Administrative Practices and Political Control in Anatolian and Syro-Anatolian Polities in the 2nd and 1st Millennium BCE,

This paper aims to demonstrate that cults and cultic institutions are a crucial element
for understanding the processes producing different regional outcomes after the fall of the Hittite
empire. In this paper, cults are understood as normative cosmic forces defining tempo and
worldview of ancient societies. Cultic institutions can be identified as physical spaces defined
by purity, charged with real and symbolic value, and led by specialists whose competence is
recognised by the community. Instead of being a by-product of political complexity, they are
a driving force behind the power dynamics because they are perceived as such in a bottomup perspective, but also often by main political actors in search of legitimation of their power.
This paper examines the interconnections between cultic and political institutions in the territory
under the Hittite empire and in the same space after the empire’s demise. We aim to distinguish
between processes of resilience, reorganisation, and transformation as they occurred in particular
micro-regions previously controlled by the empire, including the Upper Euphrates, South-Central
Anatolia, North-Central Anatolia, Cilicia, and the Northern Levant; this will demonstrate both the
importance of such a micro-regionally defined study, as well as the shared coincidence of cultic
and political institutional change. It will become evident that cultic continuity coincided with the
resilience of political institutions, and changes in the cultic landscape corresponded to political
reorganisations or transformations in post-Hittite Anatolia and north Syria.