In a mountainous kingdom in what is now southeastern Turkey, there lived in the eighth century B.C. a royal official, Kuttamuwa, who oversaw the completion of an inscribed stone monument, or stele, to be erected upon his death. The words instructed mourners to commemorate his life and afterlife with feasts "for my soul that is in this stele."
University of Chicago archaeologists who made the discovery last summer in ruins of a walled city near the Syrian border said the stele provided the first written evidence that the people in this region held to the religious concept of the soul apart from the body. By contrast, Semitic contemporaries, including the Israelites, believed the body and soul were inseparable, which for them made cremation unthinkable, as noted in the Bible.
Circumstantial evidence, archaeologists said, indicated that the people at Sam'al, the ancient city, practiced cremation. The site is known today as Zincirli (pronounced ZIN-jeer-lee).
Other scholars said the find could lead to important insights into the dynamics of cultural contact and exchange in the borderlands of antiquity where Indo-European and Semitic people interacted in the Iron Age.
The discovery and its implications were described last week in interviews with archaeologists and a linguist at the University of Chicago, who excavated and translated the inscription.
"Normally, in the Semitic cultures, the soul of a person, their vital essence, adheres to the bones of the deceased," said David Schloen, an archaeologist at the university's Oriental Institute and director of the excavations. "But here we have a culture that believed the soul is not in the corpse but has been transferred to the mortuary stone."
A translation of the inscription by Dennis Pardee, a Chicago professor of Near Eastern languages and civilization, reads in part: "I, Kuttamuwa, servant of ((the king)) Panamuwa, am the one who oversaw the production of this stele for myself while still living. I placed it in an eternal chamber ((?)) and established a feast at this chamber: a bull for ((the god)) Hadad, a ram for ((the god)) Shamash and a ram for my soul that is in this stele."
In addition to the writing, a pictorial scene chiseled into the well-preserved stele depicts the culture's view of the afterlife. A bearded man wearing a tasseled cap, presumably Kuttamuwa, raises a cup of wine and sits before a table laden with food, bread and roast duck.
In societies of the region, scholars say, this was an invitation to bring offerings of food and drink to the tomb. Here family and descendants supposedly feasted before a stone slab in a kind of chapel. Archaeologists have found no traces there of a tomb or bodily remains.