The Near East, a vast world region encompassing territories of such present countries as Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Palestine, Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, is known broadly as the Cradle of Civilisation.Footnote 1 It is also a birthplace of great monotheisms: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. L.’s book focuses on the earliest history of religion, traced back to c. 10,000 bce, the period of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, where one can find the earliest material remains of worship. L. stops with the mid-first millennium bce and the advent of monotheistic religion.
In the introduction L. carefully guides readers towards the goals of the volume. He intends to provide a comprehensive study of the transformations of religious phenomena among people living in the Near East, and he fulfils this challenging task with success. L.’s approach to religiosity in the ancient Near East is through the ‘material turn’ lenses of an archaeologist. He focuses on the remains of human bodies, objects, architecture and nature to analyse the ‘complex network of relationships between the forms of materiality and beliefs in supernatural beings’ (p. 2). L. fills a significant gap in research on the religious materiality of the Near East, trying to trace the evolution of religions in this big region. The book aims to present the materiality concept as a means of connection to the divine sphere in this religiously vibrant region of the ancient world.
The volume is divided into three main parts: Part 1, ‘In the Name of the Spirits: Humans and Natural Environments’; Part 2, ‘For the Glory of the Gods: Architecture, Icons, and Material Symbols for Encountering the Divine’; Part 3, ‘A New Era: Toward the Emergence of Monotheism’.
In the first part L. concentrates on the prehistoric Near East. The first chapter focuses on the cult of ancestors with a rich theoretical and methodological framework. He devotes a few pages to the special buildings of Göbekli Tepe, a monumental prehistoric site in modern south-eastern Turkey, and the religious practices of its people (pp. 30–5). L. observes that the significance of belief in ancestral spirits is also remarkable in third-millennium bce Mesopotamian textual and archaeological sources, especially concerning royal ancestors, and underlined by the mausolea of the kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur (2113–2005 bce). He also shows the evolution of the cult from the third to the second millennia bce in Mesopotamia. In the second chapter L. concentrates on nature and its role in religiosity. He uses the deer in Anatolian (prehistoric and Hittite) religious systems as a case study and as an animal typical of that part of the East. He moves on to the powers of water in Hittite cults, considered as a purification agent and intermediary in communication with the divine.
Part 2 concerns the architecture and creation of divine pantheons in Mesopotamia. Temples play a crucial role in this section of the book as a new element on the religious map of the Near East and a new organisational form of ancient religions. The ziggurats, the most characteristic element of the Mesopotamian landscape, emerge from the late third millennium bce in a standardised form that persists throughout the second and the first millennia bce (pp. 104–5). L. points out that social and political changes in Mesopotamia result in changes in religious concepts and forms of religious expression. Architecture serves to illustrate the cosmology of local forms of cult. The second chapter within Part 2 relates to the images (Ṣalmu) of the divine in the Near East. L. follows T. Ornan’s theory that the divine image was not an imagined, private and emotional reflection of a deity, but a product of a conscious and communal construct, determined by the shared ideology visible in the texts. The image of a god was a physical emanation of the depicted deity among humans. This sheds light on the understanding of divine images not only in pre-Hellenistic Mesopotamia, but also on the iconography of the gods in the Near East during the Roman imperial period – in times much later than those described in L.’s book. L. concentrates on the magical power of demons, monsters and other mythological hybrids. With this chapter L. skilfully shows the entanglement between the earthly and the divine worlds. The temple was like an earthly palace for the gods. The concept of the gods as kings dwelling in the palaces strengthened royal ideology in Babylonia and Assyria, especially in the first millennium bce (p. 159).
In Part 3 L. focuses on the question of aniconism and the emergence of a new form of worship: monotheism in the Southern Levant in the first millennium bce. He makes an important observation that the ‘initial forms of religiosity of the southern Levant (ca. 1200–800 bce) mirror a complex hybridization of diverse religious identities composing the mosaic of the different ethnic groups inhabiting the region’ (p. 171). This remark shows the cultures in contact and the importance of the religious and cultural impact of people from the region and neighbourhoods. L. does not omit the impact of Ugarit on the concept of Yahweh. He rightly leaves flexible the terminology (monolatry, henotheism, monotheism) used for the initial stage of the cult of the Jewish god. L. notes in the material the expression of religiosity by the aniconic forms. He states that divine words became more important than divine ‘things’ (p. 174). He adds to the extensive discussion of the concept of aniconism, using Mesopotamian, Jewish and Christian sources. Through the cult of Yahweh the religion became more individual (p. 201).
L. concludes the monograph with the words: ‘Thus, for the inhabitants of the ancient Near East, the belief system was envisioned as a multifaceted immanent presence of spiritual beings in the earthly world that was materially translated into the use of a complex semantic language combining iconographic, textual, and architectonic elements in order to make the divine power tangible. In so doing, the divine material symbols were created as a clear reference to the interaction between human beings and their natural environment where the divine spirits dwelled’ (p. 215). This is the essence of the ancient religions of the Near East, not only during the periods described by L., but also in Hellenistic and Roman times.Footnote 2
L.’s book is essential, in its comprehensiveness and contribution to the matter of ancient Near Eastern religions. It is an excellent publication for all who want to know anything about the history of religiosity of people in the past. The message of the book is that religions always interact with the natural and cultural (human-made) environment. Those readers not familiar with the terminology and history of the Near Eastern systems are initiated and directed gently through the complex evidence. The volume can serve as a good basis for students and as an introduction to the history of ancient religions. The easiness of reading and careful guidance by L. make the book accessible to everyone, including people outside of academia and the specialisation of Near Eastern archaeology.
