The Archaeology of Death in Roman Syria
Burial, Commemoration, and Empire

This book sheds new light on funerary customs in Roman Syria, offering a novel way of understanding its provincial culture.

Lidewijde de Jong (Author)

9781107131415, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 July 2017

355 pages, 159 b/w illus. 10 tables
26 x 18.3 x 2.2 cm, 0.96 kg

In the first centuries of the Common Era, an eclectic collection of plain and embellished underground and aboveground tombs filled the cemeteries of the Roman province of Syria. Its inhabitants used rituals of commemoration to express messages about their local identity, family, and social position, while simultaneously ensuring that the deceased was given proper burial rites. In this book, Lidewijde de Jong investigates these customs and the belief systems that governed the choices made in the commemoration of Syrian men, women and children. Presenting the first all-inclusive overview of the archaeology of death in Roman Syria, this book combines spatial analysis of cemeteries with the study of funerary architecture, decoration, and grave goods, as well as information about the deceased provided by sculptural, epigraphic, and osteological sources. It sheds a new light on life and death in Syria and offers a novel way of understanding provincial culture in the Roman Empire.

Introduction
1. Locating the dead: space, landscape, and cemetery organization
2. The tomb: architecture and decoration
3. Gifts for the dead: function and distribution of grave goods
4. The dead: bones, portraits, and epitaphs
5. Funerary beliefs: differentiation, continuity, and change in ritual
6. The global and the local: Romanization, globalization, and the Syrian cemetary
Postscript
Appendix 1. Sites
Appendix 2. Tomb types
List of online appendices.

Subject Areas: Archaeology by period / region [HDD], Archaeology [HD], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], History: earliest times to present day [HBL], History [HB], Humanities [H]