Nouvelles decouvertes sur les usages funeraires des Pheniciens'd Arwad.

• Author: SADER, HELENE
• Position: Review

Nouvelles d[acute{e}]couvertes sur les usages fun[acute{e}]raires des Ph[acute{e}]niciens d'Arwad. By J. ELAYI and M. R. HAYICAL. Tranesuphrat[grave{e}]ne vol. 4. Paris: GABALDA, 1996. Pp. 175, 39 plates.

Iron Age funerary monuments are widely attested in the Phoenician motherland. Since the accidental discovery of the Eshmunazar sarcophagus in 1856, hundreds of tombs have been uncovered in various sites along the Syro-Lebanese coast. However, almost all these funerary remains share the unfortunate fate of having been either accidentally discovered or simply cleared without proper excavation and documentation. The tombs discovered during the last two decades in the vicinity of Tartous, the area facing the island of Arwad, and presented by J. Elayi and M. R. Haykal in the book under review, are unfortunately no exception.

The main attraction of these Aradian funerary monuments was clearly the marble and clay anthropoid sarcophagi they contained and which M. A. Haykal published in 1996 in Arabic. According to its authors, the present book aims at completing the above mentioned preliminary publication by an in-depth study of the recent discoveries. They were however aware of the fact that the ambitious design to study the whole funerary context could not be achieved because of the "incomplete" and "arbitrary" character of the rescue excavations. But in spite of that, "ces nouvelles d[acute{e}]couvertes telles qu'elles se pr[acute{e}]sentatinet [acute{e}]taient suffisamment importantes pour l'histoire de la cit[acute{e}] ph[acute{e}]nicienne d'Arwad, et m[hat{e}]me exceptionnelles pour une certaine partie d'entre elles, pour justifier cet ouvrage (p. 7). The "new" and "exceptional" discoveries are of course the anthropoid sarcophagi, mainly the clay ones, and in the absence of relevant archaeological documentation, the book was bound to focus on these important finds.

The book includes an introduction, four chapters, a conclusion and two appendices, in all 133 pages. In the first chapter are listed the funerary monuments of the territory of Arwad known from previous publications. The following three chapters deal successively with the necropolis of Ram ax-Zahab (chapter two), the tombs of Bano, Hay al-Hamarat and al-Ka[ddot{i}]souneh (chapter three), and the tomb of the chalets area (chapter four). Appendix A presents the anthropological study of the skeletons found in sarcophagi nos. 3 and 10, a study based only on photographs. One wonders why...