Page 29 - The University of Wisconsin Press Spring 2013
Basic HTML Version
CLASSICS / ART HISTORY / ARCHAEOLOGY / ART
“A tour de force of meticulous research, broad reach, and thoughtful inter-
pretation.
Couched in Death
will remain the definitive publication of
klinai
and
kline
tombs for decades to come.”
Elspeth R.M. Dusinberre, author
of
Aspects of Empire in Achaemenid Sardis
In
Couched in Death
, Elizabeth P. Baughan offers the first comprehensive look
at the earliest funeral couches in the ancient Mediterranean world. These sixth-
and fifth-century BCE
klinai
from Asia Minor were inspired by specialty luxury
furnishings developed in Archaic Greece for reclining at elite symposia. It was
in Anatolia, however—in the dynastic cultures of Lydia and Phrygia and their
neighbors—that
klinai
first gained prominence not as banquet furniture but as
burial receptacles. For tombs, wooden couches were replaced by more perma-
nent media cut from bedrock, carved from marble or limestone, or even cast
in bronze. The rich archaeological findings of funerary
klinai
throughout Asia
Minor raise intriguing questions about the social and symbolic meanings of this
burial furniture. Why did Anatolian elites want to bury their dead on replicas of
Greek furniture? Do the
klinai
found in Anatolian tombs represent Persian influ-
ence after the conquest of Anatolia, as previous scholarship has suggested?
Bringing a diverse body of understudied and unpublished material together
for the first time, Baughan investigates the origins and cultural significance of
kline
-burial and charts the stylistic development and distribution of funerary
kli-
nai
throughout Anatolia. She contends that funeral couch burials and banqueter
representations in funerary art helped construct hybridized Anatolian-Persian
identities in Achaemenid Anatolia, and she reassesses the origins of the cus-
tom of the reclining banquet itself, a defining feature of ancient Mediterranean
civilizations. Baughan explores the relationships of Anatolian funeral couches
with similar traditions in Etruria and Macedonia as well as their “afterlife” in the
modern era, and her study also includes a comprehensive survey of evidence for
ancient
klinai
in general, based on analysis of more than three hundred
klinai
representations on Greek vases as well as archaeological and textual sources.
Elizabeth P. Baughan
is assistant professor of classics and archaeology at the
University of Richmond. Since 2009 she has served as field supervisor for the
Hacımusalar Höyük excavations in southwestern Turkey.
AUGUST
LC: 2012040082 GT
576 PP. 8 X 10 162 B/W ILLUS.,
12 COLOR ILLUS., 4 MAPS, 2 TABLES
E-BOOK $29.95 ISBN 978-0-299-29183-9
Wisconsin Studies in Classics
William Aylward and
Patricia A. Rosenmeyer,
General Editors
UWPRESS
.
WISC
.
EDU
29
O f r e l a t e d i n t e r e s t
“Webb’s grasp of the scholarship and cov-
erage of the monuments seem all but total,
and her careful and judicious critiques of
previous opinion are most valuable.”
—Andrew F. Stewart, University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 1996
LC: 95-25221 NA 224 PP. 8 ½ × 11
81 B/W PHOTOS, 55 ILLUS.
Wisconsin Studies in Classics
