Study of the orientation of the Bronce age temple of Pella, Jordan.

Belmonte, J.A.; González García, A.C.; Polcaro, A.
Referencia bibliográfica

Anthropological Notebooks Volume 19 Sup. (2013), 481-492.

Fecha de publicación:
12
2013
Número de autores
3
Número de autores del IAC
0
Número de citas referidas
0
Descripción
We present an analysis of the orientation measurements of the Bronze Age Temple of Pella, took by the authors on the field in winter 2011. The site, famous for its huge ancient Roman ruins, had revealed on its lower acropolis the remains of a large sacred building, constructed in the 19th century BC during the Middle Bronze Age, that was continually used and restored since the end of the Iron Age in the first millennium BC. The temple has a typical Southern Levant Bronze Age architecture characterized by a single elongated rectangular room, with the entrance on the shorter side flanked by two antis. Some findings recovered in the temple in each architectural phase identify the worshipped deity as Baal, Lord of the Tempest, the dying god who defied Mut, the Death, in the Ugaritic Mythology. Considering the orientation measurements, it seems clear that the entrance has an orientation to the summer solstice sunrise, a moment which, in the Near Eastern cultures, was clearly linked to festivity for dying deities associated with the wheat harvesting in a general vision of the summer months as the time when there was a confluence of the “Above” and “Below” worlds.