In 2002, excavations at Qatna, a Bronze Age palatial site located in Syria, uncovered an elite tomb complex underneath the Royal Palace. The multi-room chamber tomb, associated grave goods, and skeletal remains illustrate some of the clearest archaeological evidence of a Bronze Age Near Eastern ancestor cult that heavily relied on feasting activities and kinship networks. Mesopotamian textual sources refer to this as kispum, and Ugaritic sources show possible parallels in funerary traditions, albeit with different vocabulary. These potential parallels in texts, as well as archaeological practices, such as subfloor burials that permeated Mesopotamia and the Levant in the Middle Bronze Age, raise questions about why societies with such different material culture and development trajectories might have practiced similar burial beliefs and rituals. Analyzing Middle Bronze Age sites in Syria as specific case studies in a wider Mesopotamian and Levantine context illuminates the parallels in these burial traditions. An emphasis on kinship through feasting-centric funerary rituals allowed the individuals in Israel, Syria, and Mesopotamia to retain a sense of self and identity in a world where borders and political dynasties were constantly shifting between different cultural groups. This essentially created a pan-Near Eastern mortuary practice, with localized variety and quirks.

This paper presents a conceptual framework for understanding ancient Egyptian ritual uses of images, centred on a triad of image functions vis-à-vis the point of reference consisting of presentification, alteration and substitution. On this basis, two late Middle Kingdom funerary practices are analysed as case studies, namely the use of shabti figurines on the one hand, and woman-and-child figurines on the other. Through these two case studies, the paper illustrates the way in which the internal logic and referentiality of the image can be drawn upon to supplement more traditional iconographic, archaeological and textual approaches.

Al-Buhais 18 is a Neolithic site in the United Arab Emirates. It consists of a graveyard with more than 420 individuals, an ancient spring, and a campsite. It is interpreted as a central place for a group of mobile herders in the 5th millennium BC. More than 24 000 ornamental objects have been found, many of them in a secure funerary context, making it possible to reconstruct ornamental ensembles, and shedding light on specific rules concerning the way jewellery was worn by different sub-groups of the population. Based on these observations, some hypotheses are developed on the intentions and beliefs structuring mortuary practices and the role of jewellery within these rites. Finally, questions of continuity and change in mortuary practices can be addressed by comparing al- Buhais 18 with other, younger, sites in the region.

A significant proportion of figurative practices in Middle Kingdom funerary material culture leave the exact entities represented by the images relatively obscure to the modern observer. However, in other categories of objects, notable examples of which are shabti figurines and certain ‘fertility’ figurines, the ostensible point of reference is made clear by a combination of iconography, inscriptions and conceptual context. Still, the relation between representation and represented is not necessarily straightforward in such cases either, as e.g. when Schneider (Shabtis, 1977: I, 46) deduced a ‘double notion of the shabti as a substitute both for the master and the servant, but entirely in the former’s interest’. This paper explores the questions raised by such objects concerning the nature and function of representation, and the corollary potential for substitution for (and influence on) the ‘original’, in Egyptian funerary culture, with possible consequences for our understanding of the ontology of the image and the human being.

North-South comparisons of funerary ritual during the Middle Bronze Age in the Levant concentrate mainly on material expenditure. Thus they revolve mostly around the blinding display of afluence in elite burials of the North and the seeming uniformity of tombs in the South. The focus on material ‘expenditure’, though, only helps to obscure a subtle pluralism in forms of ritual expression and to downplay the homogeneity witnessed especially among burials of individuals lower down the social scale. Nonetheless, on cultural-historical terms such general impressions are of little value if they cannot be made more speciic and be set in context through comparative research. This is where equivalence, the search for common denominators, comes into play as the main prerequisite for meaningful juxtapositions of ritual action across such large geographical areas as is the Levant. The paper examines two case studies pertaining to tomb architecture and pottery grave goods respectively. It introduces ‘tomb concepts’ as a super-ordinate variable to ‘tomb types’ based on criteria with a higher relevance to ritual activity, and proposes a tomb typology based on a multi three-level model, which is easier to adapt to on-going research. Finally, it argues that built chamber tombs are the conceptual equivalent of rockcut chambers (i.e., shaft tombs or caves) in settlements, and that northern inland sites differ on conceptual terms from sites further south, based on the distribution of vessels of restricted pouring (juglets).

This thesis aims to further the understanding of the cultural and social history of the Middle Kingdom nomes. Two different approaches have been taken. The first examines coffin texts unique to individual coffins from the provincial cemetery of El Bersheh in the 15th Upper Egyptian nome. The evidence presented suggests that these texts were products of the Hermopolitan House of Life and were likely to have been created for specific individuals. It is concluded that the provincial elite were the driving force behind this innovation. In the second approach this thesis turns its attention to the pottery of Beni Hasan and the 16th Upper Egyptian nome. It is argued that the pottery corpus of Beni Hasan is reflective of the independence of the provincial administration and that the appearance of the Residence style during the mid 12th Dynasty is reflective of the social changes undertaken during the reign of Sesostris III. In the concluding section both approaches have been brought togeth...