University of Heidelberg

Researcher: Dr. Bjørn Paarmann

 

Scholarly Goals

This research project proposes to investigate religious exchange between Greece and the Near East. The still current and stereotypical image of Greek hostility toward the Orient has been undermined by recognition of the fact that so-called oriental cults were in fact broadly received by Greeks of the Hellenistic period. The animosity toward oriental “barbarians” seen in the literary sources does not appear to reflect everyday life, at least when it comes to religion: the Greeks happily imported foreign gods from the lands of their nominal enemies.
In the course of this research project, we will scrutinize the sources – literary, epigraphic, and iconographic – to determine whether the importation of oriental cults constitutes an exception to the hostility toward the East posited by the literary sources, or whether such hostility was restricted to a certain social level of Athenian society.
 

Programme

Of particular interest is the idea that the campaigns of Alexander the Great marked the beginning of a new understanding of the East. This new understanding was partially influenced by the introduction of religious concepts and semantics visible in Asiatic-Egyptian cults. The establishment of these cults in Greece, however, has long been regarded as a response to the ‘crisis’ of the allegedly unemotional worship of the traditional gods of the Greek cities. If one dismisses an emotional deficit in the traditional Greek cults, a new answer must be found to the question of what function religious practices adopted from the East performed. With this in mind, we must pay special attention the process of social integration in broader context of Hellenistic culture. What contribution did oriental cults make to the construction of a new social order in Greece? Our project will describe the networks in which new cults, before and after Alexander, shaped and made viable new social asymmetries, identities, and roles in the Greek world. The study will be divided into three sections. The first will consist of a catalogue of the oriental cults in Greece, which will record their dissemination and the frequency of their occurrence in a chronologically differentiated manner. This section will next address the dynamics of the development of intercultural religious exchange, with a local or regional focus, as well as the reasons behind it and its general coherence.The second section of the project is to describe the means with which the flow of religious concepts from the East were structured. This will be carried out through case studies centered on individual cities (such as Rhodes, Delos, Athens, Corinth, Orchomenos) where oriental deities were particularly prominent. We will ask how local cultures negotiated this flow of ideas: which agent(s) (the king, his “friends,” local elites, foreign religious specialists?) instigated and guided the reception of oriental cult (e.g. by means of monuments such as inscriptions, temples, reliefs, and cultic inventory such as votive offerings, costumes, sacrificial instruments). In this context, it will be necessary to determine which persons and groups took part in eastern cults, as well as what type of networks (family, ethnic, local, regional, or supraregional) and what type of roles or social asymmetries were created through participation in such cults. We will regard the oriental cults as one offering available in a religious marketplace, in which new and traditional cults compete. The dynamics of the additional possibilities of religious worship are visible, for example, in the link made between the Babylonian goddess Atargatis and the Greek goddess Aphrodite on the island of Delos: through the connection of an ethnic and a local network, the goddess became accessible to a larger group. It will also be worth considering whether the ensuing semantic translations and transformations set in motion parallel developments in other cults (whether in the same place or elsewhere).The third section of the study will be dedicated to analysis of the effects of semantic transformation on the countries of origin. In other words, precisely the reverse of phenomenon under scrutiny in Greece. Whether, how, and when the religious significance acquired in their Greek context changed the oriental cults in their countries of origin will be a central question of the project.