Consolidation of urbanism and religion in the Southern Levant during the Middle Bronze Age

This article discusses humans’ entanglement with religion in the Southern Levant during the Middle Bronze Age, and if and how this changed through this period as urbanism gradually consolidated. It reviews major trends observable in mortuary practices as well as in monumental architecture, focusing particularly on developments that typify the later stages of the Middle Bronze Age. This data will be used to diachronically reanalyse the apparent establishment of institutionalized cults in the region, considering its implications in the wider Levantine context. It will explore the mechanisms through which external elements were chosen to express this new reality, and to review whether exogenous components supplanted the indigenous customs or were embedded into the local traditions, with attention to where, when, and how. This way, it will be possible to reinvestigate how a new form of urbanism spread across the Levant during the Middle Bronze Age and whether religion was part of a broader multilinearity of innovations that accompanied this process in the south.