Twenty-four experts from the fields of Ancient History, Semitic philology, Assyriology, Classical Archaeology, and Classical Philology come together in this volume to explore the role of textiles in ancient religion in Greece, Italy, The Levant and the Near East. Recent scholarship has illustrated how textiles played a large and very important role in the ancient Mediterranean sanctuaries. In Greece, the so-called temple inventories testify to the use of textiles as votive offerings, in particular to female divinities. Furthermore, in several cults, textiles were used to dress the images of different deities. Textiles played an important role in the dress of priests and priestesses, who often wore specific garments designated by particular colours. Clothing regulations in order to enter or participate in certain rituals from several Greek sanctuaries also testify to the importance of dress of ordinary visitors. Textiles were used for the furnishings of the temples, for example in the form of curtains, draperies, wall-hangings, sun-shields, and carpets. This illustrates how the sanctuaries were potential major consumers of textiles; nevertheless, this particular topic has so far not received much attention in modern scholarship. Furthermore, our knowledge of where the textiles consumed in the sanctuaries came from, where they were produced, and by who is extremely limited. Textiles and Cult in the Ancient Mediterranean examines the topics of textile production in sanctuaries, the use of textiles as votive offerings and ritual dress using epigraphy, literary sources, iconography and the archaeological material itself.

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• PART I: GREECE
  • 1. Offering of cloth and/or clothing to the sanctuaries: A case of ritual continuity from the 2nd to the 1st millennium BCE in the Aegean?
  • 2. What does the clothing say about the killer? Some thoughts on textiles in depictions of sacrifice in Archaic Athens
  • 3. Not nothing: Conceptualising textile whiteness for cult practice
  • 4. Weaving the Chalkeia: Reconstruction and ritual of an Athenian festival
  • 5. Dress, code and identity-of-place in Greek religion: Some cases from Classical and Hellenistic Athens
  • 6. Priestly dress in the ancient Mediterranean: Herodotus as a source-book
  • 7. Headdress for success: Cultic uses of the Hellenistic mitra
  • 8. Astral symbols on a loom weight from Adjiyska Vodenitsa (ancient Pistiros), Thrace: Measurement, astronomy, and cult
• PART II: ITALY
  • 9. Building V and ritual textile production at Timpone della Motta
  • 10. The loom weights from the “Scarico di Grotta Vanella”: Evidence for a sanctuary on the north acropolis of Segesta?
  • 11. Loom weights in sacred contexts: The Square Building of the Heraion near the Sele River
  • 12. “Temple key” or distaff? An ambiguous artefact from the Greek and indigenous sanctuaries of southern Italy
  • 13. On priests, priestesses, and clothing in Roman cult practices
• PART III: THE LEVANT AND THE NEAR EAST
  • 14. Textiles in Assyrian and Babylonian temples from the 1st millennium BCE
  • 15. Textile production in the Neo-Babylonian Eanna archive
  • 16. The description of Anāhitā’s attire in the Yašt
  • 17. Modes of textile production in cultic contexts in the Iron Age Southern Levant: The finds from Tell es-Sâfī/Gath
  • 18. The High Priest’s garments of mixed wool and linen (sha’atnez) compared to textiles found in the Land of Israel
  • 19. Between fashion phenomena and status symbols: Contextualising the wardrobe of the so-called “former priests” of Palmyra
  • 20. Women in Palmyrene rituals and religious practices
• PART IV: LATE ANTIQUITY
  • 21. Textiles as gifts to God in Late Antiquity. Christian altar cloths as cultic objects