Review of Sekita & Southwood (eds.), Death imagined

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Death imagined: ancient perceptions of death and dying.

Karolina Sekita, Katherine Southwood, Death imagined: ancient perceptions of death and dying. Liverpool studies in ancient history. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2025. Pp. 336. ISBN 9781802077582.

Review by
Karen Bassi, University of California at Santa Cruz. bassi@ucsc.edu

Non-existence is unknowable. This philosophical truism underlies the myriad ways in which humans imagine and respond to death. In the succinct formulation of Michel Conche, “Death is the horizon of thought.”[1] Sekita and Southwood approach this horizon in a volume devoted to perceptions of death and dying within a broadly defined timeframe (antiquity) and geographical focus (the Mediterranean); a single chapter on Mesoamerica is included. Controlled for space and time, the principal variable is culture, specified as Mesopotamian, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Etruscan, Incan, Judaic. The sources are literary and (predominantly) archaeological. ...

Chapters of notable interest for PaleoJudaica:

8. Memory, Monumentality, and the Tomb of the Royal Steward, Matthew J. Suriano

11. Imagining the Afterlife in the Psalms: The Episode of Mitchell Dahood and His Commentary, Christopher B. Hays

Also, lots of chapters of background interest.

The volume is available as open-access.

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