The new conceptualization of molk-style rites shown in Chapter 7 led to shifts in how sanctuaries were structured and in the entailments these new structures had for the communities who used them. While past studies have focused on the movement from open-air stele fields to monumental sanctuaries as evidence of “Romanization” or the creation of “Romano-African” temple-types, this chapter argues that these new built temples instead participated in wider civic-style practices of benefaction and spectacle in ways that sought to foreground sacrificer-benefector figures. At the end of the second century CE, a number of stele-sanctuaries were rebuilt in monumental forms that privileged central altars, the spectacle of animal offering, and dining. This shift in the spatial dimension of worship afforded new possibilities of practice and social ordering that closely resemble those of the wider imperial world, creating a “sacrificial compromise” where local forms of authority were predicated on being central to the pageantry of sacrifice.

This chapter looks at potential allusions in Horace’s Odes to the religious buildings in Rome known to have been constructed or substantially repaired by Augustus. These major construction projects in Rome in the Augustan period are naturally a topic of interest to contemporary poets; in the case of the Odes, it can be argued that there are many points of contact between poetic and architectural artefacts, and even that the Roman literary achievement of the Augustan poet as proclaimed in Odes 3.30 can be paralleled with a Roman architectural project of Augustus himself. It is also interesting to note that though Horace’s Odes contain a number of potential allusions to a range of projects in the considerable programme of temple construction and renovation later carefully recorded by Augustus in the Res gestae, there are no allusions to the Temple of Diuus Iulius, perhaps because the memory of Julius Caesar was felt to be too problematic.

In this chapter tomb paintings join the selection of texts (preserved on stone, papyrus, and leather) to show the role of dependence as a structural feature of pharaonic society. Foreigners were acquired through raiding and warfare, and settled in both existing and new communities. An actual trade in persons is also documented and varying aspects of the experience of such individuals is examined, as they were exploited by those who purchased them or passed them on as gifts. Changes over time in the vocabulary of dependence are discussed, as are the different types of work and production in which such dependents were involved. Non-free dependents were employed on the land, in animal herding, and in artisanal workshops, especially textiles, as well as in the home. The key economic role of Egyptian temples is a constant feature of the period.

This paper focuses on three famous hexameters allegedly uttered by Apollo in Delphi for Emperor Julian by means of the emperor’s physician Oribasius. Since the nineteenth century, this text, in which Apollo announces the destruction of his temple and the silence of the oracle, has been the subject of numerous interpretations. Some scholars regard it as a genuine oracle produced in Delphi and intended for the pagan Emperor Julian while he was in Antioch (362–3). Others argue that it is a Christian forgery and piece of anti-pagan propaganda written shortly after Julian’s death. In this chapter, I first discuss the literary context of this oracle’s quotation in the Artemii Passio, an anonymous and fictitious seventh-century hagiographical work. I argue that we cannot date the text to the fourth century, because its attribution to the lost Church History of Philostorgius appears to be spurious and is not grounded. Second, I analyse the anonymous hagiographer’s construction of this episode and compare it to similar late Byzantine pseudo-oracles about the fate of pagan temples in order to provide a new interpretation of this prophecy.

Chapter one introduces South Asia’s people, geography, and history until the late twelfth century, and examines indigenous religious traditions as well as ones introduced by forces from Central Asia and the Iranian world. For India, by which we mean historic South Asia, we discuss differences in the north and south by focusing on Chandella patronage in north India of temples at Khajuraho, and Chola rule in south India and the construction of the Rajarajeshvara temple in Thanjavur. Contemporary with the construction of the Rajarajeshvara temple is Mahmud of Ghazni’s rise to power in what is modern Afghanistan and his subsequent raids into India. While Ghaznavid sway over India was short-lived it paved the way for the introduction of Islam and Ghurid dominance.

From the late archaic period, all the functions of money – medium of exchange, measure of value, store of value, and medium of payment – were performed by coins, almost always silver, struck by scores of states on a few different weight standards. Market trade, international commerce, and labor were all mediated by money. Finance was an important, and often decisive, factor in statecraft and warfare, and temples were both dependent upon and replete with silver and gold. Agriculture was less monetized; cultural effects are still being debated. Credit was an essential part of both friendship and business: mortgages and eranoi (joint loans by an ad hoc group of lenders) supplied extraordinary personal expenses, while small market loans and larger bottomry loans for overseas expeditions financed both large and small commerce. Banking, in the sense of investing depositors’ money, was a Greek invention. Athenian banks, always family businesses, provided credit, remote payments, money-changing, and a secure place to hide money. Ptolemaic royal banks managed royal revenue and were involved, alongside private bankers, in the local economy; cashless book-transfers were common. The scope of banking was, however, limited by the need for coin reserves, which kept the banks from dominating the economy.

This chapter focuses on Babylon and Egypt and offers a systematic comparison of the role of the local elites in the temple administration within the Seleucid and Ptolemaic governmental structures. While in both regions temples were the “centers of public life” before the Macedonian conquest, the traditional religious role of the king offered to the Ptolemies in Egyptian temples granted them a unique position that was not paralleled by the Seleucids in Babylonia. Moreover, the authors emphasize that the temple’s elite were representative of the local elite in Egypt, but that it was not the case in Babylonia. Therefore, these different traditions, notably the conception of the Egyptian king as a high priest superior to all the other priests, may explain why the administrative functions of the temples in Egypt, as well as the priestly elites, were largely integrated into the state structures of power, and why this did not happen in Babylonia. There, Seleucid kings could not play this role through the existing temple institutions and instead founded poleis as tools of governance of local communities.

The processes launched at the start of Roman rule continued to support the development of cities and their elites. The 150 years from Hadrian to Diocletian saw enough violence to do severe damage to some of those cities, particularly Alexandria, and occasional revolts disturbed the peace, including one in the Delta at the time of the great plague (smallpox) under Antoninus Pius, which led to the depopulation of many villages. A loss of workers to the plague may have intensified the concentration of landholding in the hands of the wealthy, who could invest in both machinery and capital-intensive crops such as wine. This period also saw the decline of the temples and the beginning of Christianity as a visible (and occasionally persecuted) movement, with the emergence of bishops of Alexandria and the countryside. The Egyptian language acquired a new means of expression in the Coptic alphabet, largely derived from Greek.

With the death of Antony and Cleopatra after the battle of Actium in 30 BC, the Roman general Octavian, soon to be called Augustus, took control of Egypt. Roman rule brought a standing garrison of some 20,000 troops and began the long process of making the administration of Egypt more like that used elsewhere in the Romans’ diverse empire. Although no longer a royal capital, Alexandria remained a center of commerce and culture. Much of Egypt’s wheat surplus was shipped to Rome to feed its population, and Egypt was partly integrated into regional economic networks. Roman taxation policies favored the concentration of wealth in private hands and the development of an urban elite that could take on many of the tasks of governance. The cult of the emperors was introduced into Egyptian temples, which continued as vital cultural centers during the first two centuries of Roman rule. The Jewish community of Egypt was destroyed during a revolt in the early second century.

Spenser’s poetry offers a glimpse into the aesthetics of skepticism. To understand Spenser’s exploration of perception, interpretation, and subjective experience, the chapter considers skeptical questions posed by medieval philosophy regarding universals, abstraction, mental language, the status of pictures in the mind, and the extent of God’s power. According to Heiko Oberman’s view of the via moderna, these nominalist investigations with their counterfactual approach lead to feelings of contingency and autonomy that in turn produce the subversive political idea that things can be otherwise. In his translations of du Bellay and Marot in his Complaints and in “November,” as well as on Mount Acidale in The Fairy Queen and in The Mutability Cantos, Spenser creates rapturous visions that soon dissolve. These intimations of the sublime have a skeptical quality that suggest a grounding in nominalism. Because Heidegger combats a skeptical metaphysics premised on the rift between subject and object, this chapter uses aspects of his philosophical lexicon to illuminate the stakes of Spenser’s poetic travail with problems of truth, concealment, disclosure, and fullness of being.

Images of the gods were omnipresent in the Roman world. Cult images served many functions, but some were the focal point of ritual activity in temples and are termed ‘idols’ in this book. After exploring both the ancient and modern terminology of cult images, this chapter turns to evidence for belief in the divinity of idols. Many ancient writers, including Arnobius of Sicca, give a sense that many Romans perceived idols to be divine, or at least endowed with agency. It is suggested that this aspect of Roman religion can be understood through cross-cultural comparisons and anthropological theories of agency in religious art. To help us build a complete picture of the place of Roman cult images in Roman religion, and to avoid the problem of the so-called museum effect, the book adopts a biographical approach, exploring the births, lives, and death of cult images. It focuses on cult images and temples in the western Roman Empire, including Rome, Gaul, and Germany, from the Roman Republican period, or the pre-Roman Celtic and Germanic Iron Age, to late antiquity and the early medieval period.

Chapter 1 surveys Chinese migration during the early modern period, here defined as 1500 to 1740. The chapter introduces the concept of a trade diaspora and describes some important examples, Huizhou, Shanxi, and Hokkien. It introduces diasporic institutions important during the early modern era: lineages, native-place associations, temples, and various types of intermediaries. The chapter then describes the ways in which migration was gendered, focusing on male migration, split families, and intermarriage. The chapter ends with an example of one diasporic community, the Huizhou salt merchants who formed the upper tier of the socioeconomic elite in the city of Yangzhou.