Burial klinai and ‘Totenmahl’?

How can burial furnishings help us to approach the meanings of banqueting imagery in funerary art or understand the place of banqueting in funerary ideologies? Should tombs furnished with klinai or replicas of banquet couches be understood as physical, three-dimensional representations of banqueting, meant to equip the dead for an eternal ‘Totenmahl’? Or do funeral couches mark their occupants as members of the elite class that enjoyed banqueting and/or luxury furniture while alive? These questions are not so easily answered, because klinai in the ancient Greek world were multi-functional furnishings, used for sleeping and resting as well as for dining and revelry, and because burial assemblages are constructed representations, much like tomb paintings or reliefs . This paper will summarize evidence for burial klinai in Greece and Anatolia in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, with particular focus on tombs with additional signifiers of banqueting (tables, drinking vessels, musical instruments, etc.) or with related banqueting imagery (such as the Karaburun tumulus in northern Lycia). Parameters for interpreting funerary klinai as indicators of a ‘Totenmahl’ concept will be proposed, and relevant ethnographic evidence will also be considered. It will be argued that, far from providing ‘hard evidence’ to guide our interpretations of contemporary funerary images, burial assemblages reflect the same processes of ideological construction that lie behind two-dimensional representations and thus are subject to the same questions of interpretation. Nevertheless, consideration of burial furniture enriches the study of the ‘funerary banquet’ and, when seen alongside contemporary images, underlines the importance of this concept—however defined—in certain eras and regions.This article is not currently available in ORA