As Above, So Below

Where a god lived, and where a king stood, mattered enormously in the ancient Near East. These scholarly essays look at religion through space and place, drawing on Sumerian, Akkadian and Aramaic texts, iconography and archaeology. Gina Konstantopoulos reads Sumerian literature for its mythical and half-mythical locations. Seth Richardson considers law, location and the gods in the Old Babylonian period, while Elizabeth Knott turns to Syria and the royal image placed in the right setting.

Shana Zaia follows the Neo-Assyrian capital as it moved from city to city, and what that meant for the divine. Arnulf Hausleiter and Sebastiano Lora travel to northwest Arabia to uncover a local pantheon shaped by its neighbours from the second millennium onward. This is specialist work, best suited to Assyriologists, historical geographers and serious students of Mesopotamia and Arabia.