“Civilizations is the most complex cultural level reached by man. Its symptom is the city.”¹

“Gods required temples, and temples needed to be located in cities.”²

In the late 5^th century BCE, Herodotus wrote of the Persians: “They have among them neither statues, temples, nor altars.”³ The impetus for this study came from noting the curious incongruity, between a religion to which temple-building is integral to its (religious) culture and one which appears to lack such a practice, as suggested by Herodotus’ statement. The fact that Herodotus would remark on such a specific feature (or lack thereof) in Ancient Persian culture, points to the plausible historical reality of this incongruity between religious cultures.⁴ In order to understand whence this peculiar difference in religious cultures came, the question naturally arises: what other characteristics might be understood to differentiate Greek and Persian religions? With little more than general knowledge of these religions, it seems that an obvious answer reveals an interesting possible connection: whereas the Greeks were very clear ‘polytheists’, the Persian Zoroastrians were more ‘monotheistic’. This potential connection, between polytheism and temple-building culture, serves as subject for this chapter. I suggest that there is substantial correlation between polytheistic belief and the development of temples, in contrast with the lack of native temple-building culture and the monotheistic and proto-monotheistic religions of the ancient Near East and Eurasian steppe. In order to establish this claim, we will examine available data and scholarship on the ancient Iranians and Israelites regarding the presence of temple-building practices within each religious culture.

There are primarily two types of sources which may inform this investigation: textual references and archaeological findings. For the purposes of this study, it is clear that the data must be verifiable, and although both sources of data require critical examination in order to establish the veracity of claims that a temple existed in a certain site, I have chosen the archaeological record as the source for this study because the fact of material remains appears, arguably, stronger evidence than textual attestations. In order to examine the archaeological record, then, I have compiled a dataset of temple sites in the greater Near East which have been determined by excavators to have been built prior to the end of the Iron Age around 586 BCE. Working within ArcGIS, a suite of geographic information systems tools developed by Esri (Environmental Systems Research Institute), I have assembled a dataset which establishes the trends of temple-building culture among the included religious civilizations of the greater Near East up to the couple decades before the establishment of the Persian Empire. Before these trends can be examined, we must understand the parameters of data, sources, and processes which govern this digital mapping project.