Sensing the Ancestors: The Importance of Senses in Constructing Ancestorship in the Ancient Near East

More than 100 years ago, Émile Durkheim (1995: 60) stated that “there is an ancestor cult only if sacrifices are made on the tombs from time to time, if libations are poured there more or less frequently, or if regular feasts are celebrated in honor of the dead person,” and, additionally, “the real ancestors must become the object of a cult after they die”(61) (i.e., they acquire a divine role within the world of the living). Following the words of the father of modern sociology, it is possible to state that the cult of the ancestors is a pivotal element in framing the religiosity of a society as well as in constructing social solidarity among the members of communities. Since then, the interpretation of the cult of the ancestors in ancient and ethnographically known societies has been increasingly applied in order to search for the “universality of ancestor worship” in framing human religiosity (Steadman, Palmer, and Tilley 1996). Within this epistemological framework, a necessary semantic distinction must be affirmed between “worship” (i.e., linked strictu sensu with the religious dimension and the beliefs of a given society) and a “cult” (i.e., linked to ritual practices associated with the remembrance of selected dead) of the ancestors (Insoll 2011: 1043).