| The temple, one of the central institutions of the ancient Near East, has been much studied over the years. In recent years an increase in archaeological activity and the discovery and publication of texts has led to a significant increase in the number and quality of studies related to temple beliefs, architecture and practices. And yet, there has been no attempt to systematize and to rationalize our understanding of such phenomena. This systematization is demanded by the material itself, which indicates a wide agreement of temple related practices across the ancient Near Eastern world, indeed, a "common temple ideology," which transcended language, cultural and political boundaries, and survived the rise and fal of empires.; This dissertation addresses the need to describe such an ideology, to deduce the main features of such systems from the texts, and from archaeologically recovered examples of temple complexes. The ideology forms a kind of "grammar" of temple related practices, "an inventory of the themes used, with the links between them, in order to arrive at a coherent system (Mario Liverani)."; The dissertation employs the methodology of Near Eastern archaeology, which sees ancient culture as a system expressing its cogent features in languade, architecture, city planning, and mythical views. Evidence is drawn from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and the Levant, including the Old Testament. The chronological range of the evidence derives from those cultures which show the presence of the political state, which means from the Mesopotamian Ubaid to early Roman times.; The typology is validated across the chronological range of the cultures targeted. The ways in which the temple ideology permeated and influenced all aspects of the religious, social and material (city planning, architectural, economic) life in the ancient Near East is demonstrated. Particularly important is the demonstration of the interrelatedness of the propositions of the ideology, which can be used both to identify given archaeological remains in their relationship to temple practices, and to predict and generate the totality of such systems once one or more of the features of the "grammar" have been identified. |
