:Das syro‐hethitische Grabdenkmal: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung einer neuen Bildgattung in der Eisenzeit im nordsyrisch‐südostanatolischen Raum
:Das syro‐hethitische Grabdenkmal: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung einer neuen Bildgattung in der Eisenzeit im nordsyrisch‐südostanatolischen Raum
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:Das syro‐hethitische Grabdenkmal: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung einer neuen Bildgattung in der Eisenzeit im Nordsyrisch‐südostanatolischen Raum
DOI:
10.1086/504995
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发表时间:
2006
影响因子:
0.6
通讯作者:
Thomas McClellan
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Anne Porter;Thomas McClellan
Iron Age bas-reliefs, statues, and steles from southern Anatolia and northern Syria form a major corpus of Near Eastern art that spurred on early excavations at Zinjirli, Carchemish, Tell Halaf, and other sites and that has also led to numerous art-historical studies. Bonatz’s volume on the Grabdenkmäler of Syria and Anatolia from that period is an important contribution not only to such works, but also to a topic that is at last assuming a proper prominence in ancient Near Eastern studies. Long of interest because of the wealth of objects often associated with burials, death is now understood as a complex social phenomenon imbued with political implications. Bonatz enters this discussion of death by analyzing the meaning of the Iron Age occurrence of Grabdenkmäler, decorated and/or inscribed grave-markers, 1 and firmly places the art-historical analysis of individual decorative elements (and inscriptions) in a broader sociosymbolic context. He undertakes an impressive survey of both the relevant theoretical and physical material in developing his proposal that Grabdenkmäler are complex expressions of identity and as such serve certain social, cultural, and political functions. We would summarize Bonatz’s argument as follows: the widespread use of Grabdenkmäler in the Iron Age, their nature, and their location are all indicative of key aspects of social and political identity in this period. Unlike the previous period, where iconography was structured around ideas of deities and representations of religious beliefs, these steles are marked by designs and inscriptions that Bonatz understands as portraits of the deceased and of their survivors, who record their pious acts in erecting the Grabdenkmäler. In the dining scenes that are so prominent on these markers, funerary meals do not portray gods of destiny with the deceased as some have argued, nor are they merely records of a completed act; rather, they are a locus of communication between the living and dead in which, and at which, the dead are simultaneously invoked and provided for and where their power is present (pp. 156–57, 181). The Grabdenkmal is the liminal point between the world of the living and the world of the dead—a separation that is spatial rather than temporal, for the dead and the living exist side by side in the latter terms—re-