The essays in this volume share an ambitious interest in investigating death as an individual, social, and metaphorical phenomenon that may be exemplified by themes involving burial rituals, identity, and commemoration. The disciplines represented are as diverse as art history, classics, history, music, languages and literatures, and the approaches taken reflect various aspects of contemporary death studies.

This article uses Egyptian burials of the Roman period as an entry point for considering aesthetics in relation to archaeology, ancient art, and human remains. Although some archaeologists and Egyptologists reject or ignore the concept of aesthetics, this article argues that it complements questions of ontology, materiality, and social practice that concern much contemporary archaeological thought. Moreover, engaging with aesthetics in the study of the ancient world requires archaeologists to reflect critically on the relationship between disciplinary histories and knowledge (...) production, and to recognize the influence that earlier aesthetic models, such as racial science, continue to exert in current aesthetic encounters with ancient Egypt and its dead. (shrink)

In The Burial of Jesus: History and Faith, Dr. James F. McGrath seeks to introduce a general audience to the methods historians apply to the study of the life of Jesus. Topics addressed include: how historical study work ; why Jesus' disciples would have wanted to steal his body from the tomb; why later Gospel authors changed elements in Mark's earlier version; and why Christian faith in the resurrection cannot be about what happened to a body almost 2,000 years ago.

I TRY TO EXPLAIN WHY THE "ESSAY OF MIRACLES" DID NOT APPEAR IN THE "TREATISE" BUT DID IN THE "ENQUIRY". I ARGUE THAT THE ESSAY WAS ORIGINALLY DIRECTED AGAINST REVEALED KNOWLEDGE; SO DIRECTED, IT FITTED INTO THE TIGHTLY ORGANIZED PROGRAM OF THE "TREATISE", BUT HAD TO BE SUPPRESSED FOR PRUDENTIAL REASONS. RECONSTRUCTED AS AN ESSAY DIRECTED MERELY AGAINST NON-SCRIPTURAL MIRACLES ITS APPEARANCE IN THE "ENQUIRY" PRESENTED NO PHILOSOPHICAL OR PRUDENTIAL DIFFICULTIES.

In Phaedo 115c-e Socrates scornfully rebukes Crito for enquiring how Socrates should be buried for Crito had not been persuaded by the previous arguments that burying Socrates’ body is not equal to burying Socrates. A parallel account is found in Aelian and Diogenes Laertius where Apollodorus is rebuked for attempting to persuade Socrates that he should be bothered how his remains would be clothed when laid out. Several scholars have suggested this should not be considered a copy of Plato but (...) an early proto-type written by one of his contemporaries with particular regard to Euclides of Megara. While this thesis has been criticized, further evidence will be examined in this article where the character of Apollodorus cites an unnamed Megarian examining this same argument but with conclusions different from those in Plato. Here the Megarian concludes that though the body may be separate from the soul we still show care and grief for the remains. The argument is both cogent and non-metaphysical in approach but characterized from a Socratic perspective. In the conclusions, I will attempt to reopen the case for a Euclidean origin of the Crito vignette in Phaedo 115c-e. (shrink)

Burial in the forest is a recent, non-confessional alternative to the established cemeteries owned and run by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark. Danish forest burials fulfil common criteria for non-religion and they are an example of institutionalized non-religion. Their non-confessional character is emphasized in the information material directed towards potential buyers of forest burial plots. Forest burials appeal to both non-members and members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church; in fact, nearly two-thirds of those who had a forest (...) burial by the end of 2021 were members of the church. I have participated in seven tours conducted at different forest burial sites, and I have interviewed nearly fifty participants about their motives for considering buying a forest burial plot. In my analyses, I structure the interviews along the three dimensions, knowing, doing, and being. I found that the motives for people to choose a forest burial reflected both non-religious and religious/spiritual considerations. Forest burials exemplify a religious complexity where nature, non-religion, religion, and spirituality intersect. In this complexity, I see the institution of forest burial as a non-religious vessel, which the buyers fill with their individual thoughts and acts. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 51 Heft: 1 Seiten: 39-56.

Burial rites are very common among many Africa communities. In the African context, burials are not the end of life but rather the beginning of another life in the land of the ancestors. In spite of the importance of the African funeral rites, the missional role of the church in mourning and the burial of the dead in the African communities, the COVID-19 pandemic led protocols and restrictions placed a huge challenge on the African religious and cultural practices.Contribution: In (...) the light of the above-named challenges, the article discusses the religious-cultural effect of the pandemic with special focus on the African liturgical and missiological challenges in the context of the COVID-19 restrictions on funerals and burial rites. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to explore cultural factors affecting burial rituals in Poland. Thirty-four university students collected data from their relatives and created written narratives about deaths in their families or community. Ten additional interviews were conducted with community members, a priest, and medical personnel as part of theoretical sampling and verification of emerging theories. The qualitative material was administered with NVivo and analysed using the Grounded Theory techniques to produce a complex description of folk beliefs, superstitions, as (...) well as symbolic and psychological meaning ascribed to traditional customs. Some of the practices were found susceptible to extinction due to industrialisation, globalisation, and cultural development. (shrink)

Spectrality has always been a threat to order, to the logic of difference and binary opposites — a threat therefore to the classic law of ontology, which deconstructionist thinkers and writers have consistently sought to subvert, prominently among them Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. While also engaging in an implicit dialogue with Louis Althusser's theory of ‘interpellation’, Cixous and Derrida have reinvented the psychoanalysis of gender-production through their reading of each other. Spectrality is for them an injunction to preserve otherness (...) and safeguard the presence/absence of what in fact does not yet exist, the almost unnameable which pushes at the boundaries of language and thought, and whose mystery writing aspires to attend to. Burials should not thus be performed according to established practice: they must be faulty. (shrink)

Philosophy, Socrates declared, is the art of dying. This book underscores that it is also the art of learning to live and share the earth with those who have come before us. Burial, with its surrounding rituals, is the most ancient documented cultural-symbolic practice: all humans have developed techniques of caring for and communicating with the dead. The premise of Being with the Dead is that we can explore our lives with the dead as a cross-cultural existential a priori out (...) of which the basic forms of historical consciousness emerge. Care for the dead is not just about the symbolic handling of mortal remains; it also points to a necropolitics, the social bond between the dead and living that holds societies together—a shared space or polis where the dead are maintained among the living. Moving from mortuary rituals to literary representations, from the problem of ancestrality to technologies of survival and intergenerational communication, Hans Ruin explores the epistemological, ethical, and ontological dimensions of what it means to be with the dead. His phenomenological approach to key sources in a range of fields gives us a new perspective on the human sciences as a whole. (shrink)

n one of the numerous movie versions of A Christmas Carol , Ebenezer Scrooge, mounting the steps to visit his dying partner, Jacob Marley, encounters a dignified gentleman sitting on a landing. "Are you the doctor?" Scrooge inquires. "No," replies the man, "I'm the undertaker; ours is a very competitive business." The cutthrought world of intellectuals must rank a close second, and few events attract more notice than a proclamation that popular ideas have died. Darwin's theory of natural selection has (...) been a perennial candidate for burial. (shrink)

This article argues that the alleged transfer of the remains of Julian to the church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople may well have taken place. The fact that contemporary sources do not mention the transfer is not extraordinary. Furthermore, no legal reasons for excluding his reburial in the Apostoleion complex existed in the fourth century when burials were still under the jurisdiction of Roman, not ecclesiastical, law.

Among the cultural innovations by which the Upper Palaeolithic period is characterized, those relating to burial practices furnish the possibility of evaluating the profound changes which differentiated this era from the Middle Palaeolithic. The graves of the Upper Palaeolithic offer us a sometimes very compelling glimpse of the complexity of the symbolic, cognitive and social environment of those peoples, as well as of the evolution and diversification over time and space of their rituals associated with death. This article considers the (...) set of burials discovered to date within the boundaries of Italy as particularly representative of these features. Numerous, diverse and well-endowed, they provide important information about the peoples of the Upper Palaeolithic and of the way they responded to death. These graves also represent a significant body of evidence for the debate on the degree to which Palaeolithic man can be considered culturally fully human and the extent to which he intentionally buried his dead. (shrink)

In 2012, China officially declared, as a national strategy of governance, the development of ecological consciousness, the promotion of what has been called “eco-civilization,” and the development of “ecological citizens.” In this paper, we argue that the concept of green burial reflects a number of the values underlying “eco-civilization” and ecological citizenship: respect for nature, respect for humanity, and the ecologically-sensitive rational awareness of the “harmony between nature and humanity, as in the saying “天人合一” Tian Ren He Yi = “Nature (...) and human beings combine into an integral whole”). The practice of green burial can play a valuable role in promoting the construction of an eco-civilization, although many people in China—and elsewhere—may be reluctant to accept it. One reason for this may be that the concept and practice of green burial are so new that it does not yet have a place in the ecological awareness of China’s citizens, who are the main subjects of the construction of eco-civilization. In our view, it is necessary to increase citizen awareness of green burials and their value, and to encourage people to participate in the practice. This is a reflection of the values that underlie ecological citizenship, but also serves to promote these values. While our proposal in this paper is to argue for green burial as an element in realizing this model of “eco-civilization” in China, its relevance clearly extends beyond the Chinese context. (shrink)

Among the cultural innovations by which the Upper Palaeolithic period is characterized, those relating to burial practices furnish the possibility of evaluating the profound changes which differentiated this era from the Middle Palaeolithic. The graves of the Upper Palaeolithic offer us a sometimes very compelling glimpse of the complexity of the symbolic, cognitive and social environment of those peoples, as well as of the evolution and diversification over time and space of their rituals associated with death. This article considers the (...) set of burials discovered to date within the boundaries of Italy as particularly representative of these features. Numerous, diverse and well-endowed, they provide important information about the peoples of the Upper Palaeolithic and of the way they responded to death. These graves also represent a significant body of evidence for the debate on the degree to which Palaeolithic man can be considered culturally fully human and the extent to which he intentionally buried his dead. (shrink)

This article unveils how the local, literally the soil, contains hidden and revelatory global histories, narrating how the little settlement at the edge of Manhattan was connected and indeed enmeshed in a vast network of human activity that was global in reach. Referencing the frames of big history, the universe story, and justice, the author demonstrates that the discovery of the African Burial Ground exposes hidden narratives of race, the city, and the genesis of global economic power. Among the lessons—historical, (...) social, and environmental—that can be drawn from this story: walls can no longer protect us from the dangers we face in the twenty-first century, and social equity and environmental protection must go hand in hand. (shrink)

The curious name of Golgotha, and its translations provided by the evangelists, became a focal point for interpretation, opening the door for new Christological concepts to become affixed to it. As these novel Christological interpretations accrued around Golgotha, they would eventually crystallise, and become a fixed part of the commemoration of Jesus in Palestine. Starting with Origen, third and fourth century Christian authors strongly associate the place of Jesus’s crucifixion with the burial place of Adam.

The corpus of late antique Babylonian incantation bowls comprises a class of double-bowl sets, consisting of two bowls facing each other, fastened together with bitumen. Occasionally, such bowl sets have been found to contain inscribed egg shells or human bones. The double-bowl configuration is highly reminiscent of the double-jar burial practice attested in Mesopotamia from the second millennium to the sixth century BCE. The double-jar burial involved placing the deceased between two wide-mouthed jars, occasionally joining them with bitumen at the (...) rims. This article explores the double-bowl configuration and suggests a connection between double-jar burials and the later ritual artifacts of the Sasanian period. The double-bowl sets attached with bitumen may have originated on analogy to the ancient burial practice, intending symbolically to bury evil entities or human adversaries. (shrink)

Chulan Tomb 2 in present-day Suxian, Anhui province, offers the rare opportunity to study the hitherto unknown relationship between multiple depictions of chariot processions—one of the most popular pictorial motifs in Eastern Han funerary art—at different locations in a single cemetery. Comparing this tomb’s two chariot processions in stylistic, iconographic, and positional terms, this paper draws attention to a special dragon motif that ornaments a few special chariots and argues that these “dragon chariots,” unique among stone carvings of the Eastern (...) Han, were meant to carry the deceased couple, who were buried separately but received joint sacrifices in their shared shrine. Unlike previous studies, which focus on either the shrine or the burial as self-contained units, this paper approaches the entire cemetery as an organic architectural and pictorial nexus without breaking the narrative link between its units. This case study of depictions of chariot processions presents a dynamic view of the afterlife during the Eastern Han dynasty: the burial and the shrine formed two temporary stops rather than permanent homes for the deceased souls, which were ceaselessly traveling on the posthumous road. (shrink)

Based on osteological examinations of dozens of complete skeletons and thousands of isolated bones and bone fragments, this work constructs information on Monacan demography, diet, health, and mortuary ritual in the 10th through the 15th ...