Crossing Sacred Landscapes

This volume examines the sacred landscapes, cults and mortuary traditions of northern Arabia and the southern Levant from the Neolithic to the Early Islamic period. Drawing on archaeology, history, epigraphy and rock art studies, it explores religious continuity and change across different landscapes, cultures and eras.

Crossing different landscapes and periods has been a major feature of the desert cults and beliefs of the Middle East, from prehistory to modern times. This book aims to study the sacred landscapes of northern Arabia and the southern arid margins of the Levant in ancient times throughout the longue durée, adopting an interdisciplinary approach at the intersection between archaeology, history, epigraphy, rock art research, and digital humanities. Deriving from a seminar held at the University of Oxford in December 2023, the volume presents case-studies with synchronic and diachronic analyses of the cultic and mortuary traditions of modern southern Jordan/Israel and northern Saudi Arabia, from the Neolithic to the Early Islamic period. In particular, it explores the cultural continuity of cultic and ritual manifestations throughout large geographical spaces and cutting across different landscapes and periods. Crossings were synchronic, with religious traditions, oral narratives, cultic material culture, and funerary architecture crossing diverse geographical landscapes and socio-cultural entities of different complexity. Crossings were also diachronic, with certain features of the material culture and architecture crossing through different temporal periods.

List of Figures and Tables

Contributors

Preface

Introduction. Across different times and landscapes: Cults and afterlife beliefs in Northern Arabia and the arid Southern Levant in the longue-durée – Juan Manuel Tebes and Michael C.A. Macdonald

Chapter 1. Borders in the desert: The archaeology and epigraphy of the arid Southern Levant and North-West Arabia and their context, from the nineteenth century to the present

The Archaeology and Iconography of Cult and Death

Chapter 2. The immediacy of scarcity: Towards an understanding of the indigenous geonuminosity of Arabia’s landscapes – Hans Georg K. Gebel

Chapter 3. No rest for the dead: An active afterlife in the Neolithic – Bill Finlayson

Chapter 4. Continuities, convergences, truncations, and other trends in Negev cult over the long term: An archaeological perspective – Steven A. Rosen

Chapter 5. A remote sensing perspective on funerary and cultic monuments in the arid regions of Northern Arabia – Michael Fradley

Chapter 6. A reassessment of the ‘local shrine’ and the Hathor sanctuary, Timna (Site 200), Southern Negev – Gaël Carriou

Chapter 7. The rock art of the Negev, Israel: Discussing private and public space – Davida Eisenberg-Degen and George H. Nash

Chapter 8. Speech of tree: The tradition of sacred trees in the Southern Levant and Northern Arabia as archetypal symbolism – Elizabeth S. Bloem Viljoenii

The Epigraphic and Textual Evidence for Cults and Beliefs

Chapter 9. Scented smoke over Dadan: Revisiting Julius Euting’s Stone No. 36 – Regine Hunziker-Rodewald, Thierry Grégor and Andrei Aioanei

Chapter 10. Up on the mountain, down in the valley: New clues to the spatial and social organization of religion at ancient Dadan, and to the political-economic context of the late Lihyanite period – Fokelien Kootstra-Ford, Josselin Pinot and Jérôme Rohmer

Chapter 11. Le dieu Kahl à Qaryat al-Faʾw et à Ḥimà: nordarabique ou sudarabique? – Christian Julien Robin and Mashʿal ʿAbd Allāh Āl Qurād. With a contribution of Jérôme Norris

Chapter 12. Nabataean royal portraits in the area of the Qaṣr al-Bint temple at Petra – Laïla Nehmé and François Renel

Chapter 13. Ethical waṣiyyas on the Eve of Islam – Ilkka Lindstedt

Chapter 14. Sacred locales in the Qur’an – Nicolai Sinai

Juan Manuel Tebes is Professor at the Catholic University of Argentina, the current Director of its Center of Studies of Ancient Near Eastern History, and Researcher at the National Research Council of Argentina. He is co-editor of the Ancient Near East Monographs series (SBL Press) and former Editor-in-Chief of the scholarly journal Antiguo Oriente. Tebes has participated in archaeological expeditions in Jordan, Israel, and Turkey, and has also been research fellow at many institutions.

Michael C.A. Macdonald is a Fellow of the British Academy, holds a D.Litt from the University of Chicago, and is an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. For the last 50 years he has studied the languages, scripts, rock-art and cultures of ancient Arabia and its neighbours, ancient nomads, and ancient literacy. He has led numerous expeditions to record inscriptions in the deserts of Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and led the creation of the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA).

• Edited by Juan Manuel Tebes
• Edited by Michael C.A. Macdonald