Death constitutes a deep life crisis to the living – depending on the departed, to families, communities, and societies. In this chapter, the author discusses the eminent strategies of overcoming this crisis, that is, funeral and burial practices, and the ritual sequences that connect the two. Both the Roman and the Chinese cases have received much scholarly attention. Armin Selbitschka’s chapter distinguishes itself through its comparative perspective and the theoretical charge with which it is enriched from performance theory and sociologies of place. In the study of each culture, careful consideration is given to the historical development across time. Embarking from conceptual debates on the disruption of the social order and the innate capacity of social performances to restore it, he discusses various practices revolving around the dead, including the preparation of the departed, funerary cortèges, and orations. The subsequent section extends the analysis to the inherent meaning of tombs – their place in the urban landscape, their commemorative force, and their embodiment of social hierarchies. In so doing, it reveals a curious spatial dynamics between the funeral’s beginning in the private sphere and its transition into the public arena. Due to the different configuration of public in Rome and in China, Selbitschka in conclusion makes visible the culture-specific traits in the performances that accompanied mourners on their way to the tomb and beyond, into a future where the social crisis of death was resolved, for the time being.

Thephysical structures within which people lived, learned, prayed, and played – the “built environment”– were both technological accomplishments and expressions of cultural and social meaning. From imperial palaces to domestic residences, from schools, temples, shrines, monasteries, and tombs to theaters and shops, buildings were placed in urban or rural landscapes following the principles of geomancy (most notably tombs) and other religious traditions (monasteries on sacred mountains, for example) or responding to commercial and social needs (shops, restaurants, and theaters in urban centers). Buildings were also products of the natural environment, constructed from materials that were either readily accessible or affordable to buy. The natural environment was more than a source of building materials or a backdrop for human activity. Rivers, lakes, forests, and mountains, along with the geological makeup of the land and its soils, were features of the natural landscape experienced by human actors who utilized and managed them with varying degrees of success. Climate also was a powerful and often unpredictable force that people were dependent upon for survival. Geographic space as imagined and represented through mapping is an equally important approach to deciphering human activity in relation to the physical environment.

In the 1950s, University of Pennsylvania archaeologists recovered over fifty pieces of wooden furniture from three royal tumulus burials and the city mound at Gordion, Turkey. Tumuli MM and P (eighth century BCE) contained thirteen tables and three serving stands with characteristic Phrygian features. The style and joinery of the tables tie them to a long trajectory of wooden tables from the ancient Near East. A variety of fine wooden objects was found in two tombs excavated in 1972 at Verucchio in northern Italy (late eighth through early seventh centuries BCE). The finds from tombs 85 and 89 include wood tables, footstools, thrones, boxes, and other organic materials. Three tables from tomb 85 had legs attached to the table top with a version of the collar-and-tenon joinery used for the Gordion tables. Rarely are ancient wooden artifacts recovered in good condition; the finds from Verucchio and Gordion provide a large and important corpus from the early first millennium BCE. This paper examines the similarities (and differences) between Gordion and Verucchio wooden furniture and investigates the possibility of interaction between Near Eastern and Italic woodworking schools in the eighth through the seventh centuries BCE.

This chapter unveils the author’s view of what was at stake in demythologization: the viewer’s attitude to chronology, to temporality, to characters defined by their residence in earlier time. For confirmation of this claim, the chapter studies archaeological evidence from Rome’s suburbium, examining the altered spatial relationships between house and tomb that came to dominate in the Late Empire. This reveals what was at stake in the third-century disappearance of mythic figures from sarcophagi: new demands among the living, manifested in multiple domains of Roman life, for greater proximity to their dead.

This chapter turns from religious and political explanations to those that frame demythologization in terms of other social and cultural shifts. Some have proposed that it reflects a rising populism, a widespread decline in education levels, or a diminution in the value Romans assigned to mythological culture. Others have seen in the rise of mythless genres a growing desire for imagery that more clearly projected social status. All are examined.

No play of the period is more preoccupied with memorial artifice than John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi: especially striking are three episodes involving the Duchess herself. In the opening scene her wooing of Antonio is coloured by oddly disturbing references to ‘a winding sheet’ and to ‘the figure cut in alabaster / Kneels at my husband’s tomb’; while in Act 4, her murder is prefaced by a piece of macabre theatre, when Bosola enters in the guise of an old man, announcing himself a ‘tomb-maker’ whose ‘trade is to flatter the dead’. Advising the Duchess that ‘I am come to make thy tomb’, he proceeds to discourse on the iconographic niceties of ‘fashion in the grave’, before bringing her ‘By degrees to mortification’. But the tomb he promises never appears, becoming instead a conspicuous absence at the centre of the action. Focusing on the haunted graveyard of the Echo scene (5.3), the essay argues that this absence is closely bound up with the outpouring of grief that followed the death of the idolized Protestant hero, Prince Henry, and thus with the dissident politics on which Webster's great tragedy is grounded.

In Part II, the death arts cover the post-mortem period from funerals to commemoration, completing the death-cycle initiated by Part I with its emphasis on the pre-mortem period and preparation for death. England’s protracted Reformation complicated this latter set of death arts. The relationship of worshippers to the dead underwent substantial reorientation on account of Protestantism’s elimination of the doctrine of Purgatory. Modernized and annotated excerpts, taken from a diversity of genres – including chronicles, the Book of Common Prayer, and consolation – reflect the changes not only to the Church’s burial rites but also less ritualized remembrance, which increasingly manifested itself through epitaphs, funeral elegies, and funeral sermons. Similar confessional and political tensions may be seen in the excerpts on Protestant and Catholic martyrs. Excerpts also represent a range of more secular commemorative acts from remembering traitors, regicide, and the ideal courtier, to a mother’s elegies for her infant son and a pamphleteer’s mourning of the unnamed masses killed by the plague.

Early attempts by Parthian rulers to take Babylon were short-lived, but in 141 BC they established their kingship by celebrating the New Year festival. Chronicles and astronomical diaries continued to be written. An independent ruler of Maysan in the Sealand, Hyspaosines, captured the port on the Tigris, took control of Bahrain and Failaka to control Gulf trade, and briefly claimed kingship of Babylon. He wrote in Aramaic. The Parthians regained control and rebuilt the Greek theatre. The old buildings and city plan continued to be in use, although the Summer Palace had been reroofed with terracotta tiles. New kinds of text were written on clay in cuneiform, astronomical science developed; an archive shows that temples were still active, and much older literature was still prized. Greek knowledge of the Epic of Creation was still alive in Athens from the time of Alexander until the sixth century AD. The cult of Bēl had spread west to Palmyra, to the Aegean island of Kos, and north to Edessa. In AD 116 Trajan visited the Summer Palace on a pilgrimage to the place where Alexander had died.

The setting of the city within the environment of Mesopotamia, on a branch of the river Euphrates, was without special advantages amid more ancient cities with older fame. Sumerian and Semitic Akkadian were very different languages integrated into the urbanized written culture, whereas Amorite immigrants from the west were tribal outsiders who often assimilated in the cities. Water management by canals, sluices, and flood control, and the extension of land for agriculture and settlement were duties of kings reflected in early myths. Merchants travelled abroad, west to the Mediterranean, north into Anatolia, east across the river Tigris into Iran, where they encountered the rival civilization of Elam, and south down the Arabian Gulf. They brought in precious metals, stones, timber, and plants. After 1,300 years, Babylon became a ceremonial centre without indigenous kings, but foreign kings still came to have their claim to rule legitimized in a city where the bearing of arms was prohibited. King-lists and chronicles underpinned Babylonians’ understanding of their own history; prayers, songs, epics, technical manuals, rituals, records of divination, and astronomy as well as archival and administrative texts were written on various media, of which only clay, being inorganic, survives. Temples, a palace, a harbour, city walls, and gates characterized urban space.

This chapter examines how the rise of populist nationalism in Saudi Arabia interacts with Wahhabism and the role of Western power in controlling the outcome of this interaction. As a result of its founding agreement, the Saudi ruling family needs the support of Wahhabi clerks for internal legitimacy and of the West, mainly the US, for technological help and defense and security backing. These Saudi rulers have instrumentalized Wahhabism to advance a pan-Islamic ideology (da?wa) in an effort to fight rivals at home and combat Arab nationalism and liberal, socialist, and Marxist trends in the Arab region and Islamic societies. This ideology was also used to achieve global influence. The chapter explains that Saudi Arabia is a case in which an extreme interpretation of religious doctrine was needed to legitimize an authoritarian regime and ultimately became a tool of domestic governance and foreign policy.

One of the key rules of trusts is that there must be ascertainable beneficiaries so a trust for a purpose may fail because the objects are uncertain. There are some limited exceptions which allow purpose trusts to be upheld. These are examined in this chapter. The first group are the anomalous exceptions which include trusts for specific animals. Trusts for animals as a group will be charitable but only if they fulfil the public benefit rule. A trust to erect and maintain a monument has usually been upheld but only where it complies with the perpetuity period. Following the case of re Denley where a trust appears to be for a purpose it may be upheld if there are hidden beneficiaries. In some circumstances an unincorporated association can form an exception to the beneficiary principle. There is a possible solution to the problems created by purpose trusts which is to use an enforcer or protector trust. The chapter discusses how these have been adopted in countries such as the Bahamas and the Channel Islands. It also considers the problem of who enforces against the enforcer of a purpose trust since the enforcer has no interest in the trust property.

This chapter discusses the life-expectancy of rulers, the frequency of violent death in different times and places and burial practices. Some dynasties developed long-lasting mausolea, notably the kings of France at St.-Denis, but in other realms there were changes in the choice of royal burial church, sometimes reflecting changes in dynasty, sometimes alterations in the territory of the kingdom. Reinterments of the royal dead, which were not rare, had public political significance. There is discussion of the physical qualities of tombs, their material, grave goods and epitaphs, and also the development of tomb effigies, including the joint effigies of kings and queens sometimes found in the later Middle Ages. The burial of body parts in different places multiplied centres of remembrance, despite official disapproval of the practice by the papacy. Finally, cases of damnatio memoriae, the conscious desecration of enemy tombs, are discussed.

Chapter 1, ‘Medieval Ovids’, opens the discussion with perhaps the most prolific and the most devious author of autofiction in ancient literature: the poet Ovid. Ovid had no surviving ancient tradition of Lives, but his texts themselves provided an ideal ground for the creation of biofictional narratives. Encoding within them a life-story that deliberately teeters between fiction and reality, Ovid’s texts invited a life-centred reception that illustrates some of the essential dynamics of biofictional reading. With no ancient Life available to them, medieval writers willingly took up Ovid’s implicit invitation to produce biofictional supplements to his texts, telling and retelling stories about the poet’s imaginary lives: from the accessus or ‘introduction’ that typically prefaced texts of ancient authors, often inscribed as a paratext to the poet’s works in the manuscripts themselves, to the thirteenth-century pseudepigraphal De vetula, a 2400-line poem presented as Ovid’s autobiography from exile discovered in the poet’s recently excavated tomb. Seemingly situated on the margins of medieval culture, these experiments in life-writing show that biofictional engagement with Ovid functioned as a dynamic and creative site of reading texts and writing Lives in the period, foregrounding the case for biofiction as a mode of textual engagement in reception.

Material culture is the focus of the chapter 5. After a brief methodological discussion of the “archaeology of class,” where class is a subjective sociocultural category, this chapter examines material and literary evidence for class distinctions in tableware, oil lamps, dress, and burial customs. Each of these case studies shows that elites stimulated supraregional trade and local production by seeking out imported luxury items and new types of local products. At the same time that Judaean elites developed a distinctive class culture that incorporated Graeco-Roman influences, Judaean nonelites produced new forms of utilitarian items. The agency of nonelites in generating a distinctive class culture was generally inhibited, however, by their limited economic resources. These dramatic changes in the use of material culture, which began around 20 BCE and continued into the first century CE, were at least partially a function of Herod’s building projects and urban development.