Project description
Studying early Judaism in the Southern Levant
The Persian and Hellenistic empires influenced the lives of communities in the Southern Levant. Jewish communities, alongside imperial documents, religious texts, and ancient historiographical writings, provide insights into the region’s past. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the DOC-CULT project will investigate how imperial rule shaped local communities during the Persian and Hellenistic periods (c. 538–63 BCE), analysing literary sources alongside inscriptions and archival materials. The project explores imperial documentation as a medium through which power and identity were negotiated within local communities, integrating textual and archaeological evidence to move beyond traditional scholarly dichotomies. It will also shed light on the interaction between religious and administrative discourse.
Objective
DOC-CULT investigates how Persian and Hellenistic empires shaped local life by examining imperial communication and its representation by subject communities in the Southern Levant (c. 538–64 BCE). Centring Jewish communities and the uniquely rich dossier of imperial documents embedded in the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple literature, and ancient Jewish historiography, DOC-CULT sets these literary witnesses alongside inscriptions, papyri, and the material remains of archives across the Levant and Near East. It shows that imperial documents were not just records of subject-ruler interactions, but instruments through which local communities negotiated and conceptualized power, articulated identities, and modelled relations with rulers, each other, and even God. DOC-CULT’s interdisciplinary methodology treats “texts without context” alongside archaeological contexts that lack texts, creating a new and comprehensive picture of imperial documentality. Its novel approach to documents embedded into literary writings moves beyond scholarly stalemates that reduce the scope of investigation to simple dichotomies (authentic vs. fake; pro- vs. anti-imperial). The project will demonstrate (1) that changes in communication practices shaped local perceptions of identity and power; (2) that the literary re-framing of imperial documents mediated between imperial authority and local audiences; and (3) that textualized prayers and supplications to God share features with imperial communications, reflecting deep entanglement of religious and administrative discourse. DOC-CULT is thus set to advance our understanding of the relationship between political structures and the information technologies they sustain, and between media and their impact on peoples’ perceptions of their social relations. It illuminates not only the ancient past but present human conditions, at a time when media and the social sphere are inseparably entangled.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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EH8 9YL Edinburgh
United Kingdom
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