Publisher abstract: This volume is the first of two complementary volumes that explore Abydos through the lenses of the latest archaeological, archival and collections research, building upon a colloquium and workshop held at the British Museum in 2015. A second volume (Abydos in the First Millennium AD, BMPES 9) presents a focussed view on Abydos in the post-pharaonic period. Chosen as the burial ground for the first kings of Egypt, Abydos became a site of great antiquity, and its ancient sanctity may have conferred legitimacy on the individuals buried there. The site soon became the cult centre for Egypt’s most popular god, Osiris, who ruled the netherworld and guaranteed every Egyptian eternal life after death. As a result of continued ritual performance, endowments and pilgrimage, a vast landscape of chapels and tombs, temples and towns, developed. For millennia, Abydos was one of the most consecrated sites of Egypt. The contributions in this volume will address the social and cultural dynamics of an ever-changing landscape serving this unique ritual narrative.

Today, landscape archaeology is mainly the collaborative result of archaeological, historical geography, and physical geography approaches. In Mediterranean landscape studies, the exploration of landscapes as a reflection of a multi-layered process and experience, within notions of representation and perception, are a matter of integrated research that only just started. Although intensive surface exploration revealed cultural landscape dynamics, this type of research hardly studies the reflexivity of religious monuments or the ‘sacredness’ of the landscape in the eye of the beholder. One of the main approaches of landscape studies that notify the complex representational dynamics of landscape is the ‘biography of landscape’. The biographical approach applied in this study connects the establishment and maintenance of cult places by people in the past, to long-term environmental and social political developments. The study examines how landscape, cult place and people interrelate in constructing sacred landscapes by making use of five key concepts of a landscape’s characteristics. It compares two geographical different regions: the Argolid and South Ionia, both with cult places that were in use during ± 900 until ± 350 BCE. The comparative approach enables to clarify the differences that occur in the sacred landscapes concerning the physical landscape in relation to the location of the cult places, the continuity of cult places, and the reuse of earlier remains. The biography of the landscape is considered by means of archaeological, geological, and written sources.

The thesis examines the religious topography of Arcadia through two particular aspects: the built and the natural landscape, and how each relates to human communities, their places of living, and their understanding of the world around. It relies on the assumption commonly made in the field that, since ritual practice was of prevalent importance for the Greeks, cult sites are the most important places for the communities, and therefore they can tell us a lot about the people who built, visited and looked after them. The first part rests on the acknowledgement that sanctuaries are places of interaction for a certain community of cult (which can but need not overlap with a given polis) and explores how they can be indicators of social change, defined here as responses to changes with large impact on the human milieu. These changes and their response articulated in sacred space are identified in four chapters. The first sets the stage and surveys the known sacred sites of Arcadia at the end of the Bronze Age and during the Dark Ages. The second looks at how the building of temples after the eighth century indicates a significant change in the way communities were structured in Arcadia. The third looks at how Arcadian sanctuaries responded to the increased religious mobility of the Classical and Hellenistic period. Finally, chapter four evaluates the impact of the Roman conquest on Arcadian religious sites. The second part explores how myths and rationalising discourses allowed the Greeks to make sense of the salient characteristics and numen of their surrounding natural landscape. Each of the three chapters departs from a situation observed in Arcadia by ancient sources and examines the responses articulated to explain it. Among the variety of topics to pursue, three have been selected because they exemplify a typical characteristic of Arcadia: its wetness. They also allow spatial areas that were less prominent in part one to be explored. The first chapter explores the apparent contradiction of having infernal rivers observable in the world of the living, such as the Styx flowing in the Aroania Mountains. The second chapter examines the connection made in ancient sources between Poseidon’s lordship over the Peloponnese, earthquakes, floods and cults of Poseidon Hippios in Arcadia. The third and last chapter investigates the attribution of Mycenaean waterworks in Arcadia to Herakles in myth.

This thesis examines the topographical relationship between religious sites and sanctuaries in rural areas of Arcadia following the bronze-age collapse, and their associated mythology, to ascertain if there is any possible evidence of why population settlement in the later geometric, archaic, and classical periods favoured more urban settlement away from the rural places mentioned in the mythology of Arcadia. It relies on the assumption commonly made that since ritual practice was of paramount importance for the Greeks, that sanctuaries in rural Arcadia must have a connection to the mythology of such characters as Herakles and Artemis, as these were among the characters of mythology written about in Classical period plays; and in descriptions of the landscape by ancient writers such as Pausanias.

Around the world, sacred places include holy temples, village shrines, cemeteries, graves, as well as natural places such as rivers, lakes, mountains, and trees. The attitude towards the phenomenon of death represents the culture and beliefs of societies about concepts such as life, nature, and eternity. Various landscape sites with the functionality of the dead have different potentials in terms of cultural and social aspects. A remarkable part of ethnic, racial, and social differences can be found in the interaction of people with a space called a cemetery or part of natural sites like Dakhameh (tower of silence). In Iran, after the emergence of Islam, the dead were buried in the ground, and the concept of death, graves, and cemeteries gained particular importance among the Iranians. Considering this, the cemetery seems to be a historical and symbolic space, along with the sacred natural sites. The remnants of the Armenian cemetery in the sacred sites of Julfa, Zoroastrian burial grounds in Yazd, Jewish cemeteries, Khalid-e Nabi cemetery in the north of Iran etc are all part of the landscape heritage from middles ages in the Iranian plateau. Along with fundamental changes consistent with modernity, it seems that in addition to changing the physical form and identity of the cemeteries, the manner of funerals, the arrangement of the components of space, and the meanings associated with the architecture of the death spaces has also changed to touristic, cultural sites. This study deals with the issue of death concerning landscape, nature, and sacred sites in the natural sites of Iran. This research aims to identify the evolution of the new functions of cemeteries as an space. The following questions have been answered in this research: What are the forms and architecture of these spaces? How did religious communities and pilgrims respond to the land and its features? How did religion and socio-cultural beliefs affect the cemeteries as sacred places in the different for miniritoes ? And what meanings are associated with the presence of social activists in the cemetery?