Conceiving Elements of Divinity: The Use of the Semantic Web for the Definition of Material Religiosity in the Levant during the Second Millennium BCE

Research on how forms of religiosity are produced through the interaction of local, exogenous, and hybrid elements is fundamental for the improvement of religious studies. This becomes particularly noteworthy in the context of the Levant during the Second Millennium BCE when cultural hybridization phenomena played a pivotal role in shaping novel religious beliefs. Such an exploration, in fact, opens up avenues in the process that ultimately led to the emergence of the Israelite monolatry in the First Millennium BCE. To reach this target, the Godscapes project combines a material culture perspective with the Semantic Web, an innovative application of artificial intelligence that will aid researchers in understanding religious phenomena by not only reconstructing inherent missing information within the data but also furnishing a powerful tool to search, query, and visualize them. Hence, the project aims to build "The Godscapes Ontology"(TGO) through a deconstruction process of the elements recognizable in four aspects associated with material religiosity: religious architecture, religious iconography, funerary rituals/beliefs, and religious texts. After introducing the project's scope and methodology, the article will present the conceptual model for TGO, showing how the aforementioned aspects are related to each other in the construction of religious beliefs and practices. It will further detail the semantic ontology elaborated to model the religious architecture of the Second Millennium BCE Levant. Finally, the interrogation of the dataset through pilot queries in the Semantic Web language (SPARQL) will provide validation of the designed model, and assess the potential applications of the approach.