What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife

What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife - Hardcover

$29.95
$29.95
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What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife
  • What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife
What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife - Hardcover

What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife - Hardcover

by Robert Garland
$29.95
$29.95

Book Overview

An entertaining and enlightening book about how ancient peoples dealt with death--and what we might learn from them

A lively story of death, What to Expect When You're Dead explores the fascinating death-related beliefs and practices of a wide range of ancient cultures and traditions--Mesopotamian, 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--in ways that turn out to be remarkably similar to ours--to assist the dead on their journey to the next world and to understand life's greatest mystery.

What to Expect When You're Dead chronicles the ways ancient peoples answered questions such as: How to achieve a good death and afterlife? What's the best way to dispose of a body? Do the dead face a postmortem judgement--and where do they end up? Do the dead have bodies in the afterlife--and 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're Dead will be a morbidly delicious treat for every reader alive.
ISBN9780691266176
Author Robert Garland
PublisherPrinceton University Press
GenrePhilosophy
FormatHardcover
PublishedApril 2025
LanguageENG- English
Pages344
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

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About Robert Garland

Robert Garland is the Roy D. and Margaret B. Wooster Professor of the Classics at Colgate University. He is the author of Wandering Greeks: The Ancient Greek Diaspora from the Age of Homer to the Death of Alexander the Great and The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Graeco-Roman World.

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