A conspicious Bronze Age koiné including and binding together the Eastern Mediterranean has long been recognized within the field of ritual studies by historians of religion. Indeed, cult or cultic practice seems to have been a vital component of this cultural coherence.
In this paper I present a series of sanctuaries in Karia, Kilikia, and Cyprus, which share a number of characteristics in their topographic and architectural setting and layour; features that I suggest have their origin in an ancient concept of the divine shared within the Bronze Age koiné. This small-scale experimental investigation is intended to from a concrete study of the nature, formation and transformation of the Eastern Mediterranean sanctuaries from the Late Bronze Age to the Roman period. It seems that especially during the Hellenistic and early Roman Imperial period, the local cultic roots played a major role in the manifestation of ethnic identities in an internationalised world; they formed a sort of local or Anatolian reply to a Hellenised world-view.