The tomb and the tiara

This chapter focuses on the ‘rediscovery’ of Virgil’s tomb in the Renaissance, exploring its position in the cultures of scholarship, travel, and leisure. Clusters of poets’ graves...

Hebrew funerary inscriptions began to appear in Judah during late Iron IIB. These inscriptions are relatively unique in that they are written on, or inside, tombs. But they also in...

The history of the Judahite bench tomb provides important insight into the meaning of mortuary practices, and by extension, death in the Hebrew Bible. The bench tomb appeared in Ju...

This chapter begins with the observation that inscribed texts were memorized and orally transmitted. This insight provides the key for a reading of Callimachus’ ‘Tomb of Simonides’...

Between the third and first centuries BCE, a tomb near the Via Appia not only served as a funerary monument for the Scipiones but was also believed to have once contained the statu...

This chapter explores how poetic inspiration, centred around the tombs of ancient poets, can be expressed through the material idiom of painting. It approaches the ‘tomb of Virgil’...

Burials had become a focal point of some Confucian efforts to build a socio-moral order based on Confucian norms. “Simple burial,” idealized by scholar-officials, used a simple pit...