Burial Diversity in Phoenicia and Its Social Implications (original) (raw)
Related papers
2013
This dissertation examines the mortuary practices of the Iron I-III Levantine Phoenicians to document and analyze material expressions of social identity. Previous scholarship on Iron I-II Phoenicians has emphasized their city-based political allegiances on the one hand, and relatively uniform material culture on the other. But political or cultural affiliation with a particular city does not seem to be consistently signaled in the mortuary record of the northern coastal Levant in these early periods. The history of the Phoenicians, or inhabitants of the Iron Age northern coastal Levant, has long been told from the perspective of their neighbors – via the texts of the Hebrew Bible, Greek and Roman authors, and inscriptions from Western Phoenician and Punic “colonies.” This has been the case in part because the most significant Phoenician cities (e.g. Byblos, Beirut, Sidon, Tyre) have been continually inhabited since the Iron Age (or earlier), and extensive excavation in these urban centers is not fully possible. However, a significant number of Iron Age burials found outside settlement boundaries – in the form of isolated tombs, clusters of graves, and extensive cemeteries – have been explored or excavated since the 1850s throughout coastal southern Syria, Lebanon, and northern Israel. This project catalogs the more than 1400 burials known from the Phoenician “homeland” to date, offering a substantive contribution to a social history of the Levantine Phoenicians in the earliest periods of their cultural distinctiveness. The study begins with a reassessment of all inscriptions relating to Phoenician mortuary practice thought to date to the Iron I-II (chapter two) and Iron III – Greco-Roman (chapter three) periods. The literary sources for Phoenician mortuary practice are then analyzed, first addressing the biblical texts (chapter four), and then classical sources (chapter five). This newly evaluated textual corpus is finally supplemented with a discussion of the burial database and mortuary landscapes of the Iron I-III period northern coastal Levant (chapter sixr). All of this material is incorporated into a discussion of the treatment of the dead as a stage for Phoenician meaning-making in the Iron I-III periods, and a reassessment of Phoenician social identity in this period (chapter seven). An examination of the Phoenician mortuary record indicates no sharp regional distinctions in material culture reflective of an expected city-based model of Phoenician identity. Instead, a significant degree of variation is evident in individual cemeteries, indicating that Iron I-II period Phoenicians wished to “signal” not political allegiance or ethnic identity, but other aspects of their social identities in death. Contrasting the burial data from these early centuries with the innovative mortuary practices which arose in the better-documented Iron III (Persian) period illustrates how Achaemenid influence in the region seems to have significantly altered these early Phoenician concepts of social status and affiliation.
Cemetery and Society in the Aegean Bronze Age, Sheffield Studies in Aegean Archaeology, 1998
Despite the inevitable realization that all men, beyond any discrimination, are equal before death, there is a social persistence in demonstrating social and economic inequality in mortuary contexts as a reflection of the past social status of the dead. As such, it both serves the respectful wish of the deceased for eternal preservation of their status in life and satisfies, at the same time, the need of the living for reassertion of their own social position, legitimatization of their social role, and sanctification of their authority through the memory of the dead and their bonds with the immediate or distant ancestors. The cemetery, therefore, becomes an (often distorted or exaggerated) image of the living society, but also an organic part and extension of the settlement, a place of dual nature, a source of social reassertion and veneration of the dead, in an admirable compromise of life and death. Mortuary evidence supplements information on social stratification from settlements, or, quite often, in the absence of such information it constitutes the sole source of evidence on social ranking. Various criteria may be employed to reveal social ranking from mortuary data, such as the architectural type, size, complexity, construction, materials, and location of the tomb; qualitative and quantitative differences in the grave good assemblages of specific burials or groups of burials, indicating a status of wealth and perhaps of high social ranking; evidence for symbols of authority and displays of hierarchy among the artifacts deposited with the burials, as inferred from their value, use, and frequency of appearance in the grave good assemblages; specialized objects of everyday life, deposited as kterismata with the dead, as indicators of the profession and social role of their owners; artifacts designed exclusively for funerary or ritual use and the energy expenditure for their manufacture as evidence of social differentiation; differential post mortem treatment of the corpse, including differences in the degree of elaboration of the funerary ritual, in the energy expenditure of the burial, cases of post-burial interference with skeletal remains, and cult of the dead; prominent position of specific burials inside the tomb; and demographic evidence, mainly sex and age distributions among the burials, as well as burial of particular social groups restrictive in terms of sex and social role. The Minoan cemetery of Phourni at Archanes is an instructive case study, given its extremely long and uninterrupted period of use (EM II - LM IIIC/Subminoan), its unique organization, the variety of architectural types and burial customs, the wealth of the burials, the detailed excavation and excellent state of preservation. Furthermore, the EM - LM settlement of Archanes, the MM IB - LM II palace at Tourkogeitonia, the MM temple at Anemospilia on Mount Jouchtas, and the minor MM - LM settlements and LM I villas around Archanes compose the picture of an extremely important site, a crossroads of the three major Aegean civilizations, and provide supplementary evidence on social stratification and structure. In the transitional phase from Prepalatial to Protopalatial period, when the cemetery of Phourni reached its acme with the largest number of burials and the greatest amount of building activity ever --reflecting perhaps an explosive population increase just before the erection of the first palatial centers-- and when it had aquired a ‘closed’ poleodomic plan, there seems to be a controlled differentiation in all social ranking variables (architecture, accumulation of wealth, funerary ritual). This intermediate stage of the process towards formalization is evident in the scaled pattern of repetition of certain architectural types and modes of burial at Phourni, climaxing from many isolated burials, to several rectangular chambers and house tombs, to a few tholos tombs, and finally, to a couple of monumental tomb complexes, which may reflect social ranking and, to a lesser extent, a population ethnic diversity. The combination of these variables in the Phourni cemetery produces evidence of an advanced social stratification at Archanes on the eve of the first palatial centers.
Die Like an Egyptian: Burial Customs in Iron Age I Philistia
Essays on Archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond in Honor of Thomas E. Levy, 2023
The five tombs of the "Philistine lords" at Tell el-Far'ah (South) have been a focal point for the study of Philistine burial customs. This, despite the long recognized fact, that they are also highly Egyptianized and possibly earlier than the Philistine pottery within them. In the present study we point out the similarities between these tombs and Egyptian rock-cut chamber tombs from Egypt itself and suggest a different interpretation to the Philistine burial customs they represent.
Seven tombs were excavated, belonging to three types: three loculi (kokhim) tombs, with clay coffins; three shaft tombs; and one pit grave. The first two types date to the Late Roman period, and the third type, to the Ottoman period. The burial goods found within the Roman-period tombs are typical of Phoenician burials, thereby identifying the ethnic identity of the deceased. This observation is further confirmed by historical sources describing the geographical border between the Jewish and Phoenician populations in western Galilee during the second and third centuries CE.