Programme Colloquium on March 2020

The programme of the second MAP colloquium, “Naming and Mapping the Gods in the Ancient Mediterranean. Spaces, Mobilities, Imaginaries”, is now available on the conference website! It takes place from March 25 to 27 at the Maison de la Recherche of the University Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, with about a hundred participants (communications and posters) divided into six sessions.

You can find it by clicking on the following link, which redirects you to the colloquium website: https://mappinggods.sciencesconf.org/resource/page?id=2&forward-action=page&forward-controller=resource&lang=en

The Ancient Mediterranean is a world full of gods. Far from being confined to their sanctuaries, the gods are rooted in the human environment in multiple ways: towns, crossroads, borders and boundaries, forests, mountains, seas and many other spaces where they continue to dwell. Equally, they colonise imaginary spaces, when poets and authors evoke their living areas or those that they move through on their different adventures. It is therefore logical that specialists on the Antiquity have studied the inscription of the divine in space for a long time already. In this perspective, the conference Naming and Mapping the gods in the Ancient Mediterranean. Spaces, Mobilities, Imaginaries hopes to bring together the competences and specialties of multiple disciplines – archaeology, history, geography, anthropology, history of religions, philology, reception, social network analysis – in order to consider new documentation corpora concerning the intersection between the divine and space. Subsequently, this intersection invokes a multitude of questions, which are given in the lines of approach below.

Furthermore, the conference aims to differentiate itself by proposing an innovative angle of approach, inspired by the themes of the ERC MAP project: the intersection between the spaces and designations of the gods. The ways of naming the divine powers, given that they are envisaged as ways to define, characterise, differentiate, but also to connect, effectively constitute many indexes of a dynamic and complex “mapping” of the divine. In this regard, many points have been proposed: Space as an onomastic trait, Naming the space of the gods, The ways of presenting the gods in space, Putting the gods and places in equation, Sanctuaries and the emergence of towns, Urban “religions”.