Trespassing Religions, Identities and Borders in the Ancient Levant

Acronym: TRIBAL

Description

TRIBAL attempts to readdress the religious history (12th–4th centuries BCE) of the Levant, focussing on the overall similarity of local religion\s rather than a difference based on presumed ethnic identities and postulated cultural borders. The project aims to understand the complexity of several Levantine pantheons backed by epigraphic and archaeological data, in terms of a strongly interconnected world, and a shared symbolic infrastructure.

TRIBAL has a twofold research objective:

1) describing the divine variety in ancient Levant in terms of “divine landscape” rather than as a juxtaposition of ethnically bounded pantheons, by shifting the focus from monumental and urban materials to data regarded as 'secondary evidence' or coming from the 'fringes';

2) promoting an understanding of religion not based on ethnic identities but as a social connector beyond political boarders, as part of a regional equilibrium made of competition, fluidity, and mutual understanding.