Funeral Banquet Scene

- The national museum of Damascus – متحف دمشق الوطني

Description

Funeral towers, hypogeums and house-shaped tombs have yielded an impressive number of funerary sculptures. In addition to the small slabs which closed the oculi and which presented the portraits of the deceased, the sarcophagi were generally placed at the end of the central aisle of the hypogeum or, sometimes, at the bottom of the lateral exedra. The fronts of these sarcophagi were sometimes adorned with family busts, while the panel which surmounted them showed the deceased, stretched out and leaning on his elbows as if attending a banquet. Sometimes his wife and their children accompanied him. The banquet which surmounted these sarcophagi can be interpreted in different ways: banquet in the afterlife or act of life in which the pageantry puts on the deceased, who intends to leave to posterity a gratifying image of himself, in value. In Palmyra, we have not found a funeral triclina equivalent to what we know in Petra. It is therefore difficult to know if the funeral meals really existed. Here, the man wears a cylindrical priestly mortar, which designates him as a priest. His costume is richly embroidered and the pants betray a Parthian influence.
(*)

  • Excavated from: Palmyra

  • Date: 238 CE

  • Material: Limestone

  • Item Dimensions: 1.55 m (W) x 1.26 m (H)

  • Archaeological Mission:

  • National Museum Of Damascus (2011) – inv. B. 7405, 7406.

  • VMS Code Dam 008-2

Excavation Site Location

  • Cluzan, Sophie, Éric Delpont, and Jeanne Mouliérac, eds. Syrie: mémoire et civilisation. Paris: Institut du monde arabe and Flammarion, 1993.

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Literature By S. C: Syria Memory And Civilization – Institute of the Arab world – Paris

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