Piecing Together How Ancient Greeks Mourned the Dead

This year I joined an inspiring cohort of Getty Research Institute scholars to study “The Fragment”—or more specifically, objects that are now in fragmented form due to artistic processes, acts of destruction, or forces of nature, but that offer insight into past cultures.

As an archaeologist who specializes in burials and funerary art, my fragmented object is the human body.

The fellowship is allowing me to research and write my first book, which is about mortuary spaces in ancient Greece—how they were constructed and what they looked like. In investigating this topic, I have to piece together a picture from a variety of sources, including archaeological excavations, human remains, literature, inscriptions, funerary sculpture, and painted pottery. Vase painting is an invaluable source of information for funerals, especially for the 8th–7th centuries BCE.

Vases like the Philadelphia Painter’s amphora in the Getty collection were used as grave markers and give us an idea of how Greeks mourned their dead. The mourners in these scenes show us how they constructed a space where they could freely express emotion through ritual performance. When you look at ancient Greek art, grief and mourning spaces during that time were gendered: women were more expressive, often gesturing and mourning poignantly, whereas men remained solemn, somber, and orderly. In scenes where the corpse is depicted, we often see women close to the coffin or bier while men pay respects from afar. Indeed, a good portion of a Greek funeral seems to have been women’s purview, possibly because women were deemed more suitable to interact with the pollution that emanated from death. Menstruation and childbirth also emanated “pollution,” so the female body was more accustomed to navigating this dangerous state, it was thought.

The book chapters I am currently working on explore both the power and the transformation of the human body after death. In the US and most other Western countries, death is clinical, sterilized, distanced, and commercialized. It takes place in designated spaces (hospitals, hospices) and is handled by professional service providers (crematoria, funeral homes). We compensate for the invisibility of death by making fictionalized death prevalent in movies, TV, and pop culture.

In much of the ancient world, the living and the dead were more tightly intertwined. At ancient Argos in northeastern Peloponnese, for instance, a popular practice was to reuse graves for multiple family members. For each interment, the grave was reopened and the new body was put on top of the old ones along with more gifts. If there was no room, old bones were pushed towards the edges to give the newcomer more space. In time, skeletons fell apart and mingled, one indistinguishable from the next, entangled with the objects that accompanied them into afterlife in jumbled heaps of bones and broken pottery.

Another somewhat unusual custom at Argos was the use of pithoi—large storage jars for food and liquids—as burial containers. Pithoi in a domestic setting carried symbolic significance and prestige, since they held the household’s wealth in terms of food and grain surplus. Kraters, painted containers for mixing wine and water at dinner parties, were also occasionally used as funerary containers. These were smaller and most commonly held children or infant burials, but in some cases adults were also buried in them. The use of these pots and jars as burial containers shows us how intertwined domestic and funerary worlds were in ancient Greece.

These practices may seem strange or disrespectful to us today, but for Argives they were simply the way you took care of your dead. Bonds with home and family were strong at Argos and carried on beyond death. This is possibly why the Argives did not mind that bodies fell apart and mingled with each other in their graves.

I am excited to find more definitive answers during the last months of my Getty fellowship and beyond—especially when pandemic-related restrictions on travel have been lifted.