Nanaia is a Babylonian deity who was associated with Artemis in Hellenistic times. She is identified as a moon goddess as well as a deity of love and war, and as a protector of the sovereign and the country. The reason behind the assimilation between this oriental deity and Artemis lay in the commonality of functions between the two. The presence of a goddess called Artemis Nanaia is attested in Attica by an inscription found at Piraeus which is the only testimony of the presence of this cult in Greece. Like the goddess Nanaia, Artemis was a moon goddess, identified as a protector of political order. This function in Attica is expressed by the adjective Boulaia and by the practice, widespread since the second century B.C., of offering a sacrifice to Artemis Boulaia and Artemis Phosphoros before political assemblies in the Athenian Agora.

The aim of this paper is to put into perspective the characteristics of the cults of Artemis Nanaia as attested in two important sanctuaries in the Middle East, including the sanctuary of Nanaia at Susa and the sanctuary of Artemis Nanaia at Dura-Europos, with the testimonies related to the cult of Artemis attested at Piraeus. The testimonies, and the characteristics of the cult attested in these three areas will be analysed together in order to etter understand the reasons behind the dedication of Axios and Kapo and its original location.

The article deals with the early history of the politeia Messambria Pontica through the prysm of the foundation myth and cult. The almost simultaneous establishment of the cult and myth to the historical founder and mythical eponumous hero-founder attested on the silver coinage of Messambria may refer to a certain need of a group of Messambrian society to present itself in a certain way at-home and abroad. The author elieves that this should be considered within the ethnic discourse between Ionians and Dorians.

This paper aims to investigate the reasons why, since the reign of Philip II, the “national” Zeus, venerated on Olympus and Dion and characterized by the oak crown, was abandoned in favor of the Olympian Zeus of Elis, characterized by the olive/oleaster wreath. We notice that while the members of the royal family display, in life and death, an oak wreath as an insignia of their kingship, and at the same time also as a symbol of their highest divinity, the kings themselves issue the image of the panhellenic god with an olive/laurel wreath on their coins.

The history of Hellenistic Pergamon is deeply affected by the dual status of a polis that also functioned as a dynastic residence. This overlap between civic and royal institutions significantly impacted the political life of the city. This paper contributes to the ongoing debate about honorific habits and the consolidation of the civic elite of Pergamon by focusing on the triangular interactions between the Attalids, their court, and the polis’ institutions in the period from Eumenes I to Attalos III. To do so, several dossiers concerning the priesthoods and religious liturgies of Attalid Pergamon will be reassessed by paying attention to their tenure, appointment, privileges, and the social groups that held these charges.

The paper provides a dossier of honors offered to Seleukid and Ptolemaic kings, preceded by a brief introduction.

In order to study the cult of Zeus Nikatôr, six Greek inscriptions (one from northern Syria and five from southern Anatolia) are gathered and commented. The origin, the diffusion and the longevity of the cult are evoked, since it was vivid until the IIIrd century A.D. in the eastern Mediterranean, mainly in southern Taurus (Pamphylia, Lycia, Pisidia and Phrygia Paroreios). Accordingly, also in connection with onomastics and numismatics, the Seleucid memory and the remembrance of Seleucos I are discussed, from Hellenistic times to the Roman Imperial period, and beyond.

In ancient Greek cities, the organization of festivals generated its own institutional system, with various officials involved in various aspects of the celebration. One of these officials was the panegyriarch, in charge of the market that took place during the festival. On the basis of a systematic survey of the epigraphic documentation, this paper aims at defining the profile of the individuals attested as panegyriarchs. It presents the chronological and geographical distribution of the evidence, studies the offices associated with that of panegyriarch within civic careers and reflects on the level of prestige of this specific magistracy.

The interpretation of figures of deities on the reverse of the coins of Asia Minor cities of the imperial period is usually done in several steps. The deity is generally quickly determined. It is difficult, however, to establish the superior intention behind the depiction. Does the figure refer to a real cult statue of the emitting city, is the image ‘only’ a reference to a local cult or was it chosen to symbolise, for instance, political connections of cities?

The essay brings together opinions from 140 years of international numismatic scholarship and thus offers an overview of the changing patterns of interpretation as well as their range in general. In the end, a more conscious approach to the figures of the gods on coins and a more reflective methodological approach are recommended.

The article addresses the issue of Mithraism in Ostia. It discusses the latest discoveries, the nature of the Mithra cult in Ostia, with particular emphasis on the place of Mithra’s shrines in the city space.

The epigraphic record from Palmyra brings light on the organization of the temples: personnel, management of feasts, economy and on the ritual practices towards certain deities like Allat and Shai ‘al-Qaum. These texts were previously called in the research literature “sacred laws”and what the scholarly debate nowadays labels with the term “ritual norms.”The aim of this paper, divided on the temple economy and personnel, and ritual behavior, is to understand through the scraps of information the administration of the Palmyrene temples and processes which shaped the life in the places of worship.

Today the city of Ḫarrān/Carrhae is mainly known for the famous battle, in which the Roman general Crassus was defeated by a Parthian army in 53 BCE. However, Ḫarrān was also one of the most important religious centres of North Mesopotamia. Since the Bronze Age, the moon god Sîn of Ḫarrān was popular in the wider region, and it is well known that the late Assyrian and Babylonian kings supported the cult and rebuilt the temple of Sîn. Archaeological evidence and written sources attest to the great popularity of Sîn of Ḫarrān at that time. Much less is known about the development of the cult in the subsequent periods, but the evidence assembled in this paper indicates that it continued to thrive. An important but so far largely ignored source for the study of Sîn are coins, which were minted at Ḫarrān in the second and third century CE. They suggest that some distinctive features of the Iron Age cult still existed in the Roman period. Most important in this regard is the predominance of aniconic symbolism. A cult standard, a crescent on a globe with tassels mounted on a pole, continued to be the main of representation of the god. In addition, two versions of an anthropomorphic image of the god can be traced in the coinage of Ḫarrān. The first shows him as an enthroned mature man. It is based on the model of Zeus, but his attributes identify the god as Sîn. The second version portrays him as a youthful, beardless god.

Late antique sources frequently mention that the people of Ḫarrān remained attached to pagan religion, but the veracity of these accounts must be questioned. A reassessment of the literary and archaeological evidence suggests that the accounts of a pagan survival at Ḫarrān are hyperbolic and exacer ated by negative sentiments towards Ḫarrān among writer from the neighbouring city of Edessa.

There are abundant examples of negative assessments of cultic honors to Roman emperors by nineteenth- and twentieth-century researchers. In the minds of historians raised in modern societies, in which monotheistic Abrahamic religions usually reign supreme, this is a completely understandable a priori approach; nevertheless, it hinders a correct understanding of Roman society in antiquity. This paper examines the need to provide a complex answer to the question of whether the inhabitants of the Roman world really believed in the divinity of their rulers. A complex answer to the question can only emerge from a historical contextualization of the phenomenon under analysis, an examination of the imperial cult within the wider changes that were taking place in Roman religion at the time, and application of the necessary empathetic approach.

Forty years after the publication of Sanders’ Roman Crete, a broader range of evidence for the imperial cult on Crete is available—temples and other structures, monumental architectural members, imperial altars, portraiture and statuary, coinage, statue and portrait bases, other inscriptions, priest and high priests, members and archons of the Panhellenion, and festivals—and far more places can now be identified as cities participating in the imperial cult. This evidence can be set into multiple Cretan contexts, beginning with the establishment and evolution of the imperial cult across Crete, before locating the imperial cult in the landscape of Roman Crete. The ultimate Cretan contexts are the role of emperor worship in the lives of the island’s population, as it was incorporated into Cretan religious and social systems.

The provincial imperial cult represents one of the most relevant expressions of multiform relationship between provincial communities and Roman authorities especially in the East. During the Roman Principate in Syria, we can enumerate seven administrative districts (eparchies) which occur in connection with this political and religious phenomenon. The complicated question of how the province-wide worship of the Imperial family was organised in Roman Levant must be analysed in different terms. Important aspects are the Roman territorial framework of administration, the creation of autonomous city-leagues (koiná) and their cultic functions, the rules of membership within these federal organizations and their self-representation in coinages and inscriptions. On the level of political and financial management, we are dealing with federal officials and the festivities organized by them. Our paper aims to give a detailed overview of the Syrian imperial cult related not only to one specific site, but in the context of a large and culturally complex area.