Hellenistic Funerary Culture in Pergamon and the Aeolis

Short Description

The necropolises and burial mounds of Pergamon and the neighbouring cities are a valuable archaeological heritage and an important source for our understanding of the social, political and cultural dynamics in a key region of Hellenistic Asia Minor. This volume brings together contributions from interdisciplinary funerary archaeological research in Pergamon and the Aeolis. On this basis, a picture emerges of a funerary culture which, although uniform in its basic features, was diversified at the local level. With its special focus, the volume offers for the first time a comparative regional study of Hellenistic funerary culture in Asia Minor.

Description

The necropolises and the large burial mounds of Pergamon and the Aeolian cities of Aigai, Kyme and Elaia are an important archaeological heritage and a primary source for our understanding of the social, political and cultural dynamics in a key region of Hellenistic Asia Minor. This volume brings together sixteen contributions on the methodology of interdisciplinary funerary archaeology, on funerary inscriptions and human remains, and on burials and funerary landscapes from Pergamon, the Aeolis and the neighbouring cities Mytilene and Antandros. On this basis, a picture emerges of a funerary culture that is uniform in its basic features and shows no fundamental differences between cities with fictitious Greek origins on the one hand and a Hellenistic capital in Anatolian Mysia on the other. Rather, a diversification at the local level becomes clear, which contributed to a remarkable diversity in memorial culture. With its historical and landscape focus, this volume is the first to offer a comparative regional study of Hellenistic funerary culture in Asia Minor. With the interdisciplinary definition of funerary archaeology, it can show perspectives on how the complex social and cultural-historical phenomenon of death and memory can be re-evaluated in the future on the basis of a broad dataset.

Biographical Note

Felix Pirson is a Classical Archaeologist. He holds a MA and a PhD from LMU Munich, a MPhil from Cambridge University, and a postdoctoral lecture qualification (“Habilitation”) from Leipzig University, where he is Honorary Professor. Since 2006 he is director of the German Archaeological Institute at Istanbul and head of the Pergamon-Excavation (Bergama, Türkiye). He is senior fellow at ISAW (New York University) and member of several international archaeological institutes. His current research interests include Pergamon and Pompeji, cities and micro-regions in the ancient Mediterranean, funeral archaeology and historical human-environment interaction.