Peripatetic kingship, pilgrimage and pastoralism: Re-evaluating the politics of movement in the Ancient Near East

Summary

Pilgrimage is a popular phenomenon, one which involves people traveling to and gathering at specific places during specific times, usually as part of a shared religious tradition. In the Ancient Near East, religious travel existed alongside other forms of mobility with important political and social consequences, like peripatetic kingship—in which there is no one fixed court—a characteristic of the Urartian (ca. 800-600 BC), Achaemenid (ca. 550-330 BC), and Seleucid (ca. 300-100 BC) empires, or the widespread practice of pastoral nomadism. This paper will focus on the relationships between these three forms of mobility, with special attention to the different relations between human and non-human actors that each sort of mobility permitted. Religious pilgrimage flourished in areas that had long histories of mobile pastoralism and drew upon many of its practices. At the same time, peripatetic courts congregated in places charged with affect. In some cases, these could be cultic centers like Musasir in Urartu, places of ancient political importance like Babylon in the Persian Empire, or new capitals like Seleucia in the Seleucid Empire. Juxtaposing these practices will allow us to view pilgrimage in a new light.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Rethinking Archaeologies of Pilgrimage   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16506