Burials Texts And Rituals

The villages on Bali & rsquo;s north-east coast have a long history. Archaeological findings have shown that the coastal settlements of Tejakula District enjoyed trading relations with India as long as 2000 years ago or more. Royal decrees dating from the 10th to the 12th century, inscribed on copper tablets and preserved in the local villages as part of their religious heritage, bear witness to the fact that, over a period of over 1000 years, these played a major role as harbour and trading centres in the transmaritime trade between India and (probably) the Spice Islands. At the same time the inscriptions attest to the complexity in those days of Balinese society, with a hierarchical social organisation headed by a king who resided in the interior precisely where, nobody knows. The interior was connected to the prosperous coastal settlements through a network of trade and ritual. The questions that faced the German-Balinese research team were first: Was there anything left over of this evidently glorious past? And second: Would our professional anthropological and archaeological research work be able to throw any more light on the vibrant past of these villages? This book is an attempt to answer both these and further questions on Bali & rsquo;s coastal settlements, their history and culture.

The Death of Sacred Texts draws attention to a much neglected topic in the study of sacred texts: the religious and ritual attitudes towards texts which have become old and damaged and can no longer be used for reading practices or in religious worship. This book approaches religious texts and scriptures by focusing on their physical properties and the dynamic interactions of devices and habits that lie beneath and within a given text. In the last decades a growing body of research studies has directed attention to the multiple uses and ways people encounter written texts and how they make them alive, even as social actors, in different times and cultures. Considering religious people seem to have all the motives for giving their sacred texts a respectful symbolic treatment, scholars have paid surprisingly little attention to the ritual procedures of disposing and renovating old texts. This book fills this gap, providing empirical data and theoretical analyses of historical and contemporary religious attitudes towards, and practices of text disposals within, seven world religions: Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. Exploring the cultural and historical variations of rituals for religious scriptures and texts (such as burials, cremations and immersion into rivers) and the underlying beliefs within the religious traditions, this book investigates how these religious practices and stances respond to modernization and globalization processes when new technologies have made it possible to mass-produce and publish religious texts on the Internet.

At the beginning of Mesopotamia s Early Dynastic period, the political landscape was dominated by temple administrators, but by the end of the period, rulers whose titles we translate as king assumed control. This book argues that the ritual process of mourning, burying, and venerating dead elites contributed to this change. Part one introduces the rationale for seeing rituals as a means of giving material form to ideology and, hence, structuring overall power relations. Part two presents archaeological and textual evidence for the death rituals. Part three interprets symbolic objects found in the Royal Cemetery of Ur, showing they reflect ideological doctrines promoting the office of kingship. This book will be particularly useful for scholars of Mesopotamian archaeology and history.

"Anglo-Saxons were not only frequently buried with material artefacts ranging from pots to clothing to jewellery, they were also often buried with items of food; the funeral ritual itself was sometimes marked by feasting, even at the graveside." "Christina Lee examines the place of food and feasting in funeral rituals from the earliest period to the eleventh century, considering the changes and transformations that occurred during this time. She draws on a wide range of sources, from archaeological evidence to the existing texts; she is concerned particularly to look at representations of funeral feasting and how it functioned as a tool for memory, shedding light on the relationship between the living and the dead." -- Prové de l'editor.

Historical and Archaeological Aspects of Egyptian Funerary Culture, a thoroughly reworked translation of Les textes des sarcophages et la démocratie published in 2008, challenges the widespread idea that the “royal” Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom after a process of “democratisation” became, in the Middle Kingdom, accessible even to the average Egyptian in the form of the Coffin Texts. Rather they remained an element of elite funerary culture, and particularly so in the Upper Egyptian nomes. The author traces the emergence here of the so-called “nomarchs” and their survival in the Middle Kingdom. The site of Dayr al-Barshā, currently under excavation, shows how nomarch cemeteries could even develop into large-scale processional landscapes intended for the cult of the local ruler. This book also provides an updated list of the hundreds of (mostly unpublished) Middle Kingdom coffins and proposes a new reference system for these.

The forms by which a deceased person may be brought to rest are as many as there are causes of death. In most societies the disposal of the corpse is accompanied by some form of celebration or ritual which may range from a simple act of deportment in solitude to the engagement of large masses of people in laborious and creative festivities. In a funerary context the term ritual may be taken to represent a process that incorporates all the actions performed and thoughts expressed in connection with a dying and dead person, from the preparatory pre-death stages to the final deposition of the corpse and the post-mortem stages of grief and commemoration. The contributions presented here are focused not on the examination of different funerary practices, their function and meaning, but on the changes of such rituals – how and when they occurred and how they may be explained. Based on case studies from a range of geographical regions and from different prehistoric and historical periods, a range of key themes are examined concerning belief and ritual, body and deposition, place, performance and commemoration, exploring a complex web of practices.

This collection of 15 essays throws light on the large and oft-neglected corpus of Osiris liturgies. These texts preserve the incantations and instructions for rituals performed in the temple cult of Osiris, the Egyptian god of death and regeneration. Although composed for use in state-sponsored temples, most copies have been found in private burials of the Late and Greco-Roman periods, inscribed on the walls of tombs and sarcophagi or on papyrus scrolls. Not only do the preserved copies offer precious information about the cult of Osiris but also about transformations in equipping the dead with funerary texts in these later periods of pharaonic history. The essays of this volume, presented in English, German and French, explore this interface of temple and tomb. They offer reflections on methodology, showcase new approaches and examine the scribal culture that produced these documents. Well-known compositions such as the Sakhu or Glorification Rituals, the Embalming Ritual and the Mouth Opening Ritual are discussed as well as new inscriptions and papyri that remain unedited to this day. Together these essays add to our understanding of the production and use of funerary texts, old and new, in late Pharaonic and Greco-Roman Egypt.