries of groups, access to the
past, and mobility across land and seascapes. They share as well
the methodological exploration of the intersection between human
sciences, the integration of numerous disciplines around the study
of all aspects of human life from the biological to the cultural,
and the study of the past. In so doing, they continue a long
dialogue that engages with critical models derived from
specializations within history, philology, archaeology, sociology,
and anthropology, and addresses, increasingly, the potentialities
and pitfalls of quantitative and digital analyses. Many of the
threads in this long conversation inform these chapters: the
comparative project, human social evolution, disciplinary
reflexivity, religion as an embedded, functional, and structural
system, and the role for agency, networks, and materiality.
The study of material culture has helped create a common meeting
ground for scholars seeking to integrate images, sites, texts and
implements in their approach to religion in the ancient
Mediterranean. This book explores the productivity of these
approaches, with case studies from Israel, Athens, Rome, Sicily and
North Africa. The results foreground the capacity of material
approaches to cast light on the cultural creation of the sacred
through the integration of rhetorical, material, and iconographic
means. The discussion opens more nuanced pathways to the uses of
text in the study of material evidence, and highlights the
potential for material objects to bring political and ethnic
boundaries into the sacred realm.
In this volume, first published in 2006, Sandra Blakely considers
technological myths and rituals associated with ancient Greek
daimones, who made metal; and African rituals in which iron plays a
central role. Noting the rich semantic web of associations that has
connected metallurgy to magic, birth, kingship, autochthony, and
territorial possession in both Greek and African cultures, Blakely
examines them together in order to cast light on the Greek demons,
which are only fragmentarily preserved and which have often been
equated to general types of smithing gods. Her comparison
demonstrates that these demons are more sophisticated and ritually
useful than has been previously acknowledged. This book provides
new insights into the position of technology in Greek myth.
Providing a new methodology for the study of Greek religion, which
uses comparative cultural material in a thoughtful and careful way,
it helps close the fifty-year gap between the social sciences and
Classical philology in the theoretical understanding and study of
technological systems.
In this volume, first published in 2006, Sandra Blakely considers
technological myths and rituals associated with ancient Greek
daimones, who made metal; and African rituals in which iron plays a
central role. Noting the rich semantic web of associations that has
connected metallurgy to magic, birth, kingship, autochthony, and
territorial possession in both Greek and African cultures, Blakely
examines them together in order to cast light on the Greek demons,
which are only fragmentarily preserved and which have often been
equated to general types of smithing gods. Her comparison
demonstrates that these demons are more sophisticated and ritually
useful than has been previously acknowledged. This book provides
new insights into the position of technology in Greek myth.
Providing a new methodology for the study of Greek religion, which
uses comparative cultural material in a thoughtful and careful way,
it helps close the fifty-year gap between the social sciences and
Classical philology in the theoretical understanding and study of
technological systems.
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