Memory and Urban Religion in the Ancient World: (Cultural Memory and History in Antiquity)

Memory and Urban Religion in the Ancient World brings together scholars and researchers working on memory and religion in ancient urban environments. Chapters explore topics relating to religious traditions and memory, and the multifunctional roles of architectural and geographical sites, mythical figures and events, literary works and artefacts. Pagan religions were often less static and more open to new influences than previously understood. One of the factors that shape religion is how fundamental elements are remembered as valuable and therefore preservable for future generations. Memory, therefore, plays a pivotal role when - as seen in ancient Rome during late antiquity - a shift of religions takes place within communities. The significance of memory in ancient societies and how it was promoted, prompted, contested and even destroyed is discussed in detail. This volume, the first of its kind, not only addresses the main cultures of the ancient world - Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome - but also look at urban religious culture and funerary belief, and how concepts of ethnic religion were adapted in new religious environments.

Table of Contents:
Preface: Memory, History, Forgetting - Smith Introduction: Sites of Memory and the Emergence of Urban Religion - Bommas 1. Marduk's Return: Assyrian Imperial Propaganda, Babylonian Cultural Memory and the akItu Festival of 668 BC - Nielsen 2. The Cult of the Pharaoh in New Kingdom Egypt: Cultural Memory or State Ideology? - Heffernan 3. Saints in the Caesareum: Remembering Temple Conversion in Late Antique Egypt - Westerfeld 4. Sacred Memory in Republican Rome - Miano 5. Keeping the Memory Alive: The Physical Continuity of the Ficus Ruminalis - Hunt 6. Memory Shift: Reinventing the Mythology, 100 BC - AD 100 - Dowden 7. Nights of Egeria: Juvenal's De Memoria Deorum - Larmour 8. The Iseum Campense as a Memory Site - Bommas 9. Isis in the Greco-Roman World: Cultural Memory and Imagination - Harrisson 10. Cultural Memory and Roman Identity in the Hymns of Prudentius - Kuhlmann Afterword - Harrisson and Roy Index

About the Author :
Martin Bommas is senior lecturer in Egyptology at the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity at the University of Birmingham, UK. He was a research associate of Professor Jan Assmann at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, until 2000, and has published five monographs on ancient Egyptian rituals, religious texts, and memory. Juliette Harrisson is an external lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK and an associate lecturer with the Open University, UK. Her chief research interest lies in ancient myth and religion in the Roman Empire, studied through the theoretical framework of cultural memory.