SOCIAL VALUE

Even though at death the social persona may undergo major changes, by studying funerary customs we can greatly gain in the understanding of a community’s social structure, distribution of wealth and property, degree of flexibility or divisiveness in the apportionment of power. With its great regional diversity and variety of community forms and networks, the Eastern Mediterranean offers a unique context for exploring, through funerary art, how communities developed and commemorated their members. This section will bring together scholars on funerary art in the Eastern Mediterranean of the 4th to the 1st c. BCE, to present thematic and interdisciplinary ways of analysis (e.g. temporal, regional, intra- or inter-regional, local, structural) in which funerary art may or may not provide insights on individuals, social groups and communities. The aim is to discuss themes such as, but not limited to: the placement of the dead bodies in the landscape and the extent to which this is indicative of issues of territoriality; the social role of particular groups of people (e.g. children, women, the elderly, elite or non-elite individuals, priests/-esses, expats, etc) and the ways this can be reconstructed from the fashion in which these roles are expressed or negotiated in funerary art; the impact that major historical phenomena (e.g. war, famine, earthquakes, urbanization, synoecism) may have had on funerary art; and more.

An on-site Workshop on this theme is scheduled to take place in Paphos during the second year of the project (June 2025).