Reviews

Death, Burial, and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity
by Jon Davies
Religion in the First Christian Centuries series, Sawyer, D. & Sawyer, J. (eds).
London: Routledge, 1999
256 pp.
ISBN 0415129915
Paper

Reviewed by Jennifer Hiller

With the intent of reviewing the understandings and treatments of death in several of the major world religions present in antiquity (Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Zoroastrian, Greco-Roman, Judaism, and Christianity), Davies provides a world tour of death cults and their origins. Pointing to thanatologies, or the "meaning of life as seen through the lens of death," he argues that a society’s view of their creation - "cosmology sculpted by history" - and the associated attitudes towards creation of the deities and natural forces involved influence the social understanding of death. He goes on to review both the key elements of the cosmologies and the funerary rituals and myths of afterlife associated with each of these cultures, with an eye towards understanding the differences between them as well as the effects that they had on one another’s evolutionary trajectories. This analysis culminates in his final chapters, which discuss pagan Roman burial customs and myths and contrast them with the then-young Christian faith; he analyses Christianity as both very similar and very different from what came before it. He further contrasts the martyr-hero of Christianity with the traditional hero of the older religions, and argues that the boundary set up between the mortal and the divine, which traditional heroes tried to breach in a search for immortality, was relatively easily traversed in the martyr deaths of the early Christian heroes. He concludes by elucidating the similarities between the reverential treatment of the early Christian martyr and the Euro-Christian war hero of the two world wars, pointing out that the external forces acting on a society (war, instability, and the like) have the capacity to influence the funerary customs of often specifically delineated sectors of society, such as war dead.

The book provides a fascinating introduction to the funerary rites and myths of several societies in Europe and the Middle East in antiquity, and for a reader new to the subject, the similarities and differences between each (as well as the inter-relationships to be found, evidence of religious cross-pollination) are clearly pointed out and well-explained. Someone not schooled in the mythologies of these cultures may feel a bit lost in some of the terminologies and sources used, but Davies certainly does an admirable job of condensing a tremendous amount of comparative material into a manageable and comprehensible volume. There are some incidences of confusion with chronology, though; students of Near Eastern archaeology may rail at the author’s treatment of the vast repertoire of funerary behaviour in the Near East from 4000 BC to 800-600 BC as essentially unchanging, and not germane to a discussion of the development of religious ideas in the more major religions. The archaeology of the Near East is addressed briefly, but the focus is on the religions of the states. This is, however, an understandable approach if one takes into account that Davies works in religious studies, not Near Eastern archaeology, and the vast corpus of information encompassed by both these disciplines would preclude a more thorough treatment of prehistoric and protohistoric religious traditions.

Overall, the book is easy to read, and provides a good introduction to the study of comparative funerary religion for archaeologists and others outside the discipline of religious studies. The information and arguments were well-presented and understandable, and the descriptions of the funerary cults of the past societies, and the relationships between those cults and the perceptions of humanity and society as a whole, were fascinating. It’s well worth the time, even if it’s outside one’s normal field of interest.

Return to top

Jennifer Hiller, Department of Archaeology & Prehistory, University of Sheffield. mailto:PRP99JCH@sheffield.ac.uk