A lively story of death, What to Expect When You鈥檙e Dead explores the fascinating death-related beliefs and practices of a wide range of ancient cultures and traditions鈥擬esopotamian, Egyptian, Hindu, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Early Christian, and Islamic. By drawing on the latest scholarship on ancient archaeology, art, literature, and funerary inscriptions, Robert Garland invites readers to put themselves in the sandals of ancient peoples and to imagine their mental state moment by moment as they sought鈥攊n ways that turn out to be remarkably similar to ours鈥攖o assist the dead on their journey to the next world and to understand life鈥檚 greatest mystery.
What to Expect When You鈥檙e Dead chronicles the ways ancient peoples answered questions such as: How to achieve a good death and afterlife? What鈥檚 the best way to dispose of a body? Do the dead face a postmortem judgement鈥攁nd where do they end up? Do the dead have bodies in the afterlife鈥攁nd can they eat, drink, and have sex? And what can the living do to stay on good terms with the nonliving?
Filled with intriguing stories and frequent humor, What to Expect When You鈥檙e Dead will be a morbidly delicious treat for every reader alive.
Robert Garland is the Roy D. and Margaret B. Wooster Professor Emeritus of the Classics at Colgate University. He is the author of many books, including The Greek Way of Death, Wandering Greeks (91桃色), and Athens Burning. He has also recorded six courses for the Great Courses, most recently God against the Gods.
“What to Expect When You’re Dead is a remarkable book, as broad as it is deep. Garland’s urbane, witty style makes his grand synthesis of ancient approaches to death eminently instructive for scholars and compellingly entertaining for the general reader. To say this book is well written is an understatement. I can’t imagine a single person who would not learn from it.”—Jennifer T. Roberts, author of Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture
“Vital and vivacious, Garland’s sometimes sobering, sometimes irreverent, but always informative overview takes readers on an awfully big adventure. Bringing to life 100,000 years of human responses to death, this book poses timeless questions about the greatest known unknown of all.”—David Stuttard, author of A History of Ancient Greece in 50 Lives
“Robert Garland is, in the nicest possible way, an expert on death, especially on ancient Greek ways of death. Here he turns that expertise to splendid account, ranging informatively, illuminatingly, and provocatively across death culture in not only Greece but also Etruria, Egypt, Rome—and even our own contemporary world.”—Paul Cartledge, author of Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece
This publication generally has been produced to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Level AA but has not been checked for language shifts. It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to people with print disabilities. This book contains various accessibility features including alternative text for images, a table of contents, a page list, landmarks, a logical reading order, structural navigation, an index, and semantic structure. Where applicable, there are backlinks to the table of contents.
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