Funeral: Did you mean...?

Burial of the dead is the act of placing the corpse of a deceased person in a tomb constructed for that purpose or in a grave dug into the earth. Archaeological excavations have revealed Neanderthal graves dating back 130,000 years, marking...

Athanaric (died c. 381 CE) was a king of the Thervingi Goths (better known as the Visigoths) and, according to some sources, the first and greatest king. He was of the noble Balts family of the Thervingi tribe and a relative of the later...

Funeral statue of a noble etruscan, painted terra cota, 530 BCE. Nye Carlsberg Glyptotek (Copenhagen, Denmark). Made with Memento Beta (now ReMake) from AutoDesk. The Etruscans were skilled at fashioning sculptures in clay, which was painted...

Marble funeral altar (Bômos) from Roman-era Phrygia, 313-314 CE. The decoration of the four faces is composed of the following elements, which are made difficult to read due to vandalism by Christians. a) A medallion representing...

The Sumerian poem The Descent of Inanna (circa 1900-1600 BCE) chronicles the journey of Inanna, the great goddess and Queen of Heaven, from her realm in the sky to earth and down into the underworld to visit her recently widowed sister Ereshkigal...

To the ancient Romans, everything was imbued with a divine spirit (numen, plural: numina) which gave it life. Even supposedly inanimate objects like rocks and trees possessed a numen, a belief which no doubt grew out of the early religious...

A columbarium is an underground chamber, which the Romans used for preserving the ashes of the dead. During the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, hundreds of columbaria lined the consular highways leading out of Rome, although now only some two dozen...

Unlike the rich corpus of ancient Egyptian funerary texts, no such “guidebooks” from Mesopotamia detail the afterlife and the soul's fate after death. Instead, ancient Mesopotamian views of the afterlife must be pieced together from a variety...

Material Objects & Cultures Material objects convey volumes about the people who possessed them. Cultures and societies in every generation are in part classified - either correctly or incorrectly - by the objects or symbols they select...

Homer's Iliad describes the final year of the Trojan War, a legendary conflict between an alliance of Greek cities and the city of Troy in Anatolia. It was probably written in the 8th century BCE after a long oral tradition. The Greeks themselves...