Familiar Faces

Funerary portraiture was a popular trend in the Roman world, although unevenly distributed. The portraits were meant to adorn the graves, and could be closely associated with corpses. While the physical body disintegrated, the portrait preserved or altered a version of the deceased, thus reproducing views on the body, social persona, and passage after death. This postdoctoral project investigates the role of the portrait in funerary ritual. The dataset comes from the Roman city of Palmyra, and the small collection of portraits from this site of which the original placement in the tomb can be reconstructed.

Researcher: Bilal Annan