BOB2025MIOT

This collection of essays on religious practice in the Mediterranean, Near East, and Middle East (ca. 100–800 ce) celebrates the impact that Professor David Brakke has had on the study of late antique religious history. Nineteen scholars celebrate the career of Professor Brakke with essays on a range of subjects on late ancient religion. Some chapters treat monastic texts, ascetic practice, and ritual performance; others address the roles of magic, demons, and miracle stories; still others examine Christian violence and martyrdom.

In particular, many of these essays explore the kinds of ascetic theory, practice, identity, organization, performance, and writing found throughout the diverse authors, groups, and locales of Late Antiquity. Essay topics cross disciplinary boundaries and operate in the overlapping intellectual space of Religious Studies, History, Classics, English, Anthropology, and Comparative Literature. By treating asceticism as a phenomenon within a relatively confined time period and geography across a variety of religious and literary traditions, this volume highlights the ascetic impulse within new areas.

The volume thus stands alone for its multifaceted discussions of religion and asceticism in Late Antiquity, and advances scholarly investigation of and discourse about late antique asceticism by expanding conceptual and disciplinary boundaries in new and exciting directions.

This volume brings together an international and interdisciplinary host of scholars to reflect on the complicated legacies of exploration at the archaeological site of Dura-Europos, situated on the western bank of the Euphrates River near modern Salihiyeh (Syria). A chance discovery after World War I kicked off a series of excavations that would span the next century and whose finds are today housed in collections worldwide, including the Yale University Art Gallery, the Louvre, and the National Museum in Damascus. Dura-Europos exemplifies a multiethnic frontier town at the crossroads of major trade routes. Its textual remains and remarkably-preserved Christian, Jewish, and polytheist religious sanctuaries provide key resources for the study of antiquity and attest to the cross-cultural interconnectivity that was demonstrably central to the ancient world but which has been too often obscured by Eurocentric historiographic traditions and siloed disciplinary divisions.

Foreign-run, large-scale archaeological campaigns of the early twentieth century, like those at Dura-Europos, have created narratives of power and privilege that often exclude local communities. The significance of these imbalances is entangled with the destruction the site has experienced since the 2011 outbreak of conflict in Syria. As a step toward making knowledge descendant of early excavations more accessible, this volume includes Arabic summaries of each paper, following up on the simultaneous Arabic interpretation provided at the 2022 hybrid conference whose proceedings form the core of this publication. The papers address topics connected to essential themes in relation to Dura-Europos: long-distance trade relations and cross-border interactions in antiquity, including the exchange of technologies, people, and materials; Christianity, Judaism, and other religious practices, and their relations to one another; contemporary trafficking of looted artifacts; cultural heritage and the Islamic State; and the evolving role of museum collections, technologies, and archival materials for research.