While we do not know the precise social or political roles of those interred in the bronze coffins of Babylonia, Assyria and Elam, their elevated status is very clearly expressed. Viewing the bronze “bathtub” coffins within their historical context, Álvarez-Mon judges that
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For example Stolper 1984, 44-5; Gerardi 1987, 257; Miroschedji 1990a, 75-8; Stronach 2003, 258. Potts (1999a, 259) states that under intense Assyrian pressure, Elam was probably no longer a unified state linking the highlands of Fars and the lowlands of Khuzistan as it had been in the Middle Elamite Period, and that individual cities (e.g. Hidalu or Madaktu) were no longer bounded by a single king. According to Potts the rock reliefs of Kul-e Farah and Shekaft-e Salman appear to relate to “petty kings” in the highlands, not subject to those kings mentioned by the Assyrians. Potts (2010, 122-4) has recently continued to argue along these lines.
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Pollock 1999, 196; Chapman 2000, 188. The funerary record was once looked upon as passively reflecting society (Fogelin 2007, 55, 64), but as Tarlow (1999, 11) writes, scholars are increasingly inclined to “contextualize mortuary practice as one of many expressive and structuring aspects of a wider society.”
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Henkelman (2008, 11-13) proposes that a coherent elite may have surrounded a ruling dynasty, with a centralised political organisation rather than fragmentation. Elam is notably still referred to as a unified whole in later Assyrian documentation, and the short reigns of Neo-Elamite kings need not indicate political instability. (Potts 1999, 295). P. Amiet, P de Miroschedji, M. J. Stève and F. Vallat (in Potts 1999, 295), and more recently Henkelman (2008) and Álvarez-Mon (2010a) have pointed to varying degrees of Neo-Elamite renaissance. The survival and continuation of various Elamite institutions into the Persian period testifies to the strength of Elam and return to normal activity once Assyrian pressure subsided (Henkelman 2008, 19). Elam’s military activity and building projects in the post-Assyrian period certainly suggest a Neo-Elamite renaissance free of external interference and a prophecy in Jeremiah of Judah (597-586) suggests Elam’s independence between Assurbanipal’s death and the early years of Nebuchadnezzar II (Potts 1999, 295, 299). A reference to the return of cult statues from Uruk to Susa in 626 after Nabopolassar’s defeat of Assyria “The gods of the land of Susa which the Assyrians had carried off and settled in Erech those gods Nabopolassar let return to the city of Susa” (B.M. 25127, lines 16-17, in Wiseman 1956, 51) is also cited as evidence for the presence of an authority at Susa who was worthy of receiving the statues and in command of sufficient troops to be of interest to the Babylonian king (Potts 1999, 290; Henkelman 2008, 17). However, this begs the question as to why Elam did not participate in the final destruction of the Assyrian Empire in 612 (Potts 1999, 290-5).
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For example, surveys of the Rām Hormuz plain and small-scale excavations at Tall-i Ghazir show continuous occupation and even population growth from the late 2nd millennium to well into the Achaemenid period (Carter 2007, 151).
they belonged to a Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian elite burial tradition, the ideology of which was emulated by the Neo-Elamite rulers.516 It is indeed possible that the use of the coffin was part of a process of emulation, although its precise meaning would have changed since the symbolic referents of material culture in ritual contexts (particularly mortuary contexts) tend not to cross cultural or ethnic boundaries because they are specific to internal social order.517 However, based on the forgoing discussion, the notion of Elamite emulation of Babylonian and Assyrian elite seems an overly simplistic proposition. If royal (?) Elamites hoped to emulate Assyrian royal practices, we might expect them to have chosen the stone sarcophagi of Assyrian kings and queens,518 but they do not seem to have done so. It is more likely, in my view, that their geographical distribution reflects a complex history of interaction involving intermarriage, extended visits, employment, and even deportation between regions at all levels of society.519
It remains possible that all of the burials belong to individuals who were Assyrian, or of Assyrian descent, although the practice of ascribing burials to ‘ethnic’ identity is problematic because burial type, grave goods and funerary rites may relate to any number (or combination) of identities which the burying group may have wished to emphasise for the particular individual.520 On the one hand it might be argued that these burials belong to multi- ethnic populations with shared culture, including beliefs about death. On the other, there have been significant variations between the burials noted throughout this study. The deposition of a single individual in a bronze coffin housed in a plastered, stone-built underground chamber, on the left bank of a river, away from the settlement area at Arjān and Rām Hormuz represents a markedly different tradition to the bronze coffin burials in the urban centre of Ur 516 Álvarez-Mon 2010, 274. 517 Beck 1995, 170-2. 518
Melville (2004, 44-5) too has noted that the stone sarcophagi represent the highest-status coffin type. In his report on Aššur, Andrae (1938, 138) commented that for the large stone Assyrian sarcophagi the immense amount of effort required to obtain/mine the material (probably still with the use of stone hammers). Needless to say they would have been difficult to transport/put in place. It is of course possible that fashions had changed, and in the 7th century the bronze coffin had become the favoured burial type.
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Elamite soldiers were taken into the Assyrian army and Elamite commoners were invited to live in Assyria in a period of famine during Assurbanipal’s reign (Brinkman 1986, 203; Gerardi 1987, 125).There are also specific recorded instances of Elamite deportees being moved into Assyria and elsewhere around the empire in the 7th century. Some were conscripted to the Assyrian army, some sent to Nimrud, Samaria, and even Egypt (Potts 1999a, 288). Ashurbanipal reports that after his destruction of Elam “Daughters of kings, the sisters of kings,
together with the older and younger families of the kings of Elam, officials, mayors of those cities as many as I conquered, chiefs of bowmen, governors, chariot drivers, cavalry, archers, eunuchs, craftsmen, all the army, as many as there were, people, male and female, small and great, horses, mules, donkeys, cattle, and sheep, which were more numerous than grasshoppers, I carried away to Assyria.” (Strawn et al. 2006, 367). One legal
document from Aššur records the sale of a captive Elamite woman and her daughter as domestic slaves (Faist 2009, text VAT 9755).
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and sub-floor funerary vault at Nimrud. Differing relationships of the living with the dead are suggested by these burials and it is difficult to suggest whether the coffins belong to the same symbolic domain in all three cultures, although it is probable that similar concepts of the ghost, the underworld and even the apsû, underlie these particular mortuary choices.
In sum, while the coffins themselves appear virtually identical, the burials are distinct from each other, and I would hesitate to describe them as representing a ‘shared funerary practice’ spanning the three regions. Based on the present evidence, they are better viewed as belonging to three separate arenas in which they each played a role in ideological production.521 Without a more precise date for the burials the possibility of understanding the use of these coffins within a more specific historical context will continue to elude us. Nevertheless, the presence of such distinctive burial containers in these three regions can certainly be considered an outcome of their close interaction across the 8th – 6th centuries. With further study the bronze “bathtub” coffins may eventually in their turn be added to the sum of evidence for this interaction.
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Smith (2007, 165) convinces that the construction of elite graves should be seen as the production of ideology, rather than its expression or representation. Part of this ideology production would have been the performance of ritual action accompanying the burial (see for example Cohen 2005, 3, 7).