How to cope with death: mourning and funerary practices in the ancient Near Est. Proceedings of the international workshop (Firenze, 5th-6th December 2013)

Recent advancements in scholarly approaches to the topic of death in the Ancient Near East have been particularly remarkable. If much effort has been put into the reconstruction of the ritual activities behind the formation of burial remains, nonetheless many aspects of the full ritual cycle centered around death are still to be investigated. Mourning practices remain on the whole a very underrated topic in comparison with other areas, and the heuristic potential intrinsic to burials and graves in connection to them is totally unexplored.
The Florence workshop provided the opportunity to discuss these issues in the face of new data, and of new interpretations of old data, aiming to give a contribution towards a deeper understanding of Syrian funerary practices.