Entre deuil et nécromancie: Le lexique de la lamentation funèbre à Ébla et dans l’Antiquité classique à la lumière de l’ethnologie et de la religion comparée

Abstract

This article is an attempt to provide a diachronic investigation of the Eblaite funeral lament seen in its Mediterranean setting. This research tackles the question not only of how the Eblaite lament works, but it takes also into account the relationship between the Eblaite lament and the Greco-Roman one. Very useful insights have been supplied by the works on the lament carried out by eminent scholars of the Italian school of folk studies (Cirese, De Martino, Lombardi Satriani, Miligrana and Di Nola), whose researches are unfortunately almost unknown outside Italy till now. The important results of these studies together with other fundamental works dealing with death and funerary cults in Classical Antiquity helped us to analyze and discuss the lament at Ebla during the Third Millennium B.C.