Commemorating the Dead in Early Byzantium

死亡是每个拜占庭人都经历过的一次转变，但这是一个有待系统研究的话题。我的论文将提供对早期拜占庭墓葬、墓葬物品和纪念死者的习俗(4-7世纪)的第一次审查。这一点很重要，因为围绕死亡的信仰是一种试金石，允许我们检查传统、亲属关系结构、对来世的信仰的重要性，宗教被用来构建与缺席的互动的方式，以及物质物品在纪念死者和构建社会记忆方面的作用。在早期的拜占庭世界，这些信仰也让我们剖析了传统异教习俗和新兴基督教文化之间的关系。虽然最近一项关于死亡和来世的研究考察了后来拜占庭思想(Marinis 2017)中的相关领域，但早期的工作主要包括关于特定墓地的考古报告(例如，el-Khouri 2010)，而不是对死亡的不同思想和文化理解的审查。这项研究采用了跨学科的方法，并建立在我在广泛的来源和方法(包括性别)方面的专业培训的基础上。利用文字和物质证据，我调查了墓葬物品和葬礼，以探索早期拜占庭式的死亡仪式和灵魂到来世的过渡。这个项目的中心是分析这种转变是如何在许多地区的背景下被标记和经历的。我的硕士论文研究了魔法和背道而驰的拜占庭物品，这些物品为博士研究提供了必要的研究技能。这增强了我强大的语言技能，包括拜占庭希腊语，我将通过参加2019年拜占庭希腊语暑期学校继续发展这门语言，以及相关的现代欧洲语言(法语和德语)。

Death was the one transition that every Byzantine experienced, but it is a topic which awaits systematic study. My thesis will offer the first examination of early Byzantine burials, grave goods, and practices for remembering the dead (4th-7th centuries). This is important because beliefs surrounding death function as a kind of litmus test that allow us to examine the importance of tradition, kinship structures, beliefs about the afterlife, the way religion is used to structure interaction with absence, and the role of material goods in commemorating the dead and the construction of social memory. In the early Byzantine world, these beliefs also allow us to dissect the relationship between traditional pagan practice and emerging Christian culture. Although a recent study on death and the afterlife has examined related areas within later Byzantine thought (Marinis 2017), work on the early period consists primarily of archaeologicalreports on specific burial sites (e.g. el-Khouri 2010), rather than examinations of varying ideological and cultural understandings of death.This study implements a cross-disciplinary methodology and builds upon my specialist training in a broad range of sources and methodologies (including gender). Exploiting textual and material evidence, I investigate grave goods and funerals to explore early Byzantine rituals of death and the transition of the soul into the next world. At the centre of this project is an analysis of how this transition was marked and experienced across all socio-economic groups in a number of regional contexts.My MA dissertation examined magic and apotropaic Byzantine objects, which provided the requisite research skills for PhD research. This augmented my strong language skills which include Byzantine Greek, which I will continue to develop by attending the Byzantine Greek summer school in 2019, as well as relevant modern European languages (French and German).