Licenciatura de historia

Figure 2. Al-Bass: general view of the funerary area excavated in 2008, including the large, round holes left by Roman olive trees.

THE PHOENICIAN CEMETERY OF TYRE
María Eugenia Aubet
ecent archaeological excavations in the Iron Age cemetery of Tyre have led to the recovery of the city’s principal burial area during the tenth to seventh centuries B.C.E. Compared with the rest of the knownIron Age cemeteries in the region, the necropolis of Tyre–Al-Bass offers the most dense and homogeneous assemblage of burials to date in terms of form and typology, mortuary practices, and morphology of grave goods. The archaeological evidence allows us not only to reconstruct the associated Iron Age funerary rituals as a complex sequence of ceremonies that assisted the deceased in making thetransition from this world to the netherworld but also to glimpse the egalitarian impulses of Tyre’s social organization.

R

The Landscape
The principal necropolis of Tyre during the Iron Age was discovered by chance in 1990 in the Al-Bass district, located on the mainland some 2 km away from the ancient island of

Figure 1. Map of the area of Tyre showing the location of the Phoeniciancemetery.

144 NEAR EASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY 73:2–3 (2010)

Tyre (fig. 1). The cemetery had been established on a beach at the edge of the coast opposite the city. Nowadays, the beach is buried under substantial sediments of clay and sand that built up as a result of the formation of an isthmus, or tombolo, that transformed the ancient island of Tyre into a peninsula during the Hellenistic and Romanperiods. As a result, the Phoenician graves are found at more than 3.5 m under the present ground level of Al-Bass. The Phoenician necropolis lies on the southern edge of an ancient creek. Paleobotanical and faunal analyses of the sand sediment in the area show that the creek became a lake during the ninth and eighth centuries B.C.E. For a long time, the principal necropolis of Tyre was thought to belocated at Rachidiyeh, a tell located 5 km south of Tyre, where a few Iron Age graves were found in the 1970s (Doumet 1982). We know today that Tell Rachidiyeh was a coastal settlement—probably the Ushu or Palaeotyros of the written sources—with its own necropolis and that it was part of the immediate hinterland of ancient Tyre. This area was made up of an immense, densely populated fertile plain,judging by the numerous small tells—each with its own necropolis—located at the foot of the hills and all along the main valleys leading into the interior. At present, it is difficult to study and survey this hinterland due to political conditions in southern Lebanon. The Iron Age settlements lying in a radius of some 15 km around Tyre, which includes Rachidiyeh, Qrayeh, Qasmieh, Khirbet Silm,Joya, and Qana (Chapman 1972, 179), formed part of a vast territory under the political control of Tyre. re), The cities of Achziv (25 km south of Tyre), Akko (30 km m south) and, for a while, Sidon itself (30 km north) also belonged to the Tyrian territory. Of all the necropolises discovered in this region, Al-Bass is the itumost extensive known to date. Both its situation and density of gravesindicate that it must have been the main urban necropolis s for the city of Tyre. In addition to a fertile hinterland with good means of communication, Tyre enjoyed an abundant supply of water, in particular from the extraordinary springs of Ras el-‘Ain, south of Rachidiyeh, which provided the city with drinking water from m the Late Bronze Age to the Roman and d Byzantine periods.

of which liesroughly at sea level. The Phoenician necropolis is located close to the northern edge of a monumental Roman necropolis. This explains the number of disturbances and intrusive elements from the late Hellenistic and Roman levels, such as poor and marginal Roman inhumation tombs (fig. 3) and large circular pits. The organic content of these pits (olea, a genus of the olive family), indicates that...