Monsters and Animals in Ancient Culture and Religion

Non-human and near-human creatures inhabited art, myth and scripture across ancient Mediterranean cultures. This volume assembles a truly interdisciplinary collection of contributions: some treat scriptural texts and some focus on art; some treat individual creatures (the snake, the horse, the crocodile), while others consider animals across the whole of a religious structure. All, however, trace the influence of ideas across Mediterranean cultures, demonstrating diffusion through contact, cultural influence and common patterns of thought.

The contributions are presented in four sections: the first asks what makes an animal sacred, looking at both religious practice and written texts; the second section explores the idea of hybridity, drawing on visual material and exploring the boundaries between animal, monster and human in Greek and Near Eastern religious thought; the third section looks at the topic of the monster in more detail, tackling questions of definition and explaining the role of monstrosity in religious thought, in the Mesopotamian, Assyrian and Greek traditions. The final section collects five synoptic studies of the animal and the monstrous across the Zoroastrian, Biblical, Christian, classical and Quranic traditions.

Sian Lewis is Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of St Andrews, UK. Her publications include News and Society in the Greek Polis (1996), Greek Tyranny (2010) and a collection of essays Ancient Tyranny (2006); she has also written extensively on Greek gender and iconography, including The Athenian Woman: an iconographic handbook (2002) and (as co-editor) The World of Greek Vases (2010).

Sam Newington is Programme Co-ordinator in Christian and Religious Studies at the University of Aberdeen, UK. She has published ’Titans and Giants in Greek and Biblical Narratives’, in Stuckenbruck, L.T., Goff, M. & Durkin-Meisterernst, D. (eds), Ancient Tales of Giants from Qumran and Turfan (2015) and ’Phrygian Kingdom’, in Dalziel, N. & MacKenzie, J. (eds), The Encyclopaedia of Empire (2015).

Loren Stuckenbruck is an historian of early Christianity and Second Temple Judaism, and is currently professor of New Testament Studies at the University of Munich, Germany.