British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

BA PDF Symposium 2004: Abstracts

21 April 2004

Dr Eberhard Sauer

Ancient Fundamentalism

Is knowledge of the distant past still relevant today? The events of 11 September, the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan in Afghanistan and a series of other violent or destructive acts, either perpetrated by religious fundamentalists or in response to threats posed by fundamentalism, have confronted us more than at any time in the recent past with the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism. In order to fully understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to be aware of the wider context including the origins. My paper will focus on the first time when systematic image destruction affected a geographically extensive area, namely when the Roman Empire and its early medieval successor states were Christianised. This was arguably the most destructive episode in the history of religious art and architecture the world had seen up to then. This widespread destruction has left permanent traces in the form of mutilated religious imagery. While these form a powerful complement to written sources they have never been studied in a wider geographical context. Natural sanctuaries escaped because of their indestructibility and continued to attract veneration in Christianised and Islamised form. The lecture will provide selected examples for images which have been subject to violent attack and the clues to the identity of the perpetrators. It will also try to answer the questions whether or not religious fundamentalism is a phenomenon linked to the emergence of monotheistic religions with strong missionary tendencies and whether or not the past can help us to put the present into context.

Eberhard W. Sauer has held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Keble College and at the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford from 2001 to 2003. He has studied at the Universities of Tübingen, Freiburg i.Br. and Oxford, and taught at Leicester. He is now a lecturer in Classical Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh’s School of History and Classics (as well as an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Leicester’s School of Archaeology & Ancient History). His interests encompass not only religious, but also military history and many other aspects of Roman culture. He has excavated for several years, with the support of the British Academy, a Roman fortress of the invasion period at Alchester in Oxfordshire.