Corinne Bonnet – författare

From Greece to Palmyra, Tyre or Babylon, the names of the gods, like 'Thundering Zeus', 'Three-faced Moon', 'Baal of the Force' or the enigmatic YHWH, reveal their history, family ties, fields of competence and capacity for action. Shared or specific, these names bring to light networks of gods: the Saviour gods, the Ancestral gods, the gods of a city or a family. Names tell stories about the relationship between men and gods, gods and places, places and cultures and so on. They show how gods travel and spread, how they appear and disappear, how they participate in the political, social, intellectual history of each community. Through the study of divine names, the twelve chapters of this book unfold a gallery of portraits that reveal the changing aspects of the divine throughout the ancient Mediterranean.

Ancient religions are definitely complex systems of gods, which resist our understanding. Divine names provide fundamental keys to gain access to the multiples ways gods were conceived, characterized, and organized. Among the names given to the gods many of them refer to spaces: cities, landscapes, sanctuaries, houses, cosmic elements. They reflect mental maps which need to be explored in order to gain new knowledge on both the structure of the pantheons and the human agency in the cultic dimension. By considering the intersection between naming and mapping, this book opens up new perspectives on how tradition and innovation, appropriation and creation play a role in the making of polytheistic and monotheistic religions.Far from being confined to sanctuaries, in fact, gods dwell in human environments in multiple ways. They move into imaginary spaces and explore the cosmos. By proposing a new and interdiciplinary angle of approach, which involves texts, images, spatial and archeaeological data, this book sheds light on ritual practices and representations of gods in the whole Mediterranean, from Italy to Mesopotamia, from Greece to North Africa and Egypt. Names and spaces enable to better define, differentiate, and connect gods.

Divine Names are a key component in the communication between humans and gods in Antiquity. Their complexity derives not only from the impressive number of onomastic elements available to describe and target specific divine powers, but also from their capacity to be combined within distinctive configurations of gods. The volume collects 36 essays pertaining to many different contexts – Egypt, Anatolia, Levant, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome – which address the multiple functions and wide scope of divine onomastics. Scrutinized in a diachronic and comparative perspective, divine names shed light on how polytheisms and monotheisms work as complex systems of divine and human agents embedded in an historical framework. Names imply knowledge and play a decisive role in rituals; they move between cities and regions, and can be translated; they interact with images and reflect the intrinsic plurality of divine beings. This vivid exploration of divine names pays attention to the balance between tradition and innovation, flexibility and constraints, to the material and conceptual parameters of onomastic practices, to cross-cultural contexts and local idiosyncrasies, in a word to human strategies for shaping the gods through their names.

Divine epithets serve a variety of purposes, with the most frequent being those related to the locations and functions of the gods. Epithets derived from individual names, however, have received less attention. While few studies have focused on the Greek world, research on the Latin-speaking Mediterranean is still sporadic. Such “anthropophoric” onomastic attributes have often been interpreted as related to the name of a cult founder. Yet, such a practice rather suggests various forms of relationships between the god and the individual (or group) whose name shapes the epithet. These dynamics of “individualisation” of a deity require further exploration. This collective book provides, for the first time, a detailed catalog of 398 Greek and Latin occurrences from the broad circum-Mediterranean area (including Greece, Anatolia, the Levant, North Africa, the Iberian peninsula, Central Europe, Italy, and Rome), related to 45 divinities and 191 different epithets. Multiple case studies ranging from the 5th or 4th century BCE to the 4th century CE, examined through different chronological, geographical, and thematic perspectives, offer valuable insights into local and regional strategies of religious appropriation.