mortuaryfinds of recent years.^29 Mortuary rites represent a significant
aspect of social practice with an important public dimension in the
practical construction of tombs and mounds, and in the organization
of sacrifices; there is also some evidence (albeit rather ambiguous), that
group rituals were conducted in and around tombs when these were
opened up for successive visits or burials. Unlike funerary regulations in
central and southern Greece, there seems to be no evidence of sumptuary
legislation to restrict particular commemorative forms or acts.^30 Where
known, Greek sumptuary laws seem to have been intended to restrict the
capacity of certain sections of society to spend wealth in ways that were
judged ostentatious and socially injurious. The implication of significant
expenditure on mortuary processes in the northern Aegean seems to be
that these considerations did not apply. Either this form of conspicuous
consumption was approved of by wider groups within northern societies,
or objections to such expenditure (if any) were ignored. If approved, then
the selection of tomb forms and grave goods was not primarily, or
exclusively, a matter of wealth, and distinction was based at least partly
on substantive social roles, not just on power relations.
Burial in the northern Aegean was not therefore just a matter of rites
of passage, aimed at severing the ties of the living from the dead. It was
much more than this. The inclusion of sacrificial animals, both hunted
and domestic species; furniture, and textiles, as well as plate, washing
utensils, and dining equipment in the more generously appointed graves
(in Macedonia as well as Thrace), implies a specific set of ideas, perhaps a
spectrum of ideas, about the nature of life and death and about an
afterlife, as well as concepts of what was meet and appropriate for
persons of different status. Tomb paintings provide a wide range of
ideas and images that cannot be conveniently subsumed into a single
narrative or conceptual framework. There are, undoubtedly, images that
seem compatible with Orphic, Pythagorean, or related eschatologies; and
gold sheets, sometimes inscribed with a few words, echo ideas that
(^29) Kisyov 2005, 16–74 (Tumuli I and 3, Chernozem, which most closely resemble the
élite burials at Duvanli); Marazov 2011 (material in the Vassil Bojkov Collection, some of
which is likely to come from burials in central Thrace, esp. nos 42–66, 92–7, 99–108, 110–17,
120 – 31, all of which have analogies in central Thrace; Kitov 2001; 2003a; 2003b; 2005. The
portrait head of Seuthes III has been displayed in a recent exhibition at the Royal Academy of
Arts, London ( 30 Bronze, ed. D. Ekserdjian, Royal Academy of Arts, 2012, no. 26).
Examples of this type of sumptuary legislation include Solon (Plut.Sol.21.6) and
Demetrios of Phaleron in Athens (Cic.Leg.2.64–66); or the Twelve Tables in Rome (X. 1–4);
Morris 1992, 128–55 for an incisive discussion of mortuary fashions; on the use of Zhaba
Mogila, Strelcha, and the Ostrusha tomb for successive events, Archibald 1998, 288–91.
312 Continuity and commemoration