Publisher's Synopsis
Discurso, espacio y poder en las religiones antiguas aims to reflect on how the wielders of power, be they religious, social or political, shape the discourses that justify their power within the framework of a society or a specific group, and how space participates in these discourses. Intellectuals, aristocrats, holy men or even the dead all needed to shape a discourse that would allow them to justify their hierarchies, whether they were internal or common to all of society, to reach a social consensus and to sustain them over time. The forms in which power used religion to express itself were quite diverse, such as ritual violence, martyrdom, sacrifice, or even divine trickery. Sometimes certain spaces became places whose political and religious control brought about conflicts, whose resolution was found through the legitimisation generated by the complex theological discourse, which reinforced the extraordinary qualities of the gods to reaffirm their authority, or through the cohesive value of the rites. This volume analyses these questions through fourteen works by sixteen researchers from different institutions. It includes studies carried out with materials from a wide range of sources: epigraphy, the archaeological record, and literary sources.
