From space to Place: The making of temples

Abstract

This paper investigates temple-building traditions using concepts of space and place, exploring various perspectives of temple placemaking in archaeological, textual and ethnographic data. The study first looks at temple-building practices in Mesopotamia and South Asia, before exploring the nature of temple-building traditions in the 2nd and 1st millennium BCE southern Levant. From Mesopotamia, a unique temple foundation ritual from the 1st millennium BCE is analyzed in order to provide one perspective on how a space is turned into sacred place. The study then focuses on the role that sacred models (mandalas) play in building and conceptualizing temples in South Asian traditions, as well as how ritual dances generate demarcated ritual places. Using and applying various ideas encountered in the first two case studies, the article then investigates the Bronze and Iron Age archaeological data of the Levant for traces of sacred placemaking. Amongst the various observations on how Levantine temples were conceptualized as places, the study identifies a fundamental distinction between institutionalized and non-institutionalized temple-building traditions.