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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 bottom-up 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.

"This volume is devoted to the search for borders in archaeology and takes as a case study the archaeology of Anatolia and the South Caucasus in the Bronze and Iron Ages. Up until the mid-first millennium BCE, these regions differ in interregional and macro-regional interactions, political complexity, economic and mobility strategies, and communication of identities, among which is the use and spread of writing through time. They are united by their representation in ancient sources and modern literature as borderlands. These features represent the core of the discussion developed in the volume. Chapters include theoretical discussion of borders and boundaries, and regional investigations of the Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age (Assyrian colony period, Hittite empire in Anatolia, Kura-Araxes, Trialeti-Vanadzor, Van-Urmia and other traditions in the South Caucasus), the Early Iron Age and Middle Iron Age (Troy, Phrygia, Urartu), until the unification under the Achaemenid Empire. They offer a balanced interplay between site-based investigations and landscape archaeology in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey"