VIRTUAL ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

This paper investigates how femininity, divinity, and spatial authority were constituted in pre-Islamic Arabia. While dominant historical narratives often reduce the pre-Islamic landscape to patriarchal tribal structures, surviving evidence, like numismatic imagery, sculptural fragments, inscriptions, and ritual spaces, suggest a more intricate spatial vocabulary where feminine divinity and female sovereignty played formative roles. Grounded in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s framework of phenomenological hermeneutics, the paper investigates the Pre-Islamic space as a form of play, symbol, and festival, where pre-Islamic artifacts serve not merely as historical data but as experiential horizons that reveal how communities engaged with the world. Through play, the dynamic interplay between representation and viewer opens interpretive possibilities beyond literal readings. Through symbol, the objects’ material presence gestures toward layers of meaning embedded in ritual, power, and gender. Through festival, sacred places and communal practices become temporal-spatial events that shaped collective identity. By doing so, the paper argues that juxtaposing the experiential meanings embedded in artifacts with the textual narratives that later framed, or obscured them, would allow for the emergence of new unforeseen insights into pre-Islamic feminine spatial orders; and possibly reveal how such orders, if any, have been transitioned, reinterpreted or displaced within the later ‘new’ socio-religious frameworks. By critically recovering these suppressed spatial histories, the study argues for their relevance to contemporary debates on heritage, identity, and inclusive design, where pre-Islamic feminine space can become a valuable lens for imagining more equitable and culturally attuned urban futures in the Arabian Peninsula and the wider region.