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Ritual Dynamics in the Eastern
Mediterranean: Case Studies in Ancient
Greece and Asia Minor
Angelos Chaniotis
1. mediterranean rituals 1
One of the many monuments the Athenians proudly showed
their youth and the visitors to their city was the ship with which
Theseus was believed to have sailed to Crete. In the course of
the centuries the ship’s wooden parts rotted, and the Athenians
had to replace them, providing ancient philosophers with an
unsolved puzzled: did Theseus’ ship remain the same even
though its rotten components were continually being replaced? 2
I cannot help thinking about this puzzle when I am confronted
with diachronic studies on ‘the’ Mediterranean. Can the Mediterranean
be a somehow distinctive object of historical and
cultural study, given the continual change of its living (and
therefore, ephemeral) components (human populations and
their cultures, animals, and plants)? Or is the Mediterranean
as a historical and cultural entity just a construct of the collective
imagination of scholars who contribute to journals, books,
or conferences that have the name ‘Mediterranean’ in their title?
1 The views expressed here stem from the project ‘Ritual and Communication
in the Greek cities and in Rome’, which is part of the interdisciplinary
projects ‘Ritualdynamik in traditionellen und modernen Gesellschaften’
funded by the Ministry of Science of Baden-Württemberg (1999–2000) and
‘Ritualdynamik: Soziokulturelle Prozesse in historischer und kulturvergleichender
Perspektive’ funded by the German Research Council (2002–5);
references to my own preliminary studies on relevant subjects are, unfortunately,
unavoidable. I have profited greatly from theoretical discussions with
my colleagues in this project.
2 Plu. Theseus 23.