The Urban Factor: Hermeneutical Backgrounds to a Void in History of Religion.

The present interest in urban religion, that is, the co-development of religion and city, or more precisely, religions and urbanities (that constitute places as cities, see [85] and [134]) is not just a product of the "spatial turn", which was initiated above all by the critique of the capitalist employment of urban space but was quickly followed by conceptual and methodological developments in many disciplines. It is, as I will argue in this article, also a reaction to a neglect of cities as specific places of religious developments and driving forces in religious change. This is, as one might arguably claim, by itself a result of a specifically urban development in religious thought, which located original religious experience outside the density and noise of urban space. From the Babel narrative in the Tenakh to the profiling of Christian gospels along the line of pro or contra urban adherences ([66]; [104]), Jewish and Christian traditions are substantially committed here. Buddha's asceticism, too, is placed outside of urban density and comfort (e. g. Majjhima-Nikāya 12, trsl. [34], 4, 392 – 394). Such imaginations have imprinted the very sources of the historiography of religion and hence the academic accounts.

In the following, I will start from textbook knowledge formed in the formative phase of History of Religion as an academic discipline and compare this with contemporary accounts. This will be confronted with two different lines of research. First, urban history. How was religion, how was the "religious factor" seen in the history of urbanization? As I will show, a distinctive picture emerges, which attributes a precise place to religion in early cities, a picture however that is largely seen as irrelevant for later and more recent developments. This, in a further cross-check, will be confronted with the vibrant research on contemporary religion and the latter's view of the religious past.

How has this worked out in topical research in the ancient Mediterranean basin, Greco-Roman urbanizations and their religions in particular? A brief sketch of problems and suggestions will be given in the final part.

In 1925, the Textbook of the history of religions, originally edited by the Dutch religious scholar Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye (1848 – 1920), appeared in its fourth edition ([18]). This was a European project, written by leading experts of the time. The work was committed to the search for origins that could also explain later, even present-day things. In the previous editions, these origins were no longer sought in the early advanced civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, which were also mentioned in the Bible. Only recently, in the second half of the nineteenth century, had the hitherto dominant short biblical chronology of world history been broken up in Europe, in which not even six thousand years had passed. The history of religion had also discovered in the soul a scientifically tangible element not only of psychology and established it in "animism" as a metaphor for little differentiated ideas of the addressees of religious communication. Pre-animism, the experience of non-human, diffuse power that can be localized in objects, places or actions, as published by the British philosopher Robert Ranulph Marett (1866 – 1943) in 1900, once again placed religion on broader and earlier ground. Now, religious practices and ideas that ethnology, historiography or simply missionaries and colonial officials had observed or reconstructed could be put into a grid of ascending stages, regardless of their chronology. Not so much in the study of religion itself – it remained a small subject of limited external impact – as in the sociology of Emile Durkheim, the national economy of Max Weber, in historiography, ethnology, philologies, art and music studies, indeed: in the public determination of what was understood as "culture" as increasingly determining life, religion became a factor of the highest importance.

In the textbook, the basic function was quickly outlined: First of all, religious strategies of action and explanation were of paramount importance in securing the "external conditions of life", in agriculture and craft production, where there was a lack of specialized scientific and technical knowledge. Beyond that, however, it was the development of the most diverse "ideals" that built on religiosity. In their mirror, man recognized and recognizes his limitations, his "suffering". To gain "redemption" from this drives the development of religion. The task of the history of religion was to historically order and systematize these ideas and the god concepts and practices associated with them. The division into "religions" was the decisive instrument for this: Religions that first appeared as spatially closed cultures, as in the case of "Egyptian", "Greek", "Chinese" or "North American religion", then as mobile individual or world religions that transcended geographical spaces. In the already quoted introductory chapter of "The World of Appearances and Ideas of Religion" ([65]), which precedes the chapters on "The Religion of Primitive Peoples", "The Chinese", "The Japanese", "The Egyptians", "Semitic Peoples in the Near East" and finally "Islam" in the first volume, there follow corresponding paragraphs on: "Nature and Spirits", "the human person" (der Mensch), "Gods and Deity", "Cultus", "Mythology and Theology", "Worldview and Fate of Humans" and finally "Piety". Where does the city appear? After the discussion of the relationship between the cult of the gods and the cult of ancestors (the latter includes the treatment of the house, saints and relics), there follow remarks on "special gods" (deifying activities ad hoc, "momentary gods"), "function and nature gods" (social gods included) and then "local gods", before moving into the discussion of polytheism and monotheism. It is in the context of local gods that the word city is mentioned for the first (and for a long time last) time: in Egypt as in Mesopotamia, cults of local gods often persist even where the places rise to become cities. Where cities merge into larger empires, these – now large – local gods become important elements of empire-wide polytheisms ([65], 73). Religion is religion of the individual and of the community, but the community is understood either as a village community or from the perspective of the "state", whether in Central Europe, North America or East Asia. History of religion is – this too must be said – from its emergence in the nineteenth century a comparative and global historical discipline.

Almost a hundred years later, the historical perspective has not fundamentally changed. In a "History of Religions from the Stone Age to the Present Day" published in 2018, the argumentation in the first part progresses via burials and ancestor worship to concepts of souls and God, before turning to ritual "forms of interaction", sacred spaces and times and myths as an expression of early world views. "City" appears at first only in the connection of city states and capital, then later alone as the antithesis of empire ([69], 23 – 24 and 52). The social and spatial dimension of religion is introduced with the concept of settling down; caves and the – still to be discussed in detail – Anatolian Göbekli Tepe, monumental stone buildings and public squares lead to the association of temples and the identity of a "community" ([69], 76 – 84). This does not fall behind the state of specialized research on the religious history of individual city-states. Especially in the study of ancient Mediterranean religions in a world full of cities – up to two thousand are seriously estimated ([139], 365 with n. 31) – it is always about political identity, which is created by religion. It is about civil religion, not urban religion.

Was the city simply unimportant for religion? A look at the handbooks of other schools of religious studies also seems to confirm this. Mircea Eliade's multi-volume history of religious ideas, for example. The Romanian historian of religion (1907 – 1986), who first taught in Paris and later in Chicago, investigates the content and significance of religious testimonies. Not surprisingly, he traces technical and economic developments. Settling-down marks an important turning point. The emergence of texts that have survived to the present day, is another turning point, historically linked to Mesopotamia and Egypt. Man's position in the cosmos is a central theme in such texts. It is expressed in myths of the creation of man. It is further unfolded in stories featuring the various roles in society, especially those of rulers. Cities play no role either as objects or factors of religious thought. With one exception: in a posthumous addendum, the fortieth chapter, the American scholar of Ancient Americas David [23]).

A perusal of the "Religions of Mankind" series shows that cities – unlike land (or springs or mountains) play no role either as a factor in development or as sites of particular forms of the religion under discussion. When we look into a handbook of the Italian tradition of Storia delle religioni, the most important reason for the disappearance of cities not only in compact reference works, but also in extensive books on individual religious lines of development and religions becomes clearer. The historical approach aiming at the comparison not only of individual religious phenomena but of systems, that is, aiming at the comparison of religions, isolates certain data as religious data. It must emphasize their "relative autonomy" and "self-control" ([37], 7; [38]). In this line of reasoning, such a restricted treatment is the only way to avoid misunderstanding religious lifestyle as a direct consequence of socio-cultural conditions. Such a decision is certainly acceptable but problematic for the question I am pursuing: it is not about religion as such, but about when and where people resort to religious communication – and what that makes of their lifeworld and especially their living together and their choice of urban forms of life. This may begin with the use of urban symbols in religious rituals, but it goes much further. It goes as far as the question of what the city should be in the first place. What is good and bad about it: it is precisely the latter that is extremely present in many religious narratives. The Babel narrative of Genesis (Gn 11) was certainly not written and handed down by city fans. It is precisely the critical attitude to life in the city by religious actors that may be one reason why the authors of the history of religion based on such texts could easily ignore the urban as a factor of historical change within religion. This also supported constructions of religion as a basically pre-modern phenomenon.

Religious events and institutions throughout history, indeed deities as founding figures, play a major role in many stories and chronicles that urban authors have told of their own cities (e. g. [103]). This finding in their "sources" directed the attention of European urban history research in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries much more intensively to the religious than was the case conversely in religious studies (e. g. [114]). Even if the urban historians perceived the cities of their present as secularized, the authors were nevertheless aware of some religious elements in their past (overview in [86]).

To a large extent, this was the case with the Paris-born historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830 – 1889). He had begun his academic career with theses on Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth in the house – and in the city. This study led him directly to his larger work on the ancient, that is, the Greco-Roman city, written in Strasbourg. This begins with an extensive treatment of religious practices and, most importantly, ideas, before moving on to the family and the city itself. Originally, religion was exclusively domestic. The family gathered around the hearth in the house and around the family tomb close to the front of the house. Such a cult was not public, but was conducted in the foyer, literally the "hearth" of the house, at an altar that was invisible to those standing outside. This cult was not regulated, each family could do as they wished. The family itself was constituted by this cult, by religion, as the second book describes in detail: Family was whoever celebrated with each other here. Far more than a nuclear family, this could be a whole clan, comprising thousands of people: a self-sufficient society. Essential for urban development is now the assumption that the size of societies develops parallel to the horizon of their religious concepts. Cult on a higher level also made new types of societies possible, concretely in Athens and Rome – and Fustel always remains concretely related to this Mediterranean antiquity – in the form of associations such as phratries or curiae. The principle of such cult remains the same: a common meal is prepared at the altar and is therefore "sacred".

How is this expansion possible? From the beginning, says Fustel, there were two different religions. One is based on the experience of one's own life and self and locates the divine forces in one's own soul and consequently in the ancestors, the heroes and lares. The second relates to the wider world, the external, physical forces that make life possible. Accordingly, the divine forces here are located in external objects. But these objects are also endowed with the same kind of personality and will that the deities possess in human actors and actresses. This duplicity already applies to domestic religion. The uniformity of living conditions and shared language produce identical deities. And when, under such circumstances, families discover that, although they have different ancestors, they nevertheless have similar and presumably identical deities, the prerequisite for a new, comprehensive society was thus given. This was true not least because this second type of deity also brought with it a different type of morality. The adoption of common deities advertised hospitality even for strangers and cohesion. The domestic "foyer" was transformed into a small extra-domestic shrine, eventually into a veritable temple. This was a clear sign of a larger society.

And so a certain form of city also emerged. The basic units do not merge, but come together at a higher level: Families grow together into curiae, curiae into tribes and tribes into the city. They all remain individual and independent entities, each held together by their own form of cult, their common religion. The city was not a union of individuals, but an alliance of groups. To hold them together, material forces are not enough. The strongest bond imaginable was a shared faith, without this having to be clear to those involved. The sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858 – 1917) was Fustel's disciple with his idea of a social bond created by intense feelings in communal rituals ([31] [1912]). The result is a city that is a gathering of people who share the same patron deities and perform rituals at the same altar – in the case of Rome, the temple of Vesta. And it is, in Fustel's ideal-typical construction, the de facto political and religious community (cité) that meets in banquets and feasts that decides to found a proper city (ville) – and later to venerate the initiator of this founding as a holy man. And that beats all remaining independence of the upstream levels: The double combination of political and religious authority, of magistrates and priests, leads to absolute rule even over the individual.

Fustel, however, sees not only the beginning but also the end of this religiously determined city. The religious generalization process leads beyond the expansion possibilities of the cities, which can only encompass a small minority of the total population. People are struggling, without knowing it, for a larger and more comprehensive structure than the city can offer. City crises led to a transformation of Rome into an empire, a transformation that was again first a rethinking and destroyed the balance of the "two" religions. Tension grew between ideas of the divine and divine reason on the one hand and the deceased ancestors on the other, just as it did between unreflective cult and philosophy.

Where Fustel du Coulanges had asked about the relationship between religion and society and its significance for the city, half a century later Max Weber (1864 – 1920), one of the founders of Sociology, born in Erfurt and researching in Heidelberg, asked about the relationship between economy and society. Well acquainted with ancient cities and the work of Fustel, Weber wanted to understand the differences between the high and late medieval "occidental city" and ancient oriental and (especially) Asian cities. Ultimately, he was concerned with the question of how precisely this city "had developed a self-governing urban bourgeoisie" and could become the primary arena of rational gainful employment and capitalism, which shaped his present and its cities, as he had also experienced them in the USA. In this context, the city was not his actual object, but the historical site that allowed him to observe the historical complexity of the interplay of the most diverse developments and social spheres. Because Weber wanted to explore in his universal-historical investigation why something happened in one city or group of cities that did not happen in all the others, he was interested in differentiation even in generalizations. Slavic and Chinese villages also had walls, agriculture characterized agrarian towns from antiquity to the present, specialization could also take place in the service of a prince. Self-government could affect only individual districts or be absent altogether. The paths of urbanization (not a word from Weber) could be very different. This also applied to religious matters. In many respects of great importance for lifestyle and social development in Weber's analyses, it hardly plays a role in his depiction of the city.

In ancient, but also in Asian cities, common cult plays the most important role for the cohesion of family groups. This even proves to be a hindrance. Actual or even imagined descent groups, including Indian "castes", can be very exclusive. Marriage and some forms of economic cooperation, but especially eating together, are affected by this. Ancestor worship does not bring people together. If the barriers are too high – in Chinese cities or among European Jews – ties to those living elsewhere, outside the city and in villages of origin, prevent a city community from forming. This weakened in ancient cities to such an extent that the warrior nobility in particular managed what many European medieval cities then also managed: a "fraternization" (Verbrüderung, a familial metaphor for communitization) that created appropriate religious symbols and in the long run was able to turn the community into a legal entity ([131] [1922], 744 – 745). This also existed elsewhere, but Christianity, which was shared by (almost) everyone, made it possible that such a protective deity did not simply stand next to others, clan gods for example. In this constellation, individuals, not just family groups, could also become members, citizens of the city.

What appears to be an almost organic development here was, however, historically often a confrontation. In many places it was kings and princes who founded cities as instruments of rule and profit. Those who were affected by "legitimate", royal, princely, episcopal rule and its officials, especially the middle classes who thrived on urban trade and production, united against such rule and its religious symbols. In the Middle Ages, then, the oath god necessary for such a conspiracy was the same; in antiquity, on the other hand, it was precisely such illegitimate rulers, "tyrants", who were "promoters of new emotional cults". The balance of interests between city dwellers and landowners, city and nobility took on very different forms; but it was precisely the religiously secured privileges of clerics and monasteries, but also Islamic endowments of rural and urban productive capital, that marked lasting lines of conflict until secularization. This had not been necessary in ancient cities: It was the city-dominating nobles who simply filled the priesthoods.

Where religious changes made coexistence in urban density and diversity of origin possible in the first place for Fustel de Coulanges, for Max Weber religious traditions are rather obstacles that only gradually become obsolete. Only if such a religion serves as a basis for a new form of specifically urban communitization is it conducive for the formation of cities. But many cities manage without this kind of social bond and political formation. And beyond that? Only rarely have urban researchers thought about the history of religion in Weber's global-historical breadth. That is changing. Not only ecological, economic, and political factors are proving important against the background of our own urban experiences. What atmospheres were experienced in early cities? What images of the city prevailed in the minds of its inhabitants? Not religious institutions, but religious actions, rituals thus move into the center of attention. But what do these rituals achieve? Although only a few could actually participate – one, at most two percent of the inhabitants of Maya cities were at least present as observers – solidarity is said to have been generated on a broad scale ([9], 106). Does fear in the face of destruction and violence in such rituals lead to bonding effects ([9], 107)? Which world relations are promoted in this way?

The findings are clearer when looking at better documented, written material. Uruk in the fourth millennium, the Chinese Zhungzhou and Yinxu in the second millennium BCE, Maya cities of the lowlands in the first millennium CE, and Cuzco in the Andes in the second millennium CE all show that many information technologies and the very different techniques of storing information (such as phonological writing, iconography and nodal writing, but often also the materials that suggest such different techniques in the first place) were primarily urban inventions. They allowed the management of growing social and economic complexity, they enabled and demanded accountability of administration. In short, they allowed control ([62], 225). This is then also true in the religious sphere. It could be documented who had donated what or who had participated in which ritual, indeed who was a member of a religious group. References to the subversive or counterfactual use of scripture, from prophets to oppositional wall graffiti (see [72]; [50]) are missing. But it becomes clear that it was not only urban administration and celestial authorities that controlled religious actors in this way. Those who had writing techniques at their disposal could also control the deities, record them by naming them or even create them and thus demonstrate power before other people as well as before the gods ([62], 218).

How have religious constellations changed as a result? This question is hardly ever asked. In general, the (pre-urban) form of religion is assumed to be unchanged. Studies of early Islamic Baghdad, Jerusalem, and Cahokia on the Mississippi, which flourished between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, show how memories and architecture are linked. The architectural design of cities expresses the respective cosmic order. But aren't such cosmologies anything but stable and are subject to frequent change, often even within the same generation of rulers? And how does this level of content come together with the traditions and constraints of material design? Such questions remain unanswered.

The usual models of urban development contain a final ambivalence, that is, the question of domination and inequality. Certainly, cities in Mesopotamia as in Central and South America offered security but preserved old and created new inequalities. And religion could be both cooperative and conflictual in power relations ([35], 305 – 307). But the very talk of "rulers" throughout is, where it becomes clear, a problematic simplification. The cities of the Indus civilization in what is now Pakistan (2600 – 1900 BCE) and the so-called "early historic cities" of the alluvial plain between the Ganges and Yamuna in India were places that do not reveal palaces and reflected a complex economic and social composition ([115]). Greek cities show monumentalization without strong rulers and examples such as Jenne-jeno on the middle Niger and East African cities such as Nubian Kerma (from c. 3000 BCE) argue against the identification of urbanization and centralized power. The often claimed connection between kingship, religious institutions and centralized administration does not hold here ([116], 383). Religion can even play a role in preventing the division of labor and social differentiation from turning into power hierarchies, for example through the formulation of castes or guilds or through political and religious ideologies that suppress the display of wealth ([116], 388, 391). Especially the capitals of large empire-buildings show a particularly high degree and differences in identities, ethnicities and languages. Even in the religious sphere, there are strong social differences and high specialization. The assumption that religion and rule are inseparable does not fit in with this.

This is important. In a remarkable review of historical evidence since the last Ice Age, David Graeber and David Wengrow have fundamentally challenged the assumption of a regular connection between urban life form and hierarchical inequality ([46]). But this is precisely a background assumption that underlies many studies, not only in Yoffee's otherwise impressive synopsis. And it remains unchallenged. Many histories of religion see themselves as histories of culture and civilization but make no reference to the city and urbanity as perhaps the most momentous cultural technique of the last ten thousand years. So it is not surprising that the equation "city equals rule" is easily transformed into "urban religion equals instrument of rule". The great American sociologist Robert Bellah (1927 – 2013) grandly asserted precisely this evolutionary sequence in his evolutionary outline of a history of religion from early human times to the so-called "Axial Age", the individual and ultimately "world religions" founded by prophets ([17]; cf. critique by [118]).

Bellah is interested in religious change, not the city. But as a sociologist of religion, he assumes a social evolution and its stages. Central to all later developments is the transition from chiefdoms to archaic states. The precarious dominance of the one who, through his munificence and no longer his family lineage, takes a leading role in a society of equals is replaced by a stratified society, a class society, in which typically martial success is transformed into hierarchical rule: a king whose rule is secured by a world view, a cosmology, which explains why human differences are "natural".

Already at the level of the chiefdoms, a momentous change occurs. The addressees of ritual acts become veritable deities. The understanding of new forms of human rule is unfolded in new conceptions of the non-human powerful beings. Momentary power gives way to a notion of permanent actors who dominate people and specific domains. Their actions are arbitrary, but also influenceable. Ritual strategies are adapted. These deities are "worshipped", the asymmetry of the human relationship to them is reflected in gestures of submission: one kneels or prostrates oneself. Those who worship them also try to connect with them, to share in their status ([17], 185 – 189). These new ideas also change religious rituals. A group can still get charged up in ecstatic rituals, but that is not central to the cult, to the worship. At the center is a mediator, and it is the ruler who can best clothe them ([17], 191, for the early state in Hawai'i). In the archaic "state", the king is a priest-king who can maintain the relationship with the gods or a god. To make this state permanent, this rule must be developed quickly and institutionalized more strongly ([17], 262 – 263).

In the archaic state, therefore, "gods" (Bellah uses the masculine form throughout) and worship reflect the hierarchical reality of society. Therefore, it is also possible to speak about society and rule no longer with the terminology and imagery of kinship, but in a religious language. In hierarchical society, monumental architecture is also possible, for which the necessary labor can now be mobilized. No wonder such monumentality serves ritual or royal purposes ([17], 212 – 214). But cities have also become possible. Either as city-states or as nodes in territorial states whose center, the court, is not located in a single city but moves through the territory.

Urban agglomerations are not what Bellah is interested in. More consequential for him is the development of writing, not from the city, but from the archaic state and its society that has become more complex. As a tool of a group of specialists, a scribal class, writing enables a systematization of thought. This is reflected, for example, in moral justifications of rule and the ruler's claim. But it also allows the claims formulated in this way to be turned against this rule and the society it has created. The Axial Age is approaching, with its scribes, prophets, philosophers and their ethical claims ([17], 263 – 264). For Bellah, none of this seems to have anything to do with the city.

What is the point of knowing today that religion has supported rule and that rule has been based on cities? Nothing! In the nation states of today, religion is at best a decorative – and probably illegitimate – decoration of rule or even the opposite of any urbanity, namely fundamentalism of uneducated hicks. Or to put it more delicately: a patriarchal protest movement (thus [90]). And cities are targets rather than supports of rule, at best bases of imperial foreign rule and primary military targets in case of conflict, as the Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine in February 2022 shows.

If cities are religiously relevant places, they are accorded this place in current research literature precisely because they are judged to be very different today than they were in the past. In the course of the industrialization, they were first radically secularized in Western Europe from the late eighteenth century, in North America from the late nineteenth century, and almost worldwide in the twentieth century (critical already [79], 41). And it is only in the globalized modernity of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in the flashpoints of worldwide mobility, increased diversity and placelessness, that we are supposed to observe their re-enchantment. That, at least, is the grand narrative that contemporary city-related disciplines are propagating. This is not a historical contribution in the strict sense. But fruitful this research is, and it would be a loss to ignore it.

A recent English-language handbook publication offers an overview. The editors' introduction leaves no doubt about the necessity of looking at urban development and religious development together: "Religion and cities have quite literally grown up together" ([29], 1). The reciprocity of interaction forms the basic assumption of the entire volume and applies especially historically, as the statement that the "co-production of religion and urban life has continued throughout history until the present time" makes clear ([29], 3). This agrees with a very similar conclusion of an article on religion in the "Handbook of Cities in World History" (which, incidentally, highlights how congruent urban and religious demarcations, identities and structures of rule are, [10], 190).

But what does this interaction look like? The authors refer here above all to religious self-interpretations of Jewish and Christian texts that link the task of religious lifestyle with urban welfare. But they also refer to central or even "holy cities" as the basis of religious traditions from Islam and Catholicism to Buddhists and Hindus. However, religious thinking with urban metaphors and utopias also quickly led to the highlighting of the ambivalence of cities. In their potential, but also in their chaos, they were just as suitable as metaphors for salvation as for sin, as an incentive for community building and land-grabbing in the "shining city on the mountain" as they were as a disease-creating breeding ground and symbol of the loss of social control. It is precisely the threats emanating from a city marked in this way that are still suitable today as motives for religious community building against this sinful city as a survival strategy in the city. But the authors also refer to Harvey [26] called for people to seek and rediscover God precisely in this environment ([29], 5 on [26]). The catalytic effect of this book on recent research on urban religion, they agree, can hardly be overestimated. It was directed above all against a sociology of the church that wanted to measure religion in aggregate numbers of members and ritual actors on the one hand and in the degree of individualization of religious ideas and practices on the other.

As in many contemporary studies, the focus of the handbook is on migration. Immigrants draw cultural boundaries and make urban space diverse. Above all, religious identities and their architectural visibility – even more than ethnic identities – are the decisive factor. This is not only about the addition of what is different, but also about the emergence of new differences within cultural boundaries, the so-called "superdiversity". The initial assertion of historical continuity is thus not deepened any further. Surprisingly, the editors' theologically accentuated interest in overcoming the theological dichotomy of dealing with the city takes center stage. Religious actors are expected to articulate religion in the awareness of its taking place in urban space. The editors' orientation is not surprising: just like urbanity, the question of living together under the conditions of urbanization, that is, "religion and city" as understood in the handbook is a topic that cannot ignore normative questions, the question of how we want to and should live together.

Unfortunately, the other contributions to the volume do not live up to the announcement of keeping the historical background in view, since memory and ritual connections to the past are often central in religious action ([28], 28). But many of the perspectives and questions raised in them are also historically important: the cosmopolitanism lived neighborly and reflected as such in Mumbai, the implicit display of religious preferences on house walls and shop fronts. Religious plurality and the incessant encounter of different things, as is visible here, is a fundamental question of religious history as well as the present. What different meanings and connections does architecture open up? How do urban infrastructures from canals to streets not only guide movements of religious actors, but also lead to the attribution of religious meanings? How do religious actors deal with ruins resulting from religious conflicts, why do they claim such places? What kind of urbanity prevails in those "cities" that move through Indonesia, for example, as sleeping and gathering places for a crowd of Muslims praying together that numbers in the tens of thousands? The case study on how religious actors deal with urban violence and the very limited presence of religious peace semantics in public space are just as relevant as the reflections on the theological approach to the current climate crisis. How does the change of perspective from a (too) static sustainability to a (more dynamic) resilience influence religious reflections that want to understand the now as kairos, as the "important moment to act"? To do so, one could return to the beginning, they would have to face their own ambivalent images of urban life as a scenario of doom or salvation. And they would have to face their own genesis, their co-evolution with the urban itself and its reflection. And for this, History of Religion and its inquiry into the "urban factor" would have to provide the foundations.

This background given, we need to return to the most consistent theorizing of religion in cities, namely research on the history of religion in cities of the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean. If we disregard the (unreflected) consistently urban focus of most antiquarian and historical accounts of ancient societies, a more general inquiry into urban religion was initiated by the book already presented in some detail, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges's La cité antique. In the History of Religion, however, his name is surprisingly absent even in the many studies of ancient religion, in which some of his ideas are so present. It is in this line of sustained, even if problematically narrow, reception that a term had been developed that seemed to have a larger potential, above all in the complex model of centers and peripheries proposed by François de Polignac for Greek politically independent cities (poleis) ([82]). The term "polis religion" has widely been used in order to capture the location of temples in critical, usually central places and the creation of public space for public rituals (e. g. [141], 65). This has led to a number of fruitful studies on political communication and the rise of ancient cities, but the focus has been on civic identity rather than spatial practices, if not spatial political practices (e. g. [51]; [40]; [71]).

Unlike political identity, space had been addressed rather reluctantly and above all as conceptual space (espace conçu) ([63]). Only more recently attention has been paid to the Roman Empire as a conceptual space of identities and a lived space that informed actual behavior. The same holds true for the space of cities in the Mediterranean world beyond the study of urban imaginaries in general; here local studies have begun to take into account space beyond the mere architectural setting of religious rituals (see [32]; [74]), thus opening up new perspectives for research on which further studies can build. Nevertheless, the dominant approach has remained synchronic and functional with regard to religion or diachronic and hermeneutic in relation to urban space. Central political agents and administrators and their perception of urban space as well as their use of religious practices and architecture in appropriating and shaping urban space still dominate the study of ancient religious phenomena. Only now, the intensive research on urbanization processes in antiquity with its rich observations and theorizing about diffusion, geographical location, economic and demographic factors and connectivity has started to address religious practices (see [3]; [136]).

Research on ancient cities has been influential far beyond its objects. The highly loaded Greek and Latin terms of polis, civitas, urbs and municipium – implying the normative concept that only urban life is civilized life (voiced from Plato into Late Antiquity, see e. g. [89]; [122]) – have successfully reproduced the ancient alignment of city, citizens and political autonomy. Contrary to some recent critique, this is not some Eurocentrism, but a precise (even if inadequate) concept that results in negating the status of "city" not only to large settlements with a population of several thousands, if not ten-thousands in Japan or Africa, but also to Celtic oppida, settlements that are admittedly "city-like", but negated the status of city due to the lack of spatially visible participatory regimes (see now [42]; [137]). Nevertheless it was clearly seen that economically ("consumer city") and politically ("polis") ancient cities were in permanent exchange with their rural hinterlands – neither division of labor nor innovation was restricted to city-space.

It was the very reduction of polis religion – taking into account the topographical as well as social complex composition of religious actions thematizing the polity – to civic religion (e. g. [109], defended by [73]) – entirely focusing on the political elites' definition and urban practice of religion – that had sparked critique. In the traditional view, during the imperial age and Late Antiquity a world of local practices embedded in civic power-structures and fundamental to civic identity was replaced by individualized, and hence potentially universal, religions emerging out of diverse Christianities and a Judaism deprived of its central cult place, that is, Jerusalem. This image is changing. Central for this development was the extension of the range of religious agents seen as relevant. Due to the character of the dominant 'sources', the intellectual dimension was recovered (see [92]; [68]). The role and shaping of individual agents across religious and social boundaries has been firmly established without falling back into notions of belief informed by dogma ([12]; [106]; [93]; [88]), thus undercutting the claim that individuality is a purely modern phenomenon (see [41]). Studies of religious practices as practices of specific agents, such as women, senators ([126]), immigrants, have greatly furthered the description and understanding of religion in Rome and Roman cities. Different 'spaces', in particular domestic, associative and shared as well as virtual-literary spaces, have been approached, even if primarily in social terms. Such an approach includes understandings of cohabitation and conflict (e. g. [13]; [20]; [124]; [7]). Notions of religious deviancy, claim-making and innovation have helped to clarify some major strands in the process of religious change ([95]; [133]). It is against the background of this conceptualization of a complex interaction of visual traditions, epigraphic and literary discourse, individual experience and social distinction in defined political contexts that the gods, as central symbols of religious communication, have likewise been reconceptualized, focusing on the 'construction of the divine' instead of 'biographies of gods'.

In an interesting reversal of Orsi's detection of 'Gods of the city' on the basis of his previously developed 'lived religion' approach, in the research on ancient 'metropolitan religion' the concept of lived religion was adapted and enlarged into 'lived ancient religion' ([91]; [1]; [45]). It showed that funerary ritual and domestic religion, the social and ritual practices of voluntary associations ('cults' and 'religions') and the political use of religion by administrators and political elites are neither independent strands of religious practice nor replications of or counter-models to 'civic religion'. The latter is best conceptualized as a single field of action with many loci of religious authority in permanent fluctuation. Religion is now seen as 'religion in the making' and addressing the city as focal point of movements and relations and a particular social and spatial arrangement crucial to religious practices. Yet it is the remaining task to analyze urbanity as one of the driving forces of religious change in the ancient Mediterranean path of urbanization.

Just until now, urbanites were a minority on earth. Thus, any disregard of cities and their inhabitants would be justified if the implicit bias towards religion as practiced and shaped in cities would have been reflected and adjusted for. Evidently, that was not the case in the historiography of religion. Instead, the intellectual disregard of the urban factor or even the focus on the rural as the origin of religion, whether seen in deserts or more fruitful solitudes, was infused by an anti-urban bias of city-related religious agents – authors, copyists, distributors, and recipients –, at least dominating in Christian and Buddhist traditions.

As we have seen additional factors accrued. The first concerned the very core of the classical forms of History of Religion in Europe. The reconstruction of religions in the plural as different but comparable systems of human reactions to the condition humaine and their concern with human suffering allowed to detach ideas and practices from their historical context and construe an object of study in a manner similar to Art History, History of Music, History of Literature etc. Such a 'Science of Religion' was (and is) very different from what is now called Area Studies or what is figuring as language-focused Philologies or space-and-period specific Histories, typically operating with a focus that is co-extensive with modern nation states. In difference to the latter, religions were conspicuous by not being place-specific.

The latter distinction typically collapsed in the case of city states. Here, a second factor joined in, a sociological background theory of religion. Religion (now in the singular) was seen as above all producing solidarity and groups in general and support rulership in hierarchical societies (without properly clarifying the relationship of the two hypotheses). Thus, religion figures large in studies of ancient city states, not least in the Ancient "Near East" and the later Mediterranean world. However, the city-state was regarded as a transitory phase. In an evolutionist perspective, it was "early civilizations" that were to be observed here, "Hochkulturen", which quickly developed into imperial formations. Hence, the spatial aspect of cities and city-states were hardly relevant beyond ethnocentric ideas of cosmological centers legitimizing the selection of place for urban settlements (cf. [135]). Interest was in temporal developments, as already the authors of the spatial turn have pointed out ([63]; [64]). For the area specialists, and Classicists in particular, stress was on religion in guaranteeing the unity of the political formation, the polis, that is city plus hinterland, rather than the asty, the urban settlement serving as capital.

Critique of these approaches has been inspired by developments of research dealing with the contemporary world, starting from the spatial turn attacking consequences of late modern capitalism. "Lived religion" looked at religious practices and beliefs beyond the dogmas and practices of organized religion, a field of personal activities no longer marginalized by concepts like "folklore" or "superstition" with regard to the scholars' own (and often urban) contemporaries ([16]; [4]). The spatial turn made scholars look beyond [77]; 1999a), into "urban religion".

For the ancient Mediterranean these shifts brought attention to the "impact of empire", "Roman Imperial and Provincial Religion", "Lived Ancient Religion", "Mapping Ancient Polytheism" or "Religion and Urbanity". This is not just about new interpretations. It is about archaeologists like anthropologists and even literary scholars turning towards the breadth of practices and beliefs not just in but also about spaces of various reach, towards traces of heterarchy and other forms of communalization on different levels, grouping around small streets, a courtyard, a crossroad. It is about religious practices and images of coexistence in the forms of neighborhoods, quarters, or networks. Not least, it is about the huge consequences for larger and global developments the changes discovered by these changed lenses have.

Work on this chapter has been supported by the German Science Foundation (DFG) in the framework of the Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe "Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations" at the Max Weber Centre of the University of Erfurt (FOR 2779).