ABSTRACT
In the cities, towns and countryside of both east and west, and for the later Jews and Christians as well as for the much older and larger societies of which they were a small part, much of the historical record of and witness to the ‘ancestors’ in the Ancient Near East consisted of cave-tombs, arcosolia, cists, burial shafts, urn-burials, necropoli, catacombs, sarcophagi, mausolea, hypogea, ossuaries, stelae and related epitaphs, legends and proclamations of the dead, the ‘death culture’ of the Ancient Near Eastern world. Travellers through these lands must have been aware of this legacy, whether as detritus and rumour or as visible and visited holy places. As is obvious from the accounts of later travellers such as Pausanias, much of the ‘built environment’ of the Ancient Near East consisted of tombs and associated religious buildings, in ruins or in use; many of these sites and buildings were associated with notions of sacrifice, birth and rebirth, death and monuments to death, other worlds and other lives.
