In the absence of substantial historical and literary records, an overview of Judaism in the western territories of the Roman empire from the first to the fifth century necessarily relies on epigraphic and archaeological documentation. The limits imposed by the fragmentary state of the material evidence, however, and the random circumstances of its preservation, frustrate any attempt – or temptation – to paint a detailed picture of a reality that must have been internally varied and not always in step with the evolution of rabbinic Judaism in Palestine and Mesopotamia.

From the formative period of the Jewish communities in the West down to the third and fourth centuries, when the Jewish population of Italy and the Iberian Peninsula became a significant component of local society, the western branch of ancient Judaism developed far away from its homeland. Furthermore, Jewish communities in the West were under continuous pressure from a politically and culturally hegemonic environment that rejected, at least in principle, any innovation regarded as barbaric or, in any case, alien. Not surprisingly, Judaism in the West maintained a degree of independence from Palestinian Judaism, with which it began to conform – although the trend was not uniform – only from the fifth century onward and mainly in reaction to the growing success of Christianity.

Introduction

No one knows exactly how or when Christianity arrived in Africa, and its demise under the Arabs is equally difficult to comprehend. While Christianity in other regions (for example, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Syria) survived under Muslim rule, African Christianity virtually disappeared within a century of the Arab conquest. A history of successive conquests or domination by authorities who demanded religious conformity from the resident population may partly explain the region’s failure to establish a surviving local cult (or “national church”). At first, those authorities were Roman traditionalists who prosecuted Christians as such. Later, however, they were Christians themselves whose theology, ecclesiology, or rituals differed from established local practice. Rather than tolerantly accepting local difference in practice or dogma and being content merely to govern, these rulers sought theological and disciplinary acquiescence among the Christian communities they governed (Donatists, Nicenes, Arians, and Western Chalcedonians in turn). They enforced their demands by legal restrictions, confiscation of buildings and capital, and even persecution of nonconformists.

In each instance, existing Christian communities resisted such impositions, and evolving African churches were repeatedly challenged and transformed in ways that may have undermined the survival of an enduring established community – especially one associated with a dominant ethnic group. Moreover, from its beginnings, resistance to an often hostile secular authority was a hallmark of African Christianity. Thus, consecutive cycles of oppression, in most instances a case of one group of Christians attempting to impose its authority over another, ultimately resulted in the loss of a unified religious identity, either theological or cultural. Eventually, even the faith of the invading Arab Muslims may have seemed no more religiously foreign to indigenous African Christians than those of the previous ruling power – the Byzantine emperor and his delegates.

The nineteen chapters in this volume treat the religions of the ancient Mediterranean world from Iran and the Roman Near East to Gaul and the Iberian Peninsula. The bibliography accompanying each essay consists mainly of works cited. Under the heading “Suggestions for Further Reading,” readers will find supplemental source material.

The temporal limits of each chapter vary according to region, available evidence, and subject matter. The profound transformation of the cultural and political landscape brought about by Alexander the Great and his Macedonian successors forms the natural backdrop for some of the chapters on the religions of Egypt, the Levant, Greece, and Asia Minor. For Iran and the western Mediterranean, other chronological limits are more suitable. The chapter on Iranian religion begins with the Parthian kingdom and extends to the fall of the Sasanian empire in 654. While archaeological evidence and the witness of Roman antiquarians and historians offer a glimpse, however faint, into an earlier age, the basic structures and practices of Roman and Italian religion become visible only in the last century of the Roman Republic. Similarly, the cult practices in pre-Punic and pre-Roman North Africa can only be known through inference from a scattering of later sources. The advent of Rome represents an obvious point of departure for the chapters dealing with the gods and cults of Gaul and Spain. Absent the epigraphic and material remains of Roman civilization in these regions, our knowledge of their religious traditions would be extremely limited.

The period between 70 CE and the Muslim conquests of the seventh century in the Near East saw the formulation of lasting features of Jewish ritual and practice. During this time, the authoritative legal texts, scriptural exegeses (midrash) and translations (targum), liturgical structures, and the basic liturgical calendar were all worked out in ways that would be adopted and perpetuated for centuries afterward. We know of these developments almost exclusively through the literary legacy of the rabbinic movement. For this reason, as well as for their traditional authority, rabbinic texts and traditions have been at the center of historiography on late antique Judaism.

To the surprise of nonspecialists (and some specialists), for much of the period under discussion, rabbis played rather marginal and geographically circumscribed roles. But the story of the rabbinic movement is part of larger developments in the complex and sometimes elusive history of late antique Judaism. Our goal in this chapter is to establish three main points about late antique Judaism: (1) In the first century, Jews already had a long history of porous boundaries within the non-Jewish settings they inhabited. If, by the end of our period, Jewish communities had higher and more articulated boundaries, the process requires explanation in terms of both the specific history of Jews in the Near East and the broad transformation of late antique religion. (2) We should resist the impulse to subordinate the fundamental diversity of Judaism in Late Antiquity to a “common Judaism.” Common practices, institutions, or symbols that do emerge in our evidence thus require explanation in terms of the cultural work of Jews and others in creating commonality. Finally, (3) synagogues and emergent rabbinism, among the two best-documented developments in late antique Judaism in the Near East, underscore an increasing tendency toward high cultural boundaries between Jews and non-Jews from within Jewish communities. However, both can only be fully understood within the broader landscape of late antique society and religion.

There were, of course, no Christians in Italy during the principate of Augustus (27 BCE to CE 14), when the public religion of the Romans was being recast and revitalized in tandem with the political and social institutions of the emerging imperial system. Some four and a half centuries later, however, when a bishop of Rome was said to have turned back an invading Hunnic warlord and successfully negotiated with a Vandal king before the gates of his defenseless city, Christianity was the officially sanctioned religion of Rome and Italy. Between these two poles lies, it would seem, a remarkable success story. But the rise of Christianity is a tale marked by deep continuities as well as spectacular contrasts. Pope Leo I’s (440–61) alleged victory over Attila and mollification of Gaiseric share certain fundamental assumptions with Augustus’s enlistment of the traditional Roman gods in the project of the reconstituted empire. Like many early imperial Romans, many late ancient Romans, too, viewed proper cultivation of the divine as prerequisite to public, as well as personal, welfare. To be sure, by the mid-fifth century the divine power in question was significantly different: Augustus’s Rome of Jupiter and Mars and Apollo had become the Rome of Christ, the apostles, and the martyrs, while churches and the memorials of saints now defined a cityscape once commanded by temples and imperial fora. Yet, as Augustus had displayed statues of the heroes of the legendary and recent past in his new Forum, Leo ordered that Rome’s churches be decorated with biblical cycles and declared that Peter and Paul had ousted Romulus and Remus as the city’s guardians. And although by Leo’s day the populace of Rome, like that of most Italian cities, largely regulated its ceremonial life by an annual cycle of festivals keyed to the life of Christ and the deaths of the saints, not by holidays linked to the history and legends of a fading age, those same Christian feast days frequently coincided with or overwrote earlier celebrations.

Greek cult practice comprised a broad spectrum of ritual activities that acknowledged and communicated with the multiplicity of deities in the Greek pantheon. Rather than presupposing a body of revealed truth, Greek cult reflected the cumulative expression of the Greeks’ conceptions about the general order of existence and their need to interact with the divine beings that created and controlled that order. Because the Greeks had no authoritative text(s) or central organization that served to codify and interpret their religious system, the best way to approach the topic of Greek religion is to examine the actual rituals and cult observances of the Greeks. Essential rituals included the time-honored practices of prayer and votive offerings to a deity, augmented by animal sacrifice and shared meal on a group level. Cult activities were woven into the lives of virtually all Greeks living in Greece and Asia Minor, and the shared activities of cult practice articulated social networks that strengthened bonds of affiliation with family, community, and state. Such activities could be more elaborate for a larger and wealthier unit, such as a civic festival, while an individual or small group with fewer resources celebrated simpler rites. In the absence of any sacred writings to explain Greek cult practices to us, our principal evidence lies in the physical remains of Greek religion – the sanctuaries, temples, cult images, and votive offerings – and the written texts that discuss these, both literary and epigraphical. Taken together, this material gives us a rich picture of a multifaceted religious experience that was an important component of individual lives.

Along with its great antiquity, ancient Egyptian religion presents unique obstacles to interpretation. The absence of a coherent written doctrine has required scholars to rely on a variety of disparate sources, including funerary spells, literary works, instructional treatises, biographical inscriptions, artistic representations, and archaeological evidence to attempt to understand the ancient Egyptians’ relationship to the divine. Fortunately, Egypt’s climate and the Egyptians’ own practices have left an unusually rich corpus of textual and archaeological evidence.

The study of Egyptian religion is also complicated by the seemingly alien nature of Egyptian deities and beliefs when viewed from the perspective of cultures accustomed to an anthropomorphic deity or deities. From Greco-Roman times, representations of gods and goddesses with combined human and animal characteristics aroused confusion and suspicion. The esoteric nature of surviving funerary texts, with their enigmatic denizens of the afterlife, only increased the sense of alienation. In addition, the Egyptians’ understanding of their pantheon was subject to review and alteration over its three-thousand-year history. Towns and districts each worshipped their own deities and even held different beliefs regarding creation and the nature of the cosmos. In Lower Egypt the principal creator-god was Atum, the patron god of Heliopolis. At Memphis, the Memphite god Ptah was seen as a manifestation of Atum. Meanwhile in southernmost Egypt, Khnum, a god associated with the source of the Nile, was the primary creator. The Egyptians apparently saw no contradiction in the presence of multiple gods of creation. Deities therefore shared overlapping functions and characteristics, and two or more could share attributes. For example, Amen-Ra, the supreme state god of Egypt during the New Kingdom, arose from the combination of the traditional solar god Ra with the local god of Thebes, Amen, after Thebes became Egypt’s capital.

Mycenaean religion means the religion of mainland Greece in the Late Helladic (LH) period, when we know from the evidence of Linear B that the language of administration was Greek. The principal centers in this period are Mycenae and Pylos in the Peloponnese, Thebes in Boeotia, and Knossos in Crete, which Greeks must have taken over sometime around 1400 bce. Our picture of Greek civilization in this period is still incomplete; above all, we do not know whether there was a single center of power, or if so, where it was (Mycenae and Thebes are the likely contenders). Hittite records from the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries refer to Ahhiyawa, which is now generally identified with Mycenaean Greece.

Research on Mycenaean religion can be divided into two phases, before and after the decipherment of Linear B in 1952. The most comprehensive survey of the archaeological and iconographical sources was by Martin Nilsson, who argued for a unified Mycenaean/Minoan religion, which was a distant ancestor of the Greek religion of the alphabetic period. The decipherment of Linear B as Greek enabled scholars to explore in a more focused way the relationship of Mycenaean religion to the religion of the Minoans (whose language was not Greek; see discussion of Mycenaean religion and Minoan religion) and to Greek religion of the alphabetic period (see discussion of Mycenae and Greek religion of the alphabetic period). Archaeological excavations in the last fifty years have also been important, for example, at the Cult-Center at Mycenae (see discussion of cult places) and at Phylakopi on the Aegean island of Melos, and new archaeological discoveries continue to be made, as at Kalapodi in Phokis, where a major temple of the classical period seems to have been built on the foundations of a Mycenaean structure. Problems of interpretation remain, however, as can be seen from the recent controversy surrounding newly published Mycenaean tablets from Thebes; the editors claimed these showed evidence for religious festivals, but those claims were later disputed.

Framework

The evidence for the study of Etruscan religion is fragmentary, much more than it is for Greek or Roman religion. Very little survives of original Etruscan writings on this subject. The most authoritative primary evidence comes from archaeological excavations in Etruscan sacred places, representations in art, and a few surviving texts in the Etruscan language ranging from circa fifty to thirteen hundred words, as well as some eleven thousand short inscriptions. After that come the numerous references in Greek and Latin authors, always to be read with appropriate caution as to time and place, and a few documents purporting to be translated from Etruscan into Latin or Greek. All of these sources must then be interpreted to seek a coherent picture.

Given these severe restrictions, it is still possible to use these sources to argue that the religion of the Etruscans should be studied as a system that had a profound connection with what they regarded as their sacred history. Key pieces of evidence indicate that both spoken and written words were controlling factors in formulating communication with the gods, and the result was that the Etruscans had a collection of books with an authority for them comparable to that of the Bible or the Q’uran, encompassing the origins of their religious practices, the pronouncements of their prophets, and a particular view of history as a record of the destiny of individuals, cities, and the Etruscan people as a whole.

Defining Ancient Religion

Any effort to define religion in the ancient Mediterranean world is constrained from the very outset by the absence of a single-word equivalent in the ancient languages. The English word “religion” does not convey the same meaning as the Latin word from which it is derived. Religio is “a supernatural feeling of constraint, usually having the force of a prohibition or impediment” or “a positive obligation or rule.” This latter sense is reflected in the importance attached to required ritual among the Romans, who generally associated it with active worship according to the rules. Christian authors were ambivalent about the suitability of the word to their own beliefs and practices. In the third century, the Christian apologist Lactantius continued to use the word religio to describe the tie between god and man. But Augustine later found the word problematic because it could also refer to an obligation owed to another human or to a god or gods. Hence, Augustine wrote, using the term religio “does not secure against ambiguity when used in discussing the worship paid to God”; and so it was possible to employ this term only by abolishing one meaning of the word, namely, the observance of duties in human relationships.

Introduction

Over the course of three centuries, two successive conquests profoundly altered Egyptian society. The introduction of a new ethnic group into the country resulting from the Macedonian conquest in 332 seems not to have brought about major changes. Greco-Macedonians and Egyptians coexisted without great conflict. And Egypt in the hands of the Ptolemies remained, at least up until the second century BCE, an independent and prosperous kingdom. But in integrating Egypt into a vast empire of which it was only one province among many, the Roman conquest of 30 BCE far more profoundly transformed its institutions, administrative and economic organization, and Egyptian society as a whole. (See Map 4.) Henceforth, the practice of the traditional religion of Egypt occurred within the framework of a nation subject to “foreign occupiers,” but under very different circumstances.

The religious policy of the rulers

The new regimes did not demonstrate any hostility to the native Egyptian religion. What interested the conquering powers was the domination and exploitation of the territory, not the diffusion of their own religious cults in the vanquished nation. Because they resided in Egypt, the Lagids found it necessary to heed the reactions of a people obviously committed to its traditional forms of worship. This was far less the case for the emperors; barring rare exceptions, they did not set foot in a country that for them was basically, in the words of Tiberius, “sheep for shearing” (see Cassius Dio 57.10).

Introduction: Territorial and Religious Diversity

At the outset, we must clarify our terminology and the geographic area under consideration. Even if the Romans speak readily of “Gaul” and the “Gauls” to describe the territories extending from the Pyrenees to the Rhine, this generic terminology, as recent studies of the Iron Age have demonstrated, masks great local and regional diversity, the evolution of which was shaped in various ways by the Celtic migrations. In effect, the “Gauls” did not exist apart from the reductionist mentality of the conquering Romans. The Romans could not entirely overlook the diversity, however. In the interior of “long-haired Gaul” (Gallia Comata), Caesar clearly differentiates the Belgae from the Celts and the Aquitani: “All these people,” he states, “differ from one another in speech, customs, and laws.”

Beginning with the reign of Augustus Caesar, the Tres Provinciae Galliae (as the delegates of the cities assembled at the altar of the Lyon Confluence signed their decree) ultimately became the official designation of the three new provinces of Aquitania, Lugdunensis (Lyonnaise), and Belgica. Gallia Transalpina, which was conquered in the second century BCE and which merged the regions of the Midi, received the name Gallia Narbonensis (Narbonnaise). A land of colonies and Latin civitates, the Midi, stretching from Narbonne to the Alps, was integrated into the empire at an earlier date. Geographically close to Italy, the Midi did not share the same history as the interior of Gaul conquered by Caesar between 58 and 51 BCE. (See Map 9.)

Dramatic regional differences within the Iberian Peninsula were always characteristic of the religious history of ancient Spain. Although long predating the Roman conquest, these differences are accessible to the modern scholar only as a result of the Roman conquest. Roman conquest brought with it religious practices, chief among them the habit of inscription, which have left traces in the material record. The religious diversity of Iberia followed directly from the enormous cultural differences between the coasts and the interior, the river valleys, the mountain chains, and the vast plateaus of the central peninsula. This cultural diversity was never wholly erased, not even with the spread of Christianity in the fourth and later centuries.

Nonetheless, the arrival of Roman armies in the peninsula, and thereafter the slow and bloody process by which Spain was made part of the empire, caused very significant changes to the peninsula’s religious life. For many years, these changes were intermittent and highly regional, but three periods of accelerated change affected the whole peninsula. The first of these took place during and immediately after the long reign of Augustus (r.27 BCE–14 CE), who had taken a personal interest in the final conquest of the peninsula and its incorporation into the empire. The Augustan reorganization of Spain placed every corner of the peninsula within a framework of Roman government in which Roman religious practices could spread rapidly. The second period of intense religious change began under the Flavian emperors, when Vespasian (r.69–79) extended the Latin right, a subordinate form of Roman citizenship, to every municipality in Spain that had previously lacked status under Roman law. This had the effect of giving every city in Spain a stake in the Roman system; as a result, both the cult of the Roman emperors and other Roman modes of public religious practice became universalized. The final period of accelerated change came with the imperial conversion to Christianity, as the new religion of the Roman state transformed the religious life of the Spanish provinces just as it did elsewhere. A diachronic perspective on the religious diversity of ancient Spain will perhaps be more useful than a synchronic catalogue of the religions, cults, and divinities of the peninsula, particularly given the necessary superficiality of such surveys. In the first instance, however, it will be worth sketching the broad differences among the various regions of the peninsula.

Religion is a constructed reality. As C. Geertz has observed, it is “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” One of the ways that religion’s symbolic system is constituted is through the operation of conceptual analogy or metaphor (for our purposes the terms are interchangeable). This is where what is unknown, mysterious, hoped for, or threatening is described in terms of the known. The use of analogy for the production of knowledge is basic to human conceptualization generally and part of the language instinct. Even modern science employs analogy to explain new discoveries on the basis of the known. In religion, where conceptual creativity is presumably more prevalent, metaphorical conceptualization is fundamental. It not only concretizes elements of religious belief and practice, but also provides the psychological motivation, energy, and rationale for continued belief. Therefore religious beliefs and customs informed by analogy are not merely matters of tradition, but have a life and logic for their current practitioners. It is through the theoretical framework of the analogical construction of religious ideas that we will here explore the history of the religious traditions of ancient Syria and Canaan of approximately the first three millennia bce. This will help in the observation of a creative continuity and development over time.

Historical Overview

Evidence does not allow the writing of a detailed and continuous history of the religions of ancient Syria and Canaan across the first three millennia bce. The textual record, the best evidence for reconstructing the history of religion, is extremely meager and spotty. Relevant material finds, while evocative, are even less consistently evidenced and hard to interpret. The uneven historical record leads most scholars to base their studies and descriptions on the texts from Ugarit (see below), the most extensively attested corpus. The body of this chapter will follow this custom and will bring in textual and material perspectives from the other traditions when applicable. An outline of the documentary evidence here will provide a chronological backdrop for the discussion that follows.

Asia Minor is one of the few areas of the Mediterranean where the continuous development of Christianity can be traced from the first century CE. Apart from Rome, other regions are by comparison devoid of specific literary references to the physical layout of Christian communities, the trades they practiced, their position in local social strata, and their interactions with non-Christians, excluding of course those with imperial and provincial authorities in times of sporadic persecution.

For a long time, the ecclesiastical histories of Eusebius and his successors provided the basic evidence for Asia Minor. Starting with the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, there began systematic exploration of the region for early Christian remains. Among the researchers to visit these sites were J. G. C. Anderson, William Mitchell Ramsay, and Ramsay’s students (among them W. H. Buckler and W. M. Calder). The latter took advantage of the construction of the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway to inspect parts of western and central Asia Minor that western scholars had seldom before seen. Some of this research was embodied in Ramsay’s monumental The Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia. Their work, and that of teams of German scholars, resulted in the publication of the ten-volume Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua, which contains editions of inscriptions and discussion of literary conventions. A comprehensive edition of the early Christian inscriptions of Asia Minor remains, however, a desideratum; many important editions and commentaries still lie buried in volumes of collected articles and back issues of journals. Synthetic treatments of the subject have often been disappointing in their results and at times controversial. An example of this can be seen in unsuccessful attempts to find Montanist nuances in the “Christians for Christians” inscriptions and other texts.

What do we mean by “Greek religion”? First and foremost, the limits of time need some definition. It is traditional in accounts of the ancient Greek world to begin as a sort of preface with a brief treatment of the Bronze Age Aegean (“Minoan-Mycenaean religion”), to proceed to a somewhat agnostic version of the relationship between Homer and the “Dark Ages,” and to take “archaic and classical” and “Hellenistic” as significant dividers in what follows. This may not be the only set of categories we can apply to a diachronic treatment of the subject, but it has two advantages: At least at the upper end, it fits the nature of the evidence as it shifts in the different periods, and it corresponds roughly to far-reaching changes in social and political organization, with which religious expression is intimately connected. Thus it is possible to view the religion of the archaic and classical period as mediated to us to a great extent through contemporary literature and epigraphy, unlike that of earlier periods, and, as we shall see, we can also characterize it as “polis-religion,” corresponding as it does (and not merely chronologically) to the heyday of the polis between the eighth or seventh century and the world of Alexander and his successors. Other ways of dividing up the extent of pre-Christian Greek religion may reveal other characteristics, and it is undeniable that much in Hellenistic religion is continuous or even identical with earlier periods, but it is certainly convenient and frequently helpful to take the archaic and classical period as a unit.