TOMBS IN ROMAN SYRIA DISPLAYED A VARIETY OF MESSAGES ABOUT THEIR occupants and the people who buried them. The previous chapters have analyzed particular categories of funerary material: space, architecture, grave goods, and the deceased. This chapter combines these data to examine the norms and practices that guided the funeral. What was the belief system behind the decisions on how to bury and commemorate the deceased? What happened after death, and what steps were necessary to allow the community to deal with the loss of one of its members? The patterns in the funerary record are analyzed on three levels: practices that encompassed the entire buried community, those through which distinctions were made within the burying group, and those that changed in the Roman period. The first level uncovers the deep structures of Syrian funerary belief: the ones that applied to all burials and changed little over time. The second level addresses burial differentiation and the ways in which funerary ritual was used to mark out or ignore certain groups in society. What aspects of the social persona of the deceased resulted in distinctive funerary practices? The third level addresses whether and how funerary practices changed from the pre-Roman to the Roman period, as well as throughout the Roman centuries. Were the changes in tomb architecture and decoration that emerged so clearly in the previous chapters related to new concepts of how to bury and commemorate the dead?

THE DATA

The aim is, thus, to reconstruct funerary beliefs – what people thought happened after death – and the primary source is the material record. Yet, how does one move from a tomb to a set of beliefs? A common approach is to interpret funerary beliefs as an integral part of religion. That is, scholars assume that fixed ideas existed about what happened to a person after death and that these were tied to religious beliefs. An example is the notion of a journey by the deceased to an underworld or heaven, ruled by chthonic or celestial deities. Both Greco-Roman and Near Eastern literary and visual sources have given us examples of such stories, but their connection to actual funerary ritual is rather uncertain. In fact, better-studied contexts such as Classical Greece and Imperial Rome fail to provide evidence for fixed notions about the fate of the departed.

WHO WAS BURIED? THIS CHAPTER FOCUSES ON THE BUILDERS AND occupants of the tombs in Roman Syria. The previous analysis has highlighted distinctions within the burying group, in terms of funerary space and grave good assemblages. Here, I investigate the identity of these people. Identity here is understood as the broader groups that individuals and communities identified with, in as far as it is visible in the funerary record. It concerns gender, age, ethnic, professional, collective, and individual identity (see also Introduction, p. 15). Funerary portraits and epigraphy reveal the represented identities of the deceased and the burying community. How were they depicted in art and text? What messages were considered important to highlight, and what was omitted? Ultimately, these questions concern commemorative practices: how people wanted to be remembered and what the community thought was important to stress. This chapter also addresses the physical remains of the dead, which inform us about the age and sex of the buried community, as well as trends in collective and individual burial.

The three categories of evidence – figural imagery, epigraphy, human remains – come with their own sets of interpretative issues, which form the topic of the first section of this chapter. Subsequent paragraphs explore the treatment of the body, the custom of communal and co-burial, the distribution of sex, gender, and age groups, and kinship and military identity. In the final sections, I analyze chronological developments and patterns of continuity and change. By the 1st c. CE, new modes of commemoration had emerged, and direct references to the bereaved community as heirs and survivors now adorned the tomb walls. These were inserted into long-standing traditions concerning co-sharing the tomb and preserving the body.

SOURCES

Human remains, epitaphs, and figural sculpture of the deceased provide explicit information about the occupants and sponsors of the tomb. Each offers valuable insights concerning identity, and comes with specific limitations, be they a lack of reportage or a decontextualized and partial publication. These sources represent different aspects of the mortuary ritual and cannot always be compared.

IN 1961, A FARMER FROM THE VILLAGE OF DEB'AAL DISCOVERED A HYPOGEUM while digging a cistern by his house. This hypogeum (T. 29) is one of the few tombs in the region that was left untouched by grave robbers. It yielded a vast array of coffins and grave goods, and provides a unique insight into the customs of placing items with the dead. Figure 23 illustrates the items put in one of the graves of the Deb'aal tomb, a lead sarcophagus placed in a loculus. This chapter analyzes the items that accompanied the dead. Such artifacts were not merely personal belongings given to comfort the dead, or parts of his or her wardrobe. They represent conscious selections of the burying community, and this chapter aims to unravel the meaning behind these choices. Doing so allows us to tie the discussion of grave goods to the themes of this book. What were the main features of mortuary practices in Roman Syria; and what are the patterns of continuity and change? Chapter 2 drew attention to another theme, that of distinctions in the burying community. People were not buried in the same types of tomb or even container. This chapter asks if they were accompanied by similar sets of artifacts.

The first section discusses distributions across the main categories of grave goods, as represented in Figure 23: items of personal adornment and vessels, as well as coins and lamps (not pictured in the image). The second section focuses on the patterns of variation and standardization of grave good assemblages, and traces their placement over tomb types, and over time. Concluding this chapter is a discussion of the possible function of the items in the tombs, in practical and in spiritual terms. In many ways, the grave good assemblages illustrate patterns that diverge from those established in Chapter 2. In the selection of gifts for the dead, Syrian communities kept close to older customs.

APAMEA

The ancient town of Apamea (modern Afamia) is located in the Syrian Orontes Valley. The settlement consisted of a citadel, now occupied by the modern village of Qal'at el-Mudiq, and a lower town (Figure 48). The earliest archaeological phases on the citadel are prehistoric, but the site is best known as a (re)foundation by Seleucus Nicator in 300/299 BCE, when it was named after his wife. Little is left from this period, and the development of the site remains largely uncertain until the 2nd c. CE. A funerary stele found in Beirut (T. 75) mentions a census conducted around 6 CE recording 117 000 people in the territory of Apamea. The rebuilding phase after the destructive earthquake of 115/116 CE appears prominently in the archaeological record. In the first half of the 3rd c. CE, the winter camp of the Legio II Parthica and two auxiliary cavalry units were garrisoned at Apamea. At its largest extent, the city covered around 250 ha. The Sasanian king Shapur briefly conquered Apamea in 256 CE, after which the fortification walls of the city were reinforced using, among other things, funerary stelae as building material (see later). The construction of several churches, as well as large houses with lavish mosaic floors, indicates that Apamea's wealth was not diminished in the Byzantine period. At least two ecclesiastic buildings contained tombs.

The Cemeteries

Investigations at Apamea have yielded a total of sixty-three graves dating between the 1st and 4th c. CE, with a concentration in the 3rd c. CE (Online Appendix Apamea 1). The cat. 2 assemblage includes over 128 tombs, many of which stem from excavations in the cemetery area in the 1930s (Online Appendix Apamea 2). Fires during and shortly after the Second World War destroyed the records of these excavations. The North Cemetery stretched out on both sides of the main road leaving the North Gate. Excavations yielded thirty-two tombs, thirteen of which were included in the cat.1 database, dating between the 1st and 4th c. CE and perhaps later. No dimensions or maps exist for the entire burial ground, but a section published by Vandenabeele extended over at least 53 m along the road and 5 m from the road.

WHERE TO PLACE THE TOMB? THIS FIRST CHAPTER FOCUSES ON THE choices made in the selection of a place for burial. Space is an important component of cemeteries, related both to the internal organization of a burial ground and to the surrounding landscape. Cemeteries and individual tombs were part of various, intersecting landscapes: the rolling hills and expansive steppe of the natural landscape, the houses and roads of the built landscape, the olive presses and irrigation canals of the productive landscape. This chapter also investigates the placement of burial grounds and individual tombs in relation to one another. How were cemeteries organized, and where were they placed vis-à-vis older burial grounds? What do these choices reveal about the relationship between communities and the landscape they inhabited? The emphasis in this chapter is thus placed on landscapes of the dead: cemeteries as landscapes and cemeteries in (built and natural) landscapes.

Spatial links are key in the discussion of landscape and cemetery organization, yet the available evidence imposes limitations. The absence of spatial data, sometimes even in the most basic form of a plan of the cemetery, prohibits detailed geographical information system (GIS) examinations and statistical analyses of, for example, spatial clustering or visibility analysis. We concentrate on the available evidence, which varies in quality for each of the cemeteries discussed. The first section of the chapter addresses the location of the cemeteries in relation to the built, natural, and past landscapes. The discussion centers on the study of the spatial connection between the cemetery and the town, as well as the zone around the settlement where agricultural installations, animal pens, quarries, roads, and features of the water supply were located. It then moves to questions concerning the visibility of tombs and the separation of settled and cemetery landscapes. The second section investigates the layout of the cemeteries, by focusing on spacing, orientation, clustering, spatial hierarchy, and intercutting of tombs. The conclusion highlights the aspects that characterize cemeteries across the province and can be considered part of cross-regional mortuary practices.