2019, Dining&Death
Focusing on the interpretation of a shared, widespread and particularly perplexing iconographic theme, this book compares explanatory frameworks in different schools of archaeology including Classical, Egyptian and Chinese, and importantly challenges a prevailing material skepticism that eschews and even invalidates religious and afterlife beliefs as a part of ancient social identities. The papers largely concentrate on pictorial depictions of banqueting and/or food offerings and how they might be understood in such settings, although some papers consider tomb deposits and furnishings. Traditionally, three main interpretative paradigms have been employed in 'deciphering' such images: 1) they represent worldly activities, either quotidien or idealised, 2) they represent an imagined pleasant afterlife (and therefore evidence this belief) and 3) they represent funerary or mortuary rites. Such interpretations have been challenged by scholarship that refutes the validity of these strict, divisive categories, but in concentrating on social structures embedded in the images, has tended to eschew potential eschatological aspects of meaning. Collectively, the papers here reconsider this matter, making significant contributions to discussions of ambiguity, agency, interaction, performance, the role of the viewer, the issue of 'meaning', and the various ways in which images can be approached and used. Contents Preface Introduction: what lies beyond? (Draycott) 1. J. Fabricius, ‘Hellenistic Funerary Banquet Reliefs – Thoughts on Problems Old and New’. 2. P. Amann, ‘“Banquet and grave”. The material basis, aims and first results of a recent research project’. 3. G. Robins, ‘Meals for the dead: the image of the deceased seated before a table of offerings in ancient Egyptian art’. 4. N. Harrington, ‘The Eighteenth Dynasty Egyptian banquet: ideals and realities’. 5. D. Bonatz, ‘Syro-Hittite funerary monuments revisited’. 6. E. Baughan, ‘Burial klinai and “Totenmahl”?’ 7. C.M. Draycott, ‘Drinking to Death. The ‘Totenmahl’, drinking culture and funerary representation in late Archaic/early Achaemenid Western Anatolia’. 8. S. Lockwood, ‘Family matters: the interpretation of Lycian “funerary banquet” reliefs’. 9. A.M. Carstens, ‘Bridging the boundary: the sacrificial deposit of the Maussolleion of Halikarnassos and its symbolic language’. 10. M. Tsouli, ‘Testimonia on funerary banquets in ancient Sparta’. 11. C. Lawton, ‘The “Totenmahl” motif in votive reliefs of Classical Athens’. 12. M. Stamatopoulou, ‘Banquets in the painted stelai of Demetrias’. 13. M. Kalaitzi, ‘The theme of the banqueter on Hellenistic Macedonian tombstones’. 14. T. Mitterlechner, ‘The banquet in Etruscan funerary art and its underlying meaning’. 15. L. Audley-Miller, ‘The banquet in Palmyrene funerary contexts’. 16. A. Slawisch, ‘Reading the image? Ambiguities in the interpretation of banquet scenes on grave stelai from Roman Thrace’. 17. M. Nylan, ‘At table: reading and misreading funerary images of banquets in early China’. Envoy (O. Murray) Review F. Hobden, JHS 138 (2018), 290-291 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-hellenic-studies/article/abs/cm-draycott-and-m-stamatopoulou-eds-dining-and-death-interdisciplinary-perspectives-on-the-funerary-banquet-in-ancient-art-burial-and-ritual-colloquia-antiqua-16-leuven-peeters-2016-pp-xxxviii-690-110-9789042932417/15C83FDE7C1A0CC3814ACDBD69BF057F
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Catherine M Draycott
Maria Stamatopoulou