Events
Aprile 19-20 / 2023 / 8:00 PM
Conference "Godscapes: Modeling Second millennium BCE Polytheism in the Eastern Mediterranean"
The two-days meeting was structured in four sessions dedicated to the main types of data investigated within the Godscapes project, each of which saw, alongside with the interventions of the members of the project itself, the participation as respondent of international experts. In the session devoted to architecture, Lorenzo Nigro (Sapienza University of Rome) confronted Aaron Burke (University of California, Los Angeles) on the Middle Bronze Age monumental temples from Palestine; in a session about iconography, Gianluca Miniaci (University of Pisa) and Christoph Uehlinger (University of Zurich) debated over the transmission of religious languages between Egypt and the Middle Bronze Age Levant through the case study of the Byblos sacred deposits; in the session dedicated to funerary data, Marta D’Andrea (Sapienza University of Rome) and Karel Van Der Toorn (University of Amsterdam) discussed over the fascinating topic of funerary rituals from the southern Levant in the Middle Bronze Age; in the session about textual sources, Lorenzo Verderame (Sapienza University of Rome) and Gabriele Conte (University of Pisa) confronted Ludwig Morenz (University of Bonn) about religious devotion and rituals as expressed in the textual sources from the second millennium Sinai and Syria.
Godscapes, the first meeting: Discussing about terminologies and conceptual aims of the research project.
The event was a significant milestone within the project timeline: not only it was the occasion to take stock of the project’s early progresses a year after its beginnings, such as the functionalities, limits and potential of the new Godscapes platform for collecting data about material religion. Most importantly, it was intended to stimulate a fruitful discussion and foster the advancement of current perspectives on the main focuses of the project.
The conference was inaugurated by the institutional greetings of the Rector of the University of Catania Francesco Priolo, the Director of the Department of Humanities Maria Caterina Paino, the Director of the School of Specialization in Archaeology Daniele Malfitana, and the Dean of Archaeologists Pietro Militello. The encouraging words of Paolo Matthiae (Accademia dei Lincei) and Frances Pinnock (Sapienza University of Rome) opened the conference work, followed by the keynote lecture of Prof. Philipp Stockhammer (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) on setting the agenda on how religion was entangled in with cultural and ethnic diversities in the eastern Mediterranean during the Second Millennium BCE, and by a presentation of the Godscapes project by the members of the Coordinating unit of the University of Catania (i.e., Nicola Laneri, Marianna Nicolosi Asmundo, Daniele Santamaria and Chiara Pappalardo).
The conference was ended with the stimulating words of Corinne Bonnet (University of Toulouse) that emphasized the importance of an enduring collaboration between archaeologists and historians of religions in order to demonstrate, according to the ambitious goal of the Godscapes project, how complex religious interactions can result in syncretic outcomes.
In conclusion, we hope that the stimulating information gathered during this intense two-days meeting will allow the members of the project to write up a conceptual article on the Godscapes project as suggested during the discussion that ended the last day of the meeting.
May 23 / 2023 / 9:00 PM
Workshop "New methods and approaches for defining religion in the ancient Near East" 13th ICAANE
The International Congresses on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East are organized every two years by the scientific community of scholars working on and in the Near East and studying therein cognitive, material and environmental evidence from the most remote phases until the Islamic period within a multidisciplinary approach.