Gods, Objects, and Ritual Practice in Ancient Mediterranean Religion

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.