Why did Charles love this book?
Dr. Mario Baghos, a Professor at the University of Notre Dame in Sydney, Australia, herein addresses the extent to which religion functioned in ancient and medieval cities, and how select cities from the ancient Near East to Christian Rome and Constantinople served as imagines et axes mundi (images and centers of the world).
Professor Baghos deals successively with Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and how pagan rulers built their capital cities and placed the temples of their key deities in strategic locations to emphasize their divine connections. He then deals with Hebrew and Christian theology, and how their beliefs differed from paganism; and how the conversion of Constantine to Christianity altered the way rulers related to the divine, and how it changed the way cities were constructed with churches focused upon Christ as the pantocrator and ecosystemic agent and rulers as merely agents of the true God.
The book offers…
1 author picked From the Ancient Near East to Christian Byzantium as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
This book combines concepts from the history of religions with Byzantine studies in its assessments of kings, symbols, and cities in a diachronic and cross-cultural analysis. The work attests, firstly, that the symbolic art and architecture of ancient cities-commissioned by their monarchs expressing their relationship with their gods-show us that religiosity was inherent to such enterprises. It also demonstrates that what transpired from the first cities in history to Byzantine Christendom is the gradual replacement of the pagan ruler cult-which was inherent to city-building in antiquity-with the ruler becoming subordinate to Christ; exemplified by representations of the latter as the…