Death in the Mediterranean

How we treat the dead reflects much about what the living believe. In the Ancient Mediterranean, pagan cultures considered the proper burial of the deceased to be of critical importance: otherwise, the dead person’s spirit would have a restless afterlife. On the other hand, the world of the living was to be kept separate from the universe of those who had passed on. Thus, Ancient Romans had forbidden burials inside the city walls even in their earliest law codes of the Twelve Tables (c. 450 BCE).

Here on the first picture you can see a large burial chamber in the Great Necropolis (literally “community of the dead”) of Porto. The tiny niches here (“Tomb 94”) would have held cinerary urns of a particular family. Cremation was typical for Romans until inhumation became popular in the second century.

Christianity brought about radical changes: the theology of early Christianity emphasized a universe where the living and the dead operated together in a single community, and as the religion gained traction, living Christians began to focus their urban spaces in places where the very holiest of the dead dwelt.

Thus you can see in the second photo the Tébessa Basilica, which was dedicated to the memory of St Crispina, who had been killed in 305 for her religious beliefs. Later in the fourth century, her tomb was fancied up: pilgrims walked along a 150-meter pathway flanked with arcades, courtyards, and columns to pay homage to the martyr. It is only one example — increasingly, Christians considered the cemeteries of the holy dead to be the epicenters of their communities, and had religious rituals, feasts, and important meetings among the tombs of the deceased.

The revolutionary mingling of the world of the dead and the living in Late Roman times is why today in North America, Europe, and many other places, cemeteries lie within city and village boundaries. We take this arrangement for granted because we have always lived this way.