Wealth and Death in Late Antique Syria

This lecture is part of the ISAW Library events series and will take place in person at ISAW.

Registration is required at THIS LINK.

Wealth and death are two of the most common literary themes throughout history. Authors and audiences worried about the ephemeral nature of life and fortune, argued about the latter's usefulness in the face of human mortality, and speculated about their ability to "take it with them" beyond the threshold. Late antique communities certainly fit this pattern, creating opulent burial spaces alongside anxious diatribes about the fate that awaited the wealthy in the afterlife. This lecture is based on the research for the forthcoming book Death and Afterlife in Syriac Christianity: Social Identity and Emotional Communities (Cambridge University, 2025) and focuses on a collection of funerary hymns from late antique Syria as a site for working out a philosophy of living well in the face of death—in wealth or poverty, through moderation or charity. The hymns' subjects and pedagogical targets were not only the manifestly wealthy, but also the members of the middle classes who worried about their progeny as well as their postmortem future, and who (as their widespread use suggests) found both consolation and exhortation in these texts.

Maria E. Doerfler is Associate Professor of Late Antiquity in Yale University’s Department of Religious Studies. Her scholarship focuses chiefly on interpretive practices in late antique communities, with a particular eye towards individual and communal crises. Her monograph Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2020) won the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book Prize in the History of Religion category. This year anticipates the publication of two additional books, including Death and Afterlife in Syriac Christianity: Social Identity and Emotional Communities (Cambridge University, 2025). She was an ISAW Visiting Research Scholar for 2014-15.

Image: Hermes leading the deceased in a quadriga  from the "Tomb of Tyre" (2nd cent. CE; Beirut Museum). Credit: Beirut National Museum Funerary Collection.

The lecture will be followed by a reception.

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Contact

David M. Ratzan, dr128@nyu.edu.