TOMBS IN ROMAN SYRIA DISPLAYED A VARIETY OF MESSAGES ABOUT THEIR occupants and the people who buried them. The previous chapters have analyzed particular categories of funerary material: space, architecture, grave goods, and the deceased. This chapter combines these data to examine the norms and practices that guided the funeral. What was the belief system behind the decisions on how to bury and commemorate the deceased? What happened after death, and what steps were necessary to allow the community to deal with the loss of one of its members? The patterns in the funerary record are analyzed on three levels: practices that encompassed the entire buried community, those through which distinctions were made within the burying group, and those that changed in the Roman period. The first level uncovers the deep structures of Syrian funerary belief: the ones that applied to all burials and changed little over time. The second level addresses burial differentiation and the ways in which funerary ritual was used to mark out or ignore certain groups in society. What aspects of the social persona of the deceased resulted in distinctive funerary practices? The third level addresses whether and how funerary practices changed from the pre-Roman to the Roman period, as well as throughout the Roman centuries. Were the changes in tomb architecture and decoration that emerged so clearly in the previous chapters related to new concepts of how to bury and commemorate the dead?

THE DATA

The aim is, thus, to reconstruct funerary beliefs – what people thought happened after death – and the primary source is the material record. Yet, how does one move from a tomb to a set of beliefs? A common approach is to interpret funerary beliefs as an integral part of religion. That is, scholars assume that fixed ideas existed about what happened to a person after death and that these were tied to religious beliefs. An example is the notion of a journey by the deceased to an underworld or heaven, ruled by chthonic or celestial deities. Both Greco-Roman and Near Eastern literary and visual sources have given us examples of such stories, but their connection to actual funerary ritual is rather uncertain. In fact, better-studied contexts such as Classical Greece and Imperial Rome fail to provide evidence for fixed notions about the fate of the departed.