Mapping Ancient Polytheisms Cult Epithets as an Interface between Religious Systems and Human Agency

Project Information

MAP

Grant agreement ID: 741182

DOI

10.3030/741182

Project closed

EC signature date 19 April 2017

Start date 1 October 2017

End date 30 June 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 432 062,00

EU contribution

€ 2 432 062,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITE TOULOUSE II-JEAN JAURES
France

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - MAP (Mapping Ancient PolytheismsCult Epithets as an Interface between Religious Systems and Human Agency)

Reporting period: 2022-04-01 to 2023-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The ERC Advanced Grant "Mapping Ancient Polytheisms. Cult Epithets as an Interface between Religious Systems and Human Agency" (MAP) aimed to understand the dynamics of ancient religions through the lens of divine names. Individuals, families, associations, entire cities named the deities in many different ways that reflect the conceptions they had of them and their expectations. By using variable appellatives, according to time and space, to circumstances and traditions, people shaped complex, fluid and interrelated divine powers. The MAP project has renewed our understanding of the gods as persons or personifications and has tackled with different approaches the structural and dynamic complexity of ancient religious systems. Through an exhaustive mapping of divine names and innovative methods, MAP discoverd and analysed networks of multifaceted divine powers within their historical and social environments. The project also shed light on the pragmatic orientation of cultic practices, in which onomastic elements played a strategic role to establish a communication with one or several divine interlocutors. MAP is focused on Greek and West Semitic inscriptions containing divine names on a long-term scale (1000 BCE – 400 CE) and in a truly Mediterranean dimension. Through a comparative approach, it examines how polytheisms and monotheism (Israel) develop similar and different naming strategies. Great attention is paid to time and space variations, but also to the key-notion of "agency", which implies to take into account how agents behave in ritual situations, according to their status, origin, gender, activity... In the frame of the project a wide range of scientific and cultural activities were organised, such as seminars, workshops, conferences, publications, trainings for junior researchers, communications to a larger audience…, in Toulouse and in many different locations as well.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The MAP project has developed a wide range of connected activities. The core of the project, which involved the whole team, is the MAP database, in full open access, which contains more than 22,000 divine onomastic sequences in Greek and Semitic, originating from 18,000 inscriptions. The database is thus the the first collective output of the project. More than 600 scholars, from all over the world, use it regularly. In order to conceive this fundamental tool, the MAP team deeply revisited the available conceptual framework and made new proposals, that are now widely adopted in the scientific community, like the concept of "onomastic attribute" and "onomastic sequence". In other words, the conception and the implementation of the database was a complex challenge that has fostered advances in different fields: conceptual, methodological, lingustic. Productive interdisciplinary collaborations with computer scientists, specialists of network analysis and linguists contributed to find innovative solutions. The database is provided with five search interfaces and a webmapping for the production of specific maps on the diffusion of specific divine names and cults. This great amount of evidence and information, collectef and analysed for the first time, provides a sophisticated picture of the "religion in the making". Many events and publications have been promoted to share these important results and create a network of young and experienced scholars interested in the history of religions. Our objectives was also to encourage the dialog between specialists from different fields: classics and near eastern studies, polytheisms and monotheisms, religious studies and theology, epigraphists and archaeologists. An annual Seminar, entitled “Noms de dieux !”, was organized each year of the project (from year 2) and gave birth to different publications, especially a series devoted to MAP ("Divine Names on the Spot", 2 volumes published, 2 in preparation ; the podcasts of the communications are also available in the MAP website). Two important Conferences took place in Toulouse: the "Naming and Mapping" Conference in 2021 (published in 2022) and the annual Conference of the European association of Biblical Studies in 2022 (450 participants). A final collective volume "What's in a Divine Name" is now in the press and will be published in December 2023. We paid particularly attention to the training of young scholars: a Summer School was organozed in Jerusalem in 2019 and a Spring School in Argos in 2022. In both cases, we offered seminars, methodological training, and scientific exchanges to a group of 15 PhD from many different horizons. We also offered internships in Toulouse for more than 30 students within the MAP project. A final and important aspect was the programme for Visiting Scholars: every year we welcomed from 4 to 6 scholars during 2 to 4 months; their presence helped enrich the project and build an international scientific network on divine onomastics, which will extend the project and offer new opportunities of collaboration.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The MAP project addressed the gods as multifaceted and interrelated divine powers, and goes therefore beyond static definitions and drawing up genealogies that oversimplify, even distort our understanding of complex religious systems. By putting the emphasis on the naming process, and by taking seriously into account the message delivered by the different components of divine names, MAP showed that each deity is the product of fluid human strategies for communicating effectively with the gods. The concepts of "onomastic attribute" and “onomastic sequence” put the emphasis on the experimental knowledge on the gods involved in the individual and collective agency, between tradition and innovation, standardization and distinction. Inscribed into intertwined territories in a wide Mediterranean space, the gods are named and associated according to different parameters, which the MAP database registers and enables to explore extensively. MAP also addressed the semantic scope of names, often polysemic, and their ability to explain, recount, connect. Onomastic "narrative" also imply, in some cases, iconographic "translations" of names through images that express, in their own language, all the potentialities of a qualification that refers to the gods' body, appearance, genealogy, attributes, functions, etc. Finally an important achievement of MAP is the creation of an onomastic "formula" based on different connectors in order to modelize the internal relations within each onomastic sequence, like coordination, juxtaposition, qualification, equivalence. Every onomastic sequence is thus translated, in the database, into a formula, which can be analyzed by anautomated script in order to detect shared features, specificities, singularities... With this innovative tool, MAP adopted a Big Data approach appplied to ancient sources.

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