1
Introduction
Bringing Out the Dead in the Ancient Near East
BENJAMIN W. PORTER AND ALEXIS T. BOUTIN
Intentional burialâa characteristically human behavior that first occurred nearly 100,000 years ago in the Middle Eastâis one of the most fundamental acts of commemoration. Although some people who lived in ancient Near Eastern societies1 clearly planned for their funerary treatment prior to their death (e.g., the Egyptian Old Kingdom pyramids at Giza), burial practices were largely decided by the living: how to prepare the body for interment; how to position the body in the burial chamber; what objects to include with the deceased; what ritual acts to perform days, weeks, or even years later. Given the diversity of ancient Near Eastern societies over so many millennia, the Middle East boasts a rich archive in which to investigate how people made deliberate choices to remember and commemorate the dead. And yet for all of the bodies that have been exhumed since Near Eastern archaeology began in the mid-nineteenth century, comprehensive treatments of mortuary contexts are rarely published. Mortuary rituals, the identities of the deceased, or beliefs about the afterlife consequently are interpreted using a single data setâthe assemblage with which a person was buried, for instance, or the personâs osteological profile, or written commentaries about the deceased. In doing so, scholars paint only part of a much more complex picture of death in the ancient Near East. The dearth of holistic studies integrating these data sets is odd given the sustained scholarly interest in ancient Near Eastern societiesâ perceptions of death and beliefs about the afterlife (e.g., Baker 2012; Campbell and Green 1995; Kramer 1967; Laneri 2007; Schmidt 1994). This book is a response to the irregular nature in which ancient Near Eastern mortuary contexts have been studied in the past. The chapters that follow use evidence from across the regionâs societiesâfrom Neolithic Turkey to Bronze Age Jordan, from ancient Egypt and Sudan to the Arabian Gulf and Mesopotamia. In each, authors bring at least two different, yet complementary, analytical techniques together to investigate how ancient Near Eastern societies remembered and commemorated the dead. While no chapter offers a perfect vision of collaboration, many demonstrate how teams of researchers with different skillsetsâosteological analysis, faunal analysis, culture history and the analysis of written texts, and artifact analysisâoffer ways to interpret ancient Near Eastern mortuary contexts in a richer and more robust light.
This chapter prepares readers for the studies to follow, introducing key issues surrounding the investigation of death, memory, and commemoration in ancient Near Eastern mortuary contexts. The chapter begins with a brief survey of the segmented roles that mortuary archaeologists, osteologists, bioarchaeologists, and cultural historians have played in analyses. When these disciplinary genealogies are placed side by side, a clearer vision for intersecting interests and moments of collaboration becomes apparent. The discussion then examines how recent scholarship on social memory in the humanities and social sciences provides a framework for investigating practices of remembering and commemorating the dead in ancient Near Eastern societies. Mortuary contexts, structured depositions shaped by both conscious and unconscious intentions, are sites of memory and are the result of memory work. Different modes of mortuary analysis can shed light on aspects of memory work, whether it is osteological data that can reconstruct the osteobiography of the interred person, the material cultural analysis of objects, or historians and epigraphers building a cultural context around the interment event. This chapter concludes with an overview of the different chapters in this book, illustrating how each speaks to issues raised in broader discussions.
Investigating Mortuary Contexts in Ancient Near Eastern Societies
Mortuary Archaeology
The skewed emphases in the analysis of ancient Near Eastern mortuary contexts are explained by the fact that investigations have developed along distinct disciplinary trajectories that worked in relative isolation from each other. The most dominant trajectory has been mortuary archaeology, whose principal focus has concerned materials associated with the deceased, such as the objects interred with the body or the architectural design of tombs. A glance at the contents of many excavation reports reflects mortuary archaeologyâs dominance. Each volume will invariably include an individual chapter, often entitled âThe Burials,â placed alongside other sections on architecture, ceramics, and chronology. Although human s...
