Commemorating the Dead in Early Byzantium

死亡是每个拜占庭人都经历过的一个转变，但这是一个有待系统研究的话题。我的论文将提供早期拜占庭埋葬，坟墓物品和纪念死者（4 -7世纪）的做法的第一次检查。这很重要，因为围绕死亡的信仰是一种试金石，它让我们能够检验传统的重要性，亲属关系结构，对来世的信仰，宗教用来构建与缺席互动的方式，以及物质产品在纪念死者和构建社会记忆中的作用。在早期的拜占庭世界中，这些信仰也让我们得以剖析传统异教实践与新兴基督教文化之间的关系。尽管最近一项关于死亡和来世的研究考察了后期拜占庭思想的相关领域（Marinis 2017），但早期的工作主要包括对特定墓地的考古报告（例如el-Khouri 2010），而不是对不同意识形态和文化对死亡的理解的研究。这项研究采用了跨学科的方法，并以我在广泛的来源和方法（包括性别）方面的专业培训为基础。利用文字和物质证据，我调查了墓葬和葬礼，以探索早期拜占庭的死亡仪式和灵魂进入下一个世界的过渡。该项目的核心是分析在一些区域背景下，所有社会经济群体是如何标记和经历这种转变的。我的硕士论文研究了魔法和驱幻的拜占庭物体，这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，其中包括拜占庭希腊语，我将通过参加2019年的拜占庭希腊语暑期学校继续发展，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).