Memory and Urban Religion in the Ancient World brings together scholars and researchers working on memory and religion in ancient urban environments. Chapters explore topics relating to religious traditions and memory, and the multifunctional roles of architectural and geographical sites, mythical figures and events, literary works and artefacts. Pagan religions were often less static and more open to new influences than previously understood. One of the factors that shape religion is how fundamental elements are remembered as valuable and therefore preservable for future generations. Memory, therefore, plays a pivotal role when - as seen in ancient Rome during late antiquity - a shift of religions takes place within communities. The significance of memory in ancient societies and how it was promoted, prompted, contested and even destroyed is discussed in detail. This volume, the first of its kind, not only addresses the main cultures of the ancient world - Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome - but also looks at urban religious culture and funerary belief, and how concepts of ethnic religion were adapted in new religious environments.
Memory and Urban Religion in the Ancient World brings together scholars and researchers working on memory and religion in ancient urban environments. Chapters explore topics relating to religious traditions and memory, and the multifunctional roles of architectural and geographical sites, mythical figures and events, literary works and artefacts. Pagan religions were often less static and more open to new influences than previously understood. One of the factors that shape religion is how fundamental elements are remembered as valuable and therefore preservable for future generations. Memory, therefore, plays a pivotal role when - as seen in ancient Rome during late antiquity - a shift of religions takes place within communities. The significance of memory in ancient societies and how it was promoted, prompted, contested and even destroyed is discussed in detail. This volume, the first of its kind, not only addresses the main cultures of the ancient world - Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome - but also looks at urban religious culture and funerary belief, and how concepts of ethnic religion were adapted in new religious environments.
Preface: Memory, History, Forgetting - Smith
Introduction: Sites of Memory and the Emergence of Urban Religion -
Bommas
1. Marduk's Return: Assyrian Imperial Propaganda, Babylonian
Cultural Memory and the akItu Festival of 668 BC - Nielsen
2. The Cult of the Pharaoh in New Kingdom Egypt: Cultural Memory or
State Ideology? - Heffernan
3. Saints in the Caesareum: Remembering Temple Conversion in Late
Antique Egypt - Westerfeld
4. Sacred Memory in Republican Rome - Miano
5. Keeping the Memory Alive: The Physical Continuity of the Ficus
Ruminalis - Hunt
6. Memory Shift: Reinventing the Mythology, 100 BC - AD 100 -
Dowden
7. Nights of Egeria: Juvenal's De Memoria Deorum - Larmour
8. The Iseum Campense as a Memory Site - Bommas
9. Isis in the Greco-Roman World: Cultural Memory and Imagination -
Harrisson
10. Cultural Memory and Roman Identity in the Hymns of Prudentius -
Kuhlmann
Afterword - Harrisson and Roy
Index
The role of memory in shaping religion in the ancient cities of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome.
Martin Bommas is senior lecturer in Egyptology at the
Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity at the University of
Birmingham, UK. He was a research associate of Professor Jan
Assmann at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, until 2000, and
has published five monographs on ancient Egyptian rituals,
religious texts, and memory.
Juliette Harrisson is an external lecturer at the University
of Birmingham, UK and an associate lecturer with the Open
University, UK. Her chief research interest lies in ancient myth
and religion in the Roman Empire, studied through the theoretical
framework of cultural memory.
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