This book brings together papers covering a wide range of regions and
periods, from Italy to China, and Old Kingdom Egypt to the Roman Empire,
all focusing on the interpretation of banqueting imagery in funerary
contexts. The papers largely concentrate on pictorial depictions of
banqueting and/or food offerings and how they might be understood in
such settings, although some papers consider tomb deposits and
furnishings. Traditionally, three main interpretative paradigms have
been employed in 'deciphering' such images: 1) they represent wordly
activities, either quotidien or idealised, 2) they represent an imagined
pleasant afterlife (and therefore evidence this belief) and 3) they
represent funerary or mortuary rites. Such interpretations have been
challenged by scholarship that refutes the validity of these strict,
divisive categories, but in concentrating on social structures embedded
in the images, has tended to eschew potential eschatological aspects of
meaning. Collectively, the papers here reconsider this matter, making
significant contributions to discussions of ambiguity, agency,
interaction, performance, the issue of 'meaning', and the various ways
in which images can be approached and used.