Nicola Laneri is a professor at the University of Catania and is the Director of the School of Religious Studies at CAMNES (Florence). He taught at the University of Chicago, the Middle Eastern Technical University of Ankara and the Oriental Institute of Naples. Principal Investigator of the project PRIN 2020 (MUR) - Godscapes: Modeling Second Millennium BCE Polytheisms in the eastern Mediterranean. Since 2022, he is the director of the Baghdad Urban Archaeological Project (BUAP) linked to the excavation at Tell Muhammad (Iraq).
Chiara Pappalardo is research associate in Archaeology of the Ancient Near East at the University of Catania, where she obtained her PhD with a dissertation titled Visible Dead: Ancestral Landscapes in Prehistory between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East.
As a member of the project Godscapes: Modeling Second Millennium BCE Polytheisms in the Eastern Mediterranean, her current focus is the analysis of the material data related to religiosity in the Levant during the second millennium BCE through a semantic approach.
Abstrakt
The Project ‘Godscapes: Modeling Second Millennium BCE Polytheisms in the Eastern Mediterranean’ aims at defining the basic material elements occurred in structuring forms of complex polytheisms practiced in the Levant during the Second Millennium BCE. In order to do so, we are trying to disentangle the new elements from the traditional aspects that had a long-term tradition throughout the second millennium BCE in framing religious architecture, funerary traditions, religious texts, iconographic elements. Based on these theoretical premises, the project proposes an innovative application of the artificial intelligence, namely the Semantic Web, to build ‘The Godscapes Ontology’ (TGO) through a deconstruction process of the elements recognizable in four pivotal aspects associated with material religiosity: religious architecture, religious iconography, funerary rituals/beliefs, and religious texts. After introducing the project’s scope and methodology, the paper will present the conceptual model for TGO, and the knowledge graphs resulting from the Godscapes dataset, mapping how various aspects of human life and knowledge are related to each other in the construction of religious belief, that is considered as a co-product of the enactment of ritual behaviors, as reconstructed from material correlates recognizable in the archaeological context, and cognitive representations that are especially embedded in the iconographic representation of other-than-human beings. Preliminary results highlight the potential of TGO to aid researchers in the understanding of religious phenomena by not only reconstructing the inherent missing information within the data, but also by delivering a powerful tool to query and analyse them.