Religion and the Economics of the Sea
at the Bronze Age-Iron Age transition
Barbara Kowalzig, NYU
Monday, April 23
5PM in HUMN 135
The paper explores fundamentally new conceptions of maritime economic and social connectivity taking shape at the Bronze Age-Iron Age transition in Greece and the Near East. According religion a central role in this process, it examines changing attitudes towards, and uses of, the sea emerging from the ever-growing depths of ‘Dark Age’ archaeology. These may offer a key to understanding how myths, rituals and cults tied into the Epic cycles come to structure the formation of what I tentatively term ‘cabotage religion’ – a broadly diffused maritime belief system bound up with geography, ecology and the rhythms of navigation, underlying the workings of seaborne networks over time, their stability and fragility as inherited sets of maritime knowledge in Mediterranean societies lasting well beyond antiquity.