I costumi funerari della media vallata dell'Eufrate durante il III millennio a.C.

Publisher: UniorPress

Series: Dissertationes

ISSN: 1723-8226

Pages: 276

Language: Italian

NBN: urn:nbn:it:unina-28409

Abstract: The funerary ritual, as with many other expressions of human culture, should be considered as a formal representation of the ideological performance that is portrayed by a community of living beings due to their concern for the unexplainable end of life. The construction of the ritual itself is based on the creation of a “text” by the group to which the individual belongs, and in which the elements of the material culture (the objects composing the funerary set, the dead body, the songs and lamentations of the living) express the need to transform a negative event, such as death, into a positive one, because “the moment of death is related not only to the process of afterlife, but also to the process of living, ageing and producing progeny” (Metcalf and Huntington1991: 108).The aim of this volume is to define, interpret, and reconstruct the funerary rituals that were performed during the Third Millennium BCE along the Syro-Anatolian Euphrates valley, a region which region extends from the northern border of the Taurus Mountains, down to the southern reaches of the modern border between Syria and Iraq. This text was developed as a Doctoral dissertation completed at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” between 1995 and 1999.