At its heart are the so-called sacred laws – inscriptions from the vicinity of Greek temples and sanctuaries. Among other things, they protected ‘sacred’ trees and springs or regulated the use of temple land. Christopher Schliephake’s research project asks what ideas lay behind these provisions: were they an expression of an early environmental awareness, did they serve to administer divine property, or did they reflect a distinct form of ancient resource regulation? “Our research aims to show how pre-modern societies dealt with limited resources, and in doing so to open up new perspectives on current debates about sustainability,” Schliephake explains.

International workshop on environmental regulation in ancient sanctuaries

The project gains an international dimension through Prof. Dr. Adeline Grand-Clément of the Université Toulouse II Jean Jaurès, who will come to Augsburg for one semester as a Mercator Fellow. Together with Christopher Schliephake, she will organise an international workshop on environmental regulation in ancient sanctuaries. The funding also enables the continuation of the doctoral project of Isabel Mancebo Leon, who is the first to evaluate the sacred laws systematically from an environmental-history perspective.

The DFG project builds on preliminary work carried out under the seed-funding project “Ancient Sustainability in Historical Perspective”, which has been supported since 2025 by the University of Augsburg's Green Transformation Fund. That project made the relevant sources accessible and, through international workshops, laid important foundations for the research now approved.