Nicole Belayche

The coming of Alexander the Great ushered many changes in the southern Levant, and the subsequent period saw many more upheavals, including the Roman conquest, the Jewish Revolts, and the gradual Christianization of the Holy Land. Throughout this period, many local cults and cultic places – "pagan", Jewish and Christian – dotted the local landscape. These cults underwent processes of profound change, but also maintained much of their older identities, while at the same time constantly interacting with each other. Our group seeks to examine these processes both synchronically and diachronically, along three different axes – cultic places, personnel, and objects. Though different, these axes share a common denominator, namely, the people whose beliefs and practices shaped religious behaviour in the Greco-Roman southern Levant. Our aim is to investigate whether cultic practices formed a coherent cultural system, by taking into account the co-existence and competition of different religious systems, and analyzing them in terms of continuity, discontinuity, and change over a long period of time, roughly from Alexander the Great to the conversion of Constantine (ca. 300 BCE – 300 CE). Our approach is deliberately eclectic and interdisciplinary, combining archaeological, philological, historical and art-historical analyses of the different bodies of evidence, in order to overcome the narrow tunnel vision that often is characteristic of each of these fields. Our modus operandi will consist of weekly seminars, combined with numerous visits to archaeological excavations, sites and museums, in order to examine the remains of ancient religious shrines and cultic practices.