This article revisits the concept of the ‘Christian city’ in Late Antique North Africa by shifting the focus from topography to the lived and perceived urban experience. While earlier scholarship has emphasized the accumulation of Christian buildings, this study argues that religious transformation is equally, if not more, visible through the evolving practices of city inhabitants. By analysing both Christian and continuing pagan traditions between the fourth and seventh centuries, the article explores how monuments and public religious practices shaped the perception and function of the city. Special attention is given to the volumetric presence of sacred architecture and to the role of public spaces, particularly streets, in hosting religious acts. Ultimately, the study offers a more nuanced understanding of the Christian city: one defined not solely by the presence of basilicas, but by the rhythms, gestures, and visibility of religious life within the broader civic landscape.

Intertextual linkages between Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions and mythological narratives have significantly contributed to our understanding of royal self-presentation and historicization. Less explored, however, are how such linkages may be interpreted and visualized within royal art. In this paper, I propose an intervisual connection between Ninurta mythologies and Assyrian royal lion hunts by unpacking modes of display and interaction embedded between image, text, and lived experience in the palace art of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. Intervisuality was arguably deployed as an innovative strategy to craft a sophisticated connection between royal and divine kingship. I explore how Anzû, a mythological adversary of Ninurta that embodies chaos and disorder, was conceptualized and manifested across media, including cylinder seals and in relief art. Consequently, the paper displaces the typical focus given to the Assyrian king by instead investigating the roles of animals and monsters in upholding royal narratives. I argue that the form and actions of Anzû as embodied and performed in objects act as powerful symbolic referents that anchor its transformed image in royal hunt narratives. In conclusion, I consider why Ashurbanipal may have employed visual references to Anzû in his palace art.

This paper investigates how Assyrian kings protected their material legacies for posterity and why in some prominent instances such protections failed, with a particular focus on the palaces of Kalḫu and Nineveh during the Sargonid Period. I approach this question through the lens of intergenerational reciprocity; Assyrian worldviews provided various channels through which past, present, and future kings could engage with one another in reciprocal and coercive relationships across time. Unlike curses and blessings, which were relatively easy for Assyrian kings to disregard, these reciprocal relationships provided more compelling incentives for rulers to honour and preserve their predecessors’ material legacies. However, practical or ideological concerns would sometimes result in the need to alter buildings in ways that damaged the material legacy of a past ruler. In some of these instances, steps were taken to symbolically compensate the past ruler in question for this damage. In this fashion, rulers were able to negotiate the ideological tension between tradition and innovation to preserve historical memory while adapting living cultural heritage to meet current needs.

The last decades have seen great scholarly interest in the fate of Roman temples and cult statues during the Christianisation of the Roman Empire. The surge of studies on spatiality and lived religion in Roman studies have demonstrated that ancient religious practice was not confined to sanctuaries but rather infused into all spheres of everyday life. Informed by these studies, I argue that the Christianisation effort was not confined to temples and cult statues in sanctuaries, despite the narrow focus on these monuments in legal and patristic sources. The spaces where people most frequently moved, lived, and practised religion in their everyday lives were equally important religious arenas. In this article I venture out of the temples and into the streets of late antique Ephesus to the Triodos intersection to highlight an array of subtle transformations that are unassuming in isolation, but together effectively Christianised the streetscape. I demonstrate that streetscapes were arenas of material Christianisation alongside monumental sanctuaries. The Triodos is used as a point of departure to show how the Roman streetscapes functioned as more-than-material religious assemblages. Human–material interaction in ritual and everyday movement and practices made the streetscapes active participants in the Christianisation process.