The Art of Burial in the Medieval Nile Valley: Christian and Islamic Interchange in Religious Funerary Contexts
Christian communities in medieval Islamic Egypt (ca. ninth to twelfth centuries) were active participants in Islamicate visual culture. Indeed, Christians employed the same artistic objects as their Muslim neighbors in secular contexts, and close commonalities were even pervasive in art employed in religious rituals. This dissertation investigates one such instance of the shared use of objects between Christians and Muslims in distinct sacred contexts. Christian and Muslim burials shared deep similarities, including the use of burial shrouds and grave markers with almost identical iconographic and compositional features. I draw attention to ways that Christians deployed an interreligious visual and material culture to communicate unique social and theological values. While medieval Christianity and Islam shared a belief in bodily resurrection, their conceptions of the state between death and resurrection differed fundamentally. Islamic doctrine maintained that deceased individuals remained sentient and suffered “tortures of the grave,” including decaying flesh, crumbling bones, and agonizing loneliness. In contrast, Christians believed that the dead were impervious to the hardships of burial. Christian souls separated from the confinement of interred corpses and existed in an extrasensory paradise, joining the otherworldly community of Christian dead. Over three parts, focusing on 1) wall paintings depicting the blessed in heaven and damned in hell; 2) garments shrouding deceased bodies; and 3) grave markers where mourners congregated, I argue that these differences in belief concerning the circumstances of the dead shaped the meanings of funerary objects in significant ways. Christians adapted visual and material features of funerary objects that originally served Islamic doctrine in order to accommodate Christian beliefs. At the same time, burial objects held meanings that were common to Muslims and Christians, including the expression of a shared culture of social prestige.
Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Art and Architecture, History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology
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