ABSTRACT
Religious worship was a regular and recurring activity among the inhabitants of the Syrian Euphrates judging by the recovery at several settlements of buildings of a sacred character. Large and solid structures, carefully segregated from the rest of the urban communities, served as places where sacred rites and cult festivals dedicated to the gods were celebrated. These religious structures had a long history that reached back even to the earliest phases of third millennium occupation in the region. Some of these early sacred complexes reveal a striking degree of monumentality and organization, reflecting the presence of well established religious traditions and institutionalized offices of religious leadership.
