Mortuary Graffiti in the Roman East

Abstract

This chapter examines how graffiti was used by ancient Jews to communicate with and about the dead. Focusing on graffiti discovered in cemeteries and burial caves throughout Palestine during the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods, it describes recurrences of graffiti in Jewish mortuary contexts and suggests that acts of carving them were systematic and deliberate exercises, undertaken by Jews inside cemeteries and burial caves throughout the ancient Levant. The chapter first considers the graffiti inside the mortuary landscape of the ancient city of Beit Shearim, which reveal new readings of the cultural matrix of burial populations at the site as well as insights into Jewish life (and death) in the late ancient Roman East. The mortuary graffiti found at Beit Shearim also offer important information about the relationships between regional Jews and contemporaneous rabbis, who may or may not have followed common practices relating to death and commemoration.