UC Berkeley

In the ancient Near East, the Sinai, the Negev, southern Jordan and northwestern Arabia

constituted a marginal and peripheral landscape, a liminal land considered both lifeless

and teeming with fantastic creatures and divine powers. However, the position of this

region between the more populated areas of Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and the

Arabian Peninsula marked this landscape as a crossroads for materials and people, a

movement of phenomena perpetuated mainly by local mobile pastoral communities. As

such, roadside ritual comprised a major expression and practice of multiple ideologies

about the land from earliest times. Sites of ritual along roadsides harnessed multiple,

overlapping, and intersecting senses of liminality, the potency and danger of being

inbetween, to lay claim to the land and offer protection against human and suprahuman

dangers. In this context, roadside ritual sites operated as confluences of interaction for

multiple communities and religious traditions in this region. The ways in which these

communities understood and experienced this landscape often drastically differed, and

the interaction of these communities generated new and distinct ways of seeing.

This dissertation utilizes textual, ethnographic, and archaeological materials to explore

these phenomena in the sixth through the first millennium BCE, with a focus on the early

first millennium BCE. This period sees the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in ancient

Iraq, which came to dominate much of the ancient Near East in the ninth, eighth, and seventh

centuries BCE. Imperial domination inscribed the land with new settlement patterns,

monumental architecture, and fortifications that recursively interacted with the ancient

meshworks of pilgrimage, subsistence, memory, and liminality already engraved within

the landscape. Two ritual sites, Kuntillet ʾAjrûd in the northeastern Sinai (eighth century

BCE) and Ḥorvat Qitmit in the northern Negev (seventh century BCE) act as case studies that

both manifest these ancient traditions of movement and interaction and presage their

acute intensification in later Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Early Islamic, and Ottoman

contexts.