Conference Paper

In ancient Greek tradition, soul’s journey to the afterlife is supposed to be a particularly risky task which gives rise to many concerns; the dead is thus provided with rituals, apotropaic and prophylactic gestures to avoid bad encounters and failure, layouts that are sometimes materialized in the funerary sema (material device that stands for him in this world), composed by a stele, the signs written on it, and, as we interpret it, some of the artefacts given to him and deposited in its tomb. This ritual apparatus is still attested at the end of Antiquity, form the IV^th to the VI^th centuries, when Christian faith introduced new funeral arrangements while keeping some of the traditional elements. Instead of examining funerary stelea and its materiality mainly as a social phenomenon, we intend in this paper to analyse apotropaic and prophylactic gestures embedded within material, iconographical and formulary aspects of funerary stelae, in an anthropological perspective. Ritual and religious functions of the setting of the dead’s sema will be studied in the context of christianization, in a corpus of funerary inscription and funerary markers from various sites of ancient Greek world.