HKAK03302U KL. ARK Classical Archaeological Topic 2: Beyond “Oriental Cults”: Religious Plurality in the Graeco-Roman World

The Graeco-Roman world was shaped by religious plurality and by constant movement of people, objects, images, and ritual practices. The cults of Isis and Sarapis, Magna Mater, Mithras, and Iuppiter Dolichenus are a good example of this world in motion. Their evidence appears across the Mediterranean: in cities and ports, in civic sanctuaries and association buildings, in military environments, and at times also in more private or semi-private settings. They are documented through a rich body of archaeological, epigraphic, iconographic, and literary evidence. Since the early twentieth century, modern scholarship has often discussed these cults under the label of “Oriental cults”. This category has shaped the way in which their origins, spread, ritual forms, social settings, and religious meanings have been interpreted.

The seminar begins by examining how this category was formed and why it has become problematic. Particular attention will be paid to the legacy of Franz Cumont and to the ways in which the concept of “Oriental religions” shaped the study of ancient religion in the twentieth century. We will ask what scholars meant when they described these cults as “Oriental”, why they were often treated as exceptional or external to Greek and Roman religion, and how this perspective influenced the interpretation of their sources. This discussion leads to the modern critique of religious “Orientalism” and to recent attempts to move beyond models based primarily on origin, influence, and diffusion.

On this basis, students will explore newer approaches to religious mobility and transformation. Rather than treating these cults as closed religious systems that spread from East to West, we will examine them as mobile, locally embedded, and socially organised forms of religious practice. Concepts such as cultural translation, religious flows, network theory, group religion, and ancient lived religion will be introduced through concrete case studies. They will help us to ask how religious traditions moved, how they were supported and adapted by local actors, how sanctuaries and associations became institutionalised, and why the same cult could be perceived differently in different local settings.

A central part of the seminar will be devoted to the material, spatial, and embodied dimensions of cult practice. Inscriptions, images, votive offerings, ritual equipment, architectural settings, and written sources will not be treated as separate categories of evidence, but as different ways of approaching how these cults functioned in practice. We will consider how sanctuaries created specific forms of visibility and access, how images and objects shaped the relationship between worshippers and gods, how ritual spaces guided movement and perception, and how religious experience was produced through the interaction of bodies, things, and built environments.

By the end of the seminar, students will be able to critically assess the category of “Oriental cults” and to develop independent interpretations of ancient religious practice from material, spatial, textual, and visual evidence. They will learn to relate individual case studies to broader questions of religious mobility, local appropriation, institutionalisation, and lived religion in the Graeco-Roman world.