Death, Burial and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity

Jon Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134792719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

In Death, Burial and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity, Jon Davies charts the significance of death to the emerging religious cults in the pre-Christian and early Christian world. He analyses the varied burial rituals and examines the different notions of the afterlife. Among the areas covered are:
* Osiris and Isis: the life theology of Ancient Egypt
* burying the Jewish dead
* Roman religion and Roman funerals
* Early Christian burial
* the nature of martyrdom.
Jon Davies also draws on the sociological theory of Max Weber to present a comprehensive introduction to and overview of death, burial and the afterlife in the first Christian centuries which offers insights into the relationship between social change and attitudes to death and dying.

Part I

Death in the Ancient Near East

There is continuity in our funeral rituals and traditions extending back to the ancient Near East.

(Kennedy 1987:227)

The Greeks burn their dead, the Persians bury them; the Indian glazes the body, the Scythian eats it, the Egyptian embalms it.

(Lucian of Samosata 1905: vol. 3, 217)

Van der Meer and Mohrmann’s Atlas of the Early Christian World records the existence of approximately forty-two churches or Christian congregations of the first century of the Common Era. Of these, all but two were in the Eastern or Greek-speaking end of the Roman Empire, including ten in ‘Palestine’. The two main concentrations were in ‘Palestine’ and in what is now Turkey. By the year 300 CE concentrations of Christian churches are to be found in Africa (around Carthage), Spain (in the south-east in ‘Baetica’), and in Italy and Syria, as well as in Mesopotamia, Armenia and Egypt. In these areas Van der Meer and Mohrmann classify the population almost exclusively as ‘majority or large number of the people Christian’ (Van Der Meer and Mohrmann 1959: Maps 1, 2 and 3).

The cities and lands in which Christian churches and congregations are nearly all to be found are often enough identical with the cities and lands of the Jewish diaspora or galut, as well as of the Jewish ‘homelands’. The earliest Christians were of course Jews. At one time or another, and in one way or another, Jews had travelled to and lived in (voluntarily or otherwise) most of the major cultures and religions of the Ancient, Classical, Hellenic and Roman Near East.

The story of Abraham and his descendants, of the sojourn in Egypt and of the wandering Israelite tribes who became the ‘Kingdom of Israel’ as well as ‘The Jews’ of the Exile and the ‘Judaism’ of the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Mishnah, takes us on a journey through the lands and homes of the most ancient of their (and our) religious ancestors. If travel, trade and propinquity result in an ingestion and exchange of religious ideas, then the people of the Jewish scriptures must have been among the most influenced, if not necessarily the most influential of cross-cultural receivers, transmitters and messengers. Given the religious importance of the people and the lands through which they moved or on which they settled, it is not surprising that they (both land and people!) have been extensively ‘dug over’ by archaeologists and other antiquarians. As a consequence, we know a great deal about the Prehistoric and Ancient Near East, as well as about the succeeding periods of history.

This part of the book will concern itself first with the more prominent of the religious death cultures of the lands over which the Jews wandered or to which they were exiled, that is the death cultures of Egypt to the south and of Mesopotamia and ‘Persia’ to the east. Egypt had a relatively self-contained death culture. To the east, however, ‘Persia’ and ‘Mesopotamia’ have to represent the various religions of ‘Babylon’ (‘Assyria’ or ‘Syrio-Mesopotamia’), as well as an Iranian-Zoroastrian manifestation. While all of these religions are ‘old’ by most standards, there are to be found in the Ancient Near Eastern archaeological and other records evidence for even earlier ‘tribal’ religious cults and associated burial practices. We see these practices, carried out in the names of their gods and goddesses: El, Marduk, Atargatis, Astarte, Anat, Asherah, Dagan, Baal and Melkart, and a host of others, gradually becoming involved in the larger empires of the area. In the ‘Christian centuries’ all these and others are encountered in most of the cities of the Ancient Near East in bewildering and endlessly reconfigured variety, what Ramsey MacMullen calls the ‘pullulation of beliefs’ of the lands of what became the Roman Empire (MacMullen 1981:1).

The ‘standard’ Greco-Roman city referred to by MacMullen would contain temples to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, Mercury, Isis and Serapis, Apollo, Liber Pater, Hercules, Mars, Venus, Vulcan, Ceres, and these in turn would be manifestations of other gods or aspects of gods, under different names. As an example we could perhaps take the Syrian city of Edessa, a city associated in Christian tradition with Jesus himself. In one version of the Edessa story, Jesus wrote a letter to Abgar, King of Edessa, in response to a request for help with a royal illness. This is clearly apocryphal. By the second century CE the city of Edessa, the home of the religious teacher and philosopher Bardesanes, had strong Parthian-Iranian (Zoroastrian) religious influence co-existing with a Judaism connected with the large Jewish colonies of Babylonia. Edessa s Christianity, initially Jewish-Christian, would have probably also entered from the east, producing a variety of Judeo-Christian texts such as the Odes of Solomon. In addition there were Gnostics, such as the Quqites, who mixed a Samaritan tradition with Iranian elements. All of this, in the second century CE, ‘existed beside and on the basis of’ (as Hendrik Drijvers puts it) ‘an authochthonous Semitic religion, in which Baal and Nebo were worshipped and an important place was reserved for Atargartis to whom the sacred fish in the lake of Kallirhoe were dedicated’. Astrology flourished in Edessa, with a seven-planet Empire under one Ruler-God, and separate worship of the Sun and Moon. Sanctuaries to these cults were being built in the second century CE. Eastern philosophy made an appearance, in the form of the thoughts of Diogenes of Babylon and others, and from the west came knowledge of Greek Stoicism. In addition, over the early Christian centuries the city became the location of persistent intra-Christian disputes, ‘an amorphous mass of Christians’, with heresies in various forms (such as the teachings of Marcion and Tatian), as well as Bardesanes’ own version, all adding to the available menu of theologies and philosophies (Drijvers 1965:215–6; Klijn 1962:33). It is perhaps small wonder that when Christianity came to Edessa it became itself riven by argument and heresy: the local ‘mix’ was simply too rich!

I will discuss the thanatologies of these cults, as well as those of Egypt, Canaan, Mesopotamia and Persia, in the following chapters of Part I. In Part II, I will try to relate all of this to the specifically Jewish variants of this Ancient Near Eastern culture, as this Jewish tradition developed in the course of Jewish history from the Iron Age into the Hellenistic and Roman periods. There is, of course, no implication in this that the movement of history in the Ancient Near East was aimed at ‘producing’ Judaism. Jews and Judaism were always, and remain, a minority presence in the Ancient Near East. However, it was there that Judaism developed, and I will use Part II to present an analysis of Jewish death culture, archaeology and attitudes, which evolved as we approach the centuries which are the focus of this book.

In the chapters of Part III, I will address the other obvious fact arising out of a perusal of the map presented by Van der Meer and Mohrmann—that is, that the early Jewish-Christian congregations are to be found primarily in the Greek-dominated part of the Roman Empire. We will therefore be interested in Greek and Roman attitudes to death and burial—which are themselves, of course, part of the general death culture of the Ancient Near East, although with their own very distinctive imprint. Indeed, it was Hellenism very much more than Judaism which ‘imported’ Egypt, in the form of cults (including the cult of Isis), into the Roman Empire. Egypt is therefore more relevant to these later chapters than to the discussion of Judaism. Again in these cities of the Greco-Roman world we find the ‘pullulation of beliefs’ referred to by MacMullen.

The ‘pantheon’ of each city was not simply a list of gods; it was a list of the dangers and disasters against which the gods, properly worshipped, would offer protection. In the multiplicity and ubiquity of the gods lies the evidence for the multiplicity and ubiquity of the dangers the people of the Ancient Near East and the Roman Empire sensed in the world around them. The gods were protectors of animals, crops and human beings. They were the guarantors (when properly worshipped) of ‘fertility’ in its widest sense, the basis of communal life. In the city of Mantineia, which was thirteen by (at most) seven kilometres, there were (in the actual city) six temples with six or more statues, eight sanctuaries, three grave-shrines and various public monuments (Zaidman and Pantel 1992:207–13). At five separate sanctuaries Zeus was worshipped for five different functions: Zeus Thunderbolt, Zeus Saviour (i.e. guarantor of the city after it had to be rebuilt following a Spartan sacking in 385 BCE), Zeus as War Lover, Zeus as Counsellor, Zeus as Bountiful. In the country zone of Mantineia, there was a sacred wood to Demeter and a sanctuary to Poseidon Hippios, itself a modern version built by Hadrian (died 138 CE) around the earlier sanctuary. There were sanctuaries to Artemis, Penelope, the mysteries of Dionysus, Black Aphrodite, Pelias’ daughters, Areithos, Ankhises and, again, Aphrodite. No citizen of Mantineia could have avoided one or more of these shrines, statues, sanctuaries and temples on a short evening walk: if they followed the Athenian example, then 120 days in each year would have been devoted in whole or in part to religious festivals of one kind or another, including especially processions—the public celebration of the protective cults. To be irreligious in such contexts was practically impossible, as well as dangerous. The citizens of such cities were heirs to an extraordinary religious inheritance to which I will now turn.

1

Osiris and Isis

The Life-Theology of Ancient Egypt

The Egyptians alone believe in the resurrection, as they carefully preserved their dead bodies. They have a custom of drying up their bodies and making them as durable as brass.

(St Augustine, in Pettigrew 1834:15)

Of any Egyptian doctrine of a final catastrophe there is no record.

(Hastings 1912: vol. 5, 374)

[For over four thousand years] of eventful history…the care of the Egyptians for their dead remained the striking and constant feature of their religion. …Several of the old-world customs survive in almost their ancient form. Among these are the periodical visitation to the tombs, the feastings and observances on these occasions, the prayers and invocations made almost directly to the dead, the belief of the presence either in or near the tomb of the ‘good spirit’ or double of the deceased, and the provisioning of the tomb with food.

(Garstang 1907:1–2)

Amongst the oldest thanatologies of the Ancient Near East were those of Egypt and Persia. In both cases the religious systems were both formalised and ‘official’, although the sacred texts of Persia are much more elusive than those of Egypt. The Egyptian texts are more extensive. Both sets of texts present problems for interpretation, translation and comprehension; and in both cases there are additional problems of establishing the degree, if any, of their cultural influence.

In the case of Egypt, there is very considerable debate about the precise nature of Egyptian (or ‘African’) influence on the Greco-Roman world. This controversy enlivens the pages of Black Athena (1987), by Martin Bernal, and Not Out of Africa (1997), by Mary Lefkowitz. The controversy was reviewed by John Ray in 1997. Whether with Herodotus in the fifth century BCE, with Diodorus Siculus in the first century BCE, with Plutarch in the first century CE, or with contemporary writers, ‘Egypt’ seems to be a culture reported and exported as much by creative misrepresentation as by accurate understanding.

Egypt was ancient when Abraham was merely old. The Egyptian dynasties date from about 4400 BCE. Egypt accounts for seventenths of the period from the invention of writing to now (see Ray 1978–9). The average Egyptian of the Dynastic periods had a life expectancy at birth of 30–36 years. Half of the population died by the age of 30 and few excavated burials contain people over the age of 60. Few of these deaths would have been attended by any medical personnel, as the court and its high officials had a virtual monopoly of such care, sharing it only on occasion with the army. Ordinary Egyptians died young and ill (Nunn 1996:22, 118).

Yet they had been created lovingly. The ‘Monologue of the Creator God’ describes the acts of Creation:

I did four good deeds

within the portal of the horizon.

I made the four winds

so that every man might breathe in his surroundings.

I made the great flood

so that the poor and the rich might have power.

I made every man like his fellow.

I did not ordain that they do wrong;

their hearts disobeyed what I had said.

I caused that their hearts did not forget the west,

so that the offerings be presented to the gods of the locality.

(Hornung 1983:198)

A humanity created so lovingly lived in the same way: in a real sense Egyptians did not ‘die’. Augustine was probably wrong in using the term ‘resurrection’, since the Egyptian fourfold concept of the person in effect sees it as immortal, with ‘death’ providing more of an opportunity for fulfilment, rather than experienced as a negation requiring a rebirth, a resurrection. The whole point of Egyptian funerary ritual was to prevent a second death (feared as oblivion) from taking place by transcending any gulf there might be between the two worlds. The central religious preoccupation of Egyptian religion was with life, a sanguine philosophy perhaps engendered by the annual gift of water from the Nile and of the benign cosmology which saw ‘nature’ attached to the life-giving inundation and the seemingly uninterruptible miracle of crops and food. Egyptian cosmology was without an End Time, an Apocalypse, and it is in this that the Egyptians are perhaps most distinctive, even unique. Zandee (I960) has taught us not to downplay the dark or ‘hellish’ side of Egyptian religion, but both Spencer (1982) and Henk Milde (1994: 15–35) would agree with the editors of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (Hastings 1912) and with Cohn, who argues that the idea that ‘time was moving towards a universal consummation…had no place at all in Egyptian thinking’ (Cohn 1995:30). To put this point in another way, there is no radical dualism in Egyptian theology which would invoke, for either individual or humanity, some crisisridden eschatological drama.

The Egyptians feared chaos in this world and the next: the whole purpose of their spells and rituals was to deny the chaos implicit in death and to preserve continuity at the time of death so that its divisive and dis-membering consequences could be pre-empted. Death was an opportunity to reassemble life, with all of the threatening elements removed, in unity with Osiris and the eternal journey of Ra in the skies and in the underworld.

In their pyramids and their associated mastabas and cemeteries, in their mummification practices (of both humans and animals) and in the associated construction of a sense of ‘person’, the Egyptians elaborated a theology in which individual life was so important and valuable that every effort had to be made to ensure that death and burial provided cause and occasion for the affirmation of that life rather than for fatalistic acceptance or sufferance. The spells and incantations of the various Books of the Dead were aimed at bringing the dead ‘out into the day’, which as a title would be a much more accurate translation of the purpose and spirit of the Books than the translation we ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of plates
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Death in the Ancient Near East
• Part II: From caves and rock-cut tombs to Judaism
• Part III: Romans and Greeks: A theodicy of good fortune?
• Part IV: Christians, martyrs, soldiers, saints
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index