At its core, this project is aimed at investigating the veracity of Herodotus' claim within the archaeological record. Before the sources of data can be addressed, it is important to outline the boundaries of the data to be included in this project. The title of this project is Temple Sites in the Greater Near East through the Iron Age (opens map), and in order to define the parameters of the data for this project, I will take a page from scholar of Near Eastern religions Tammi Schneider; as she writes in An Introduction to Ancient Mesopotamian Religion I will “begin by going over each element of the title because the definition of the different parts lays the groundwork for what to expect”¹ in this project.

Temple

There are many sites of worship mentioned in various sources throughout the civilizations of the Near East; most open air worship sites, altars, sacred spaces are lost to history for without archaeological evidence it is extremely difficult to confirm any site as the spot for worship. By my working definition, a temple must be a human-made building specifically constructed and used for worship. In Gods in the Desert: Religions in the Ancient Near East biblical scholar Glenn S. Holland describes Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Syrian-Palestinian temples each with difference emphasis; I have compiled these descriptors to produce a rubric for defining what can be considered a temple:

1. “a complex, including the temple building and the precinct immediately surrounding it”²

2. “the dwelling-place of the city’s patron god where the daily rituals of worship and sacrifice took place”³

3. “[a] building [the main feature of which] was a large central room with an altar where sacrifices were offered…might include shrines for other gods in addition to the primary god worshipped in the temple”⁴

Thus spaces considered to be a temple for this project must: be enclosed within a building, which itself may be part of a complex; be considered the dwelling place of a deity and the site of ritual worship and sacrifice or offering; and be designed and furnished for such rituals with altars, shrines, etc.

Sites

In many cases, the remnants we have are perhaps just enough to identify a building as having been built and maintained specifically as a temple. Although many are collapsed or demolished remains, while some are still standing or have been reconstructed, still, our best chance of understanding how a space was regarded must be partially speculative, as we have such limited records of the daily workings of each particular site. For this project I am concerned with the temples as sites situated in a society as markers of that culture’s religion and so each structure need not be deeply investigated – its identification and location are sufficient to provide evidence for the presence of a religious edifice that space.

in

It is beyond the scope of this project to be concerned with the individual dates of building and usage of each temple beyond confirming their existence at some point during the period with which I am concerned. Insofar as the greater scope of the project concerns the question of religious origins of monotheistic traditions it is important to limit the cut-off date of sites to a time before modern Zoroastrian Fire Temples and Jewish Synagogues, as such, would have developed. If a temple is confirmed in the archaeological record to have been constructed within the following geographic limits and in use at some time prior to the end of the Iron Age (586 BCE) it qualifies as extant for this project.

the Greater

The purpose of this project is to investigate a lack of, or the extremely limited nature of, temple building culture by the earliest ancient Iranian and Israelite societies. This can only be achieved by showing, in contrast, the proliferation of temples in neighboring religious cultures. Thus, I have considered a geographic scope large enough to include sufficient contrasting evidence from regions which are not traditionally included in conceptualizations of the Near East.

Near East

Historian Marc Van De Mieroop writes in A History of the Ancient Near East that “[i]t is in the Near East and northeast Africa that many of the elements we associate with advanced civilization first originated...The Near East and Egypt encompass a vast area, stretching from the Black Sea to the Aswan Dam, and from the Aegean Sea to the highlands of Iran, an area that was densely inhabited throughout its history.”⁵ Van De Mieroop’s description summarizes the ‘known’ and ‘unknown’ qualities of describing a region such as the Near East; his suggestion of boundaries highlights the difficult task of demarcating edges of a nebulous conceptual zone that attempts to encompass many civilizations over a broad span of time. In order to compare the ancient Iranians and Israelites with the prolific building societies of Egypt and Mesopotamia, a span of geographic space must be included in this study. Inspired by the approximate political boundaries of the Persian Empire under Darius I (an imperial power too late, chronologically, to be included in this research), the geographical parameters of this project were established to include the following modern countries (or specific portions described): Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Egypt, Israel (including Palestinian territories), Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan (areas west of the Indus river).

through

For this project I have relied upon the dates given in Archaeology of the Land of the Bible 10,000 – 586 B.C.E. by Amihai Mazar for the Iron Age: the Iron IA period beginning in 1200 BCE and the end of Iron IIC in 586 BCE.⁶ Because I am concerned with understanding temple-building culture as an organic development of specific types of religion, this beginning date is less important than the end. The inclusion of the word through here indicates that it is the end date which is of primary importance: a stricter end date allows for the inclusion of temples that would have been constructed and in use up to the the few decades before the Persian conquest, excluding those which would have been built by a civilization under foreign imperial rule. I am working with a more flexible beginning date in order to allow for acknowledgment of the periods in which some temples were originally built and would have been a part of that particular religious civilization up to the end of the Iron Age.

the Iron Age

There are many different ways in which to periodize the history of a particular civilization or site, each significant to a specific lens or focus. This project is an effort to bring together data from different regions in which individual historians or archaeologists might have differing opinions about an effective terminology for periods describing each particular site. My modest archaeological experience in Israel informs my sense of stratigraphic periodization and is explained by Mazar: “Terminology for the early periods in Palestine is based upon worldwide periodization maintained since the 1819 work of the Danish archaeologist Ch. J. Thomsen. This is the Three Age System, which divides the early periods into three major units: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age.”⁷ My choice of the Iron Age as the final period from which data may be included in this project is specifically aimed at marking 586 BCE as the end date for this study. It is important to note that this date is close to the chronological boundary of independence for religious civilizations in the region prior to their occupation by the Persian Empire and coincides, approximately, with the destruction of the First Temple and a major turning point in the development of ancient Judaism.

In constructing the most simple of temple site lists within these parameters, the first question concerns which source material is valid. The availability of archaeological evidence to confirm each temple site in this project is a critical standard for all of the data, with the exception of a single listing: Solomon’s Temple. In Ancient Building in South Syria and Palestine, G.R.H. Wright begins thirteen pages of exposition on the Solomonic Temple with a statement to which I will defer in the decision to include this single exception in this project: “Common sense advises that little or nothing should be said here of Solomon’s Temple since there are no remains of this building accessible for investigation. However the peculiar status of the building in our civilisation overrides common sense.”⁸

Without delving into a deep discussion of the steps of building this dataset, it is important to acknowledge that the process of assembling, verifying, and incorporating the information for this project began with a ‘wide-net’ approach before moving to a refined selectivity to what could be called ‘quality data’. The necessary first step was the production of a thorough list, by region or civilization, of potentially viable data points: in this case temple sites within the geographic parameters and temporal limits. Since the purpose of this data assemblage is to understand a relationship between temple-building culture and the structure of a particular religion, the collection of temple sites as data points must then have logically been found in sources which focus on a particular region, religion, or civilization. The majority of sources for the preliminary list were archaeological and architectural in focus: the former being clearly concerned with the excavation and verification of a variety of tangible ruins including temple sites.  The latter is specifically concerned with categories of building cultures and styles which attempt to differentiate religious structures (and others) from rest of the site.

The dataset from these initial sources had to be verified and it was in the archaeological record that confirmation was found. The archaeological record, as I use the reference here, describes a body of material that is not merely limited to the published excavation reports but includes accessible site notes, plans, photos, and find lists. These ‘verification materials’ serve not just to support the argument for inclusion of a particular site in the project data, but to enhance each specific listing with layers of additional data and provide a level of transparency that is very useful in this form of research. When a listing had associated sources, it was considered valid and viable for integration into the dataset to be mapped and otherwise analyzed. Although this digital project is an effort to establish data that would otherwise require an entire companion volume to evidence, the dataset draws authoritative strength as much on data as on clarity and proper sourcing. With these parameters outlined, we next must turn to the trends of temple-building culture revealed by the dataset.