Travel and Religion in Antiquity considers the importance of issues relating to travel for our understanding of religious and cultural life among Jews, Christians, and others in the ancient world, particularly during the Hellenistic and Roman eras. The volume is organized around five overlapping areas where religion and travel intersect: travel related to honouring deities, including travel to festivals, oracles, and healing sanctuaries; travel to communicate the efficacy of a god or the superiority of a way of life, including the diffusion of cults or movements; travel to explore and encounter foreign peoples or cultures, including descriptions of these cultures in ancient ethnographic materials; migration; and travel to engage in an occupation or vocation. With interdisciplinary contributions that cover a range of literary, epigraphic, and archeological materials, the volume sheds light on the importance of movement in connection with religious life among Greeks, Romans, Nabateans, and others, including Judeans and followers of Jesus.

Travel and Religion in Antiquity considers the importance of issues relating to travel for our understanding of religious and cultural life among Jews, Christians, and others in the ancient world, particularly during the Hellenistic and Roman eras. The volume is organized around five overlapping areas where religion and travel intersect: travel related to honouring deities, including travel to festivals, oracles, and healing sanctuaries; travel to communicate the efficacy of a god or the superiority of a way of life, including the diffusion of cults or movements; travel to explore and encounter foreign peoples or cultures, including descriptions of these cultures in ancient ethnographic materials; migration; and travel to engage in an occupation or vocation. With interdisciplinary contributions that cover a range of literary, epigraphic, and archeological materials, the volume sheds light on the importance of movement in connection with religious life among Greeks, Romans, Nabateans, and others, including Judeans and followers of Jesus.

Mobility and travel have always been key characteristics of human societies, having various cultural, social and religious aims and purposes. Travels shaped religions and societies and were a way for people to understand themselves, this world and the transcendent. This book analyses travelling in its social context in ancient and medieval societies. Why did people travel, how did they travel and what kind of communal networks and negotiations were inherent in their travels? Travel was not only the privilege of the wealthy or the male, but people from all social groups, genders and physical abilities travelled. Their reasons to travel varied from profane to sacred, but often these two were intermingled in the reasons for travelling. The chapters cover a long chronology from Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages, offering the reader insights into the developments and continuities of travel and pilgrimage as a phenomenon of vital importance.

Pilgrimage and Economy in the Ancient Mediterranean brings together diverse scholarship to explore the socioeconomic dynamics of ancient Mediterranean pilgrimage from archaic Greece to Late Antiquity, the Greek mainland to Egypt and the Near East.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions is the first comprehensive single-volume reference work offering authoritative coverage of ancient religions in the Mediterranean world. Chronologically, the volume’s scope extends from pre-historical antiquity in the third millennium B.C.E. through the rise of Islam in the seventh century C.E. An interdisciplinary approach draws out the common issues and elements between and among religious traditions in the Mediterranean basin. Key features of the volume include: Detailed maps of the Mediterranean World, ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire, and the Hellenistic World A comprehensive timeline of major events, innovations, and individuals, divided by region to provide both a diachronic and pan-Mediterranean, synchronic view A broad geographical range including western Asia, northern Africa, and southern Europe This encyclopedia will serve as a key point of reference for all students and scholars interested in ancient Mediterranean culture and society.

North American and European scholars of archaeology and theology explore the issue of how primary religious texts of the ancient Mediterranean world and artifactual evidence can be mutually supportive and illuminating. The essays are divided into those on early Christianity, late-antique Judaism, and the Greco-Roman world at large, and include studies on the placing of Jesus, celibacy and social deviancy in the Roman period, and epigraphic evidence for Jewish defectors. Canadian card order number: C00-930959-4. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

This ground-breaking volume examines the presentation and role of children in the ancient world, and specifically in ancient Jewish and Christian texts. With carefully commissioned chapters that follow chronological and canonical progression, a sequential reading of this book enables deeper appreciation of how understandings of children change over time. Divided into four sections, this handbook first offers an overview of key methodological approaches employed in the study of children in the biblical world, and the texts at hand. Three further sections examine crucial texts in which children or discussions of childhood are featured; presented along chronological lines, with sections on the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, the Intertestamental Literature, and the New Testament and Early Christian Apocrypha. Relevant not only to biblical studies but also cross-disciplinary scholars interested in children in antiquity.

This comprehensive classic textbook represents the most recent approaches to the biblical world by surveying Palestine's social, political, economic, religious and ecological changes from Palaeolithic to Roman eras. Designed for beginners with little knowledge of the ancient world, and with copious illustrations and charts, it explains how and why academic study of the past is undertaken, as well as the differences between historical and theological scholarship and the differences between ancient and modern genres of history writing. Classroom tested chapters emphasize the authenticity of the Bible as a product of an ancient culture, and the many problems with the biblical narrative as a historical source. Neither "maximalist" nor "minimalist'" it is sufficiently general to avoid confusion and to allow the assignment of supplementary readings such as biblical narratives and ancient Near Eastern texts. This new edition has been fully revised, incorporating new graphics and English translations of Near Eastern inscriptions. New material on the religiously diverse environment of Ancient Israel taking into account the latest archaeological discussions brings this book right up to date.

Travel and pilgrimage have become central research topics in recent years. Some archaeologists and historians have applied globalization theories to ancient intercultural connections. Classicists have rediscovered travel as a literary topic in Greek and Roman writing. Scholars of early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have been rethinking long-familiar pilgrimage practices in new interdisciplinary contexts. This volume contributes to this flourishing field of study in two ways. First, the focus of its contributions is on experiences of travel. Our main question is: How did travelers in the ancient world experience and make sense of their journeys, real or imaginary, and of the places they visited? Second, by treating Jewish, Christian, and Islamic experiences together, this volume develops a longue durée perspective on the ways in which travel experiences across these three traditions resembled each other. By focusing on "experiences of travel," we hope to foster interaction between the study of ancient travel in the humanities and that of broader human experience in the social sciences.

An accessible and authoritative overview capturing the vitality and diversity of scholarship that exists on the transformative time period known as late antiquity. Provides an essential overview of current scholarship on late antiquity – from between the accession of Diocletian in AD 284 and the end of Roman rule in the Mediterranean Comprises 39 essays from some of the world's foremost scholars of the era Presents this once-neglected period as an age of powerful transformation that shaped the modern world Emphasizes the central importance of religion and its connection with economic, social, and political life Winner of the 2009 Single Volume Reference/Humanities & Social Sciences PROSE award granted by the Association of American Publishers