Royal Corpses, Royal Ancestors and the Living: The Transformation of the Dead in Ancient Syria (2016) (original) (raw)
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The relationship between objects, people, and places can be fundamental when the aim is to create forms of memorialization for the dead among the living. This is especially the case of ancient societies who left behind numerous traces that can be useful for scholars in reconstructing ancient religious beliefs and practices. In particular, archaeologists have used a social memory theoretical framework to enlarge the field of research to a broader agenda that, as emphasized by Andrew Jones, can help researchers in defining ‘how things and places helped societies remember’. Regarding funerary contexts, researchers have primarily directed their interest towards the definition of archaeological correlates that can help identify tangible elements to be associated with ancient cults of the ancestors. Even though the search for the cult of the ancestors can be both risky and tricky, this exercise can be particularly fruitful if the archaeological data are supported by written sources that better explain the role of the ancestors and how they were venerated and memorialized by a given society. For example, in the case of the ancient Near East the proliferation of texts dedicated to this topic can be found starting from the third millennium BCE. These texts are mostly concerned with the subject of royal or elite ancestor worship and it therefore appears of great importance to confront these textual evidences with archaeological data helpful for interpreting and reconstructing the ritual practices involved in the memorialization of royal ancestors. Of particular relevance for the topic investigated in this paper is the appearance of Royal Hypogea built underneath palaces, as well as mausolea that have marked the urban fabric of numerous ancient Near Eastern cities starting from the third and continuing until the first millennia BC. Thus, in this paper I will use a social memory theoretical framework as a tenet to be used in analysing two specific case studies from western Syria: the third millennium example available from Ebla, and the second millennium Royal Hypogeum discovered at Qatna. In this epistemological process I will use the written data to support my theoretical tenet that is based on the assumption that the creation of the memory of royal ancestors is pivotal for constructing the ‘charismatic authority’ of royal families and linking them to a cosmic dimension; because, as I mentioned in a previous publication, ‘in order to establish this authority, the leader’s charisma has to be communicated through a language based on the performance of rituals that assist the observer in connecting the royal domain with the divine one’. In this paper, I will especially focus on the investigation of the role of body memories in constructing forms of memorialization with an emphasis on how memories were incorporated by the social body through the practice of ritual journeys and convivial eating.
In 2002, excavations at Qatna, a Bronze Age palatial site located in Syria, uncovered an elite tomb complex underneath the Royal Palace. The multi-room chamber tomb, associated grave goods, and skeletal remains illustrate some of the clearest archaeological evidence of a Bronze Age Near Eastern ancestor cult that heavily relied on feasting activities and kinship networks. Mesopotamian textual sources refer to this as kispum, and Ugaritic sources show possible parallels in funerary traditions, albeit with different vocabulary. These potential parallels in texts, as well as archaeological practices, such as subfloor burials that permeated Mesopotamia and the Levant in the Middle Bronze Age, raise questions about why societies with such different material culture and development trajectories might have practiced similar burial beliefs and rituals. Analyzing Middle Bronze Age sites in Syria as specific case studies in a wider Mesopotamian and Levantine context illuminates the parallels in these burial traditions. An emphasis on kinship through feasting-centric funerary rituals allowed the individuals in Israel, Syria, and Mesopotamia to retain a sense of self and identity in a world where borders and political dynasties were constantly shifting between different cultural groups. This essentially created a pan-Near Eastern mortuary practice, with localized variety and quirks.
The paper analyzes the iconography of the bone talisman, discovered in the Tomb of the Lord of the Goats, the hypogeum attributed to king Immeya (1750 BC) and excavated below the Western Palace of Ebia. Each symbol and image carved on the talisman, part of two ritual scenes concerning the royal ancestors' cult, were studied in relation to the nearby figures. Moreover, other similar human and animal figures, discovered scattered in the same tomb, were related to the talisman, in order to reconstruct the entire scene depicted on it. The small animal figurines, applied at the top and bottom of the object, were also analyzed, in order to understand their ideological meaning, possibly connected to the ideology of death of the Old Syrian dynasties of Tell Mardikh. I propose to interpret Immeya's bone talisman as a ritual object, perhaps used during the Eblaic royal funerary ritual. In this hypothesis, the talisman had the magical function to help the dead king in his travel through the netherworld, ending with his assumption among the celestial deified ancestors. The shape and suggested purpose of the object might allow a parallel with talismans used in the contemporary funerary rituals of the Egyptian pharaonic dynasties during the Middle Kingdom.
Embodiments of Death: The Funerary Sequence and Commemoration in the Bronze Age Levant
Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 2017
This article presents an archaeological model for Levantine funerary rituals performed in the context of commingling inhumations. Using the case study of a masonry-constructed chamber tomb from Middle Bronze Age Tel Megiddo (Israel), the funerary sequence is reconstructed in three main phases: (1) pre-interment; (2) interment; and (3) post-interment. The sequential performance of funerary rituals in this shared burial space resulted in a high degree of skeletal fragmentation as previously interred corpses were moved aside to accommodate subsequent inhu-mations. However, rather than merely representing a functional aspect of burial, the repositioning of deceased bodies constituted a ritually meaningful practice that involved continuous physical interactions between the living and the dead. Drawing on theories of embodiment and methods of burial taphonomy, this article argues that mourners' close encounters with deceased bodies played a major role in transforming the status of the dead after burial. Ritualized fragmentation and in-termingling of human skeletal remains were integral components of becoming an ancestor.
Asia Anteriore Antica , 2020
Death remains a fascinating and challenging issue for archaeological research. Sometimes, however, it is astonishing how rationally and unemotionally archaeologists and anthropologists approach it. They take human remains and everything that surrounds them just like any other archaeological data set. Following the maxim "the dead do not bury themselves", they mainly ask about for the social and political background of burials and funerary practices, and they try to reconstruct funerary rituals. Other questions that relate to the essential human experience of death rarely appear on the research agenda. In this respect, the recently published proceedings of an international workshop held in Florence in 2013 help me review the different approaches of ancient Near Eastern archaeologists and phi-lologists who deal with phenomena of death and burial. Since the promising title of the book, published in 2016, is "How to Cope with Death" (in the ancient Near East), it will address the methodological question how to cope with death in Ancient Near Eastern archaeology. After a discussion centered on the papers collected in this volume (see appendix), the perspective will be enlarged by a refined look at the Syro-Hittite funerary monuments.
The Ancestor Cult in the Middle Bronze Age at Tell Arbid, Syria
Contextualising Grave Inventories in the Ancient Near East, Qatna Studien Supplementa Band 3, Peter Pfälzner, Herbert Niehr, Ernst Pernicka, Sarah Lange and Tina Köster (eds.) , 2014 Harrassowitz Verlag · Wiesbaden, 2014
In this paper I present considerations on a phenomenon of an ancestor cult evidenced by rituals associated with vaulted chamber tombs located within the limits of Middle Bronze Age II settlement on Tell Arbid in NE Syria. The tombs were constructed with shafts, in the fill of which, remains of subsequent deposits of offerings were found on different levels. This fact, as well as the specific location of the tombs, and the amount of energy expended in their construction, convinced me that we are dealing here with practices characteristic for ancestor worship. The phenomenon appeared at the site suddenly in the first half of the second millennium BC and disappeared in mid-second millennium BC.