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The corpus of carved ivories from the sanctuary of Orthia at Sparta has often been invoked as evidence of religious and artistic interrelations between Sparta, Crete, and the Levant in the Iron Age. In this talk, I explore these long distance interrelations through the lens of shared ideologies of death operating amongst communities of elites across western Asia and the Aegean in the eighth to sixth centuries BCE. In particular, I examine a seemingly anomalous scene on two ivory plaques showing three figures mourning a deceased male and its mythical and ritual place within the larger votive repertoire from the sanctuary of Orthia.