"...Now the wanderer lifts his right hand to his forehead and makes the sign of the cross when passing this ambrosial place": churches and their builders in the late antique Near East

The talk focuses on church building in the Late Roman Near East, particularly in Gerasa in the Decapolis region, modern northern Jordan. When studying urban development we sometimes get access to the history of individuals. Through this evidence it often becomes clear that it to a large extent was individuals who shaped groups, spoke for groups or simply overruled groups often through generous donations for buildings which were prominently situated in the urban landscape. Euergetism of this sort was certainly very common for the period in concern and an inherent part of how Roman society functioned, but it has not been considered in detail how this phenomenon was used specifically to shape the image of the learned person – also in a Christian context. In the period when the earliest canonical churches and cathedrals were constructed, pagan life was flourishing as well and pagans and Christians lived side by side – more or less peacefully. This talk attempts to contextualise some early churches and their builders within their local and imperial contexts and understand what these buildings were meant to convey about their donators to their surrounding world.

Rubina Raja is associate professor in Classical Archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her area of specialisation is the eastern regions of the Hellenistic and Roman world and their historical and archaeological contexts. She has among other aspects worked on urban development in the eastern Roman Empire and recently published the monograph Urban development and regional identity in the eastern Roman provinces: Aphrodisias, Ephesos, Athens, Gerasa (Copenhagen University Press 2012). Furthermore she is currently working on the religious life and cults in the Hellenistic and Roman Near East. Since 2010 she heads the Danish-German archaeological project in Jerash, Jordan jointly with Professor Achim Lichtenberger, Ruhr-Universität Bochum. The project explores crucial aspects of the city’s settlement history in order to trace the various cultural influences over time. She also directs the Palmyra Portrait Project together with lecturer Andreas Kropp, Nottingham University. This project focuses on the largest corpus of portrait sculpture outside of Rome itself and will among other things provide a searchable database of known palmyran portrait sculpture as well as contextualise this important material in its historical and archaeological environment.