Death marks the end of a life—but rarely the end of its costs. Following our team’s recent workshop in Cairo on the politics and memory of death and burial, we began thinking about the practical side of dying: the materials, labour, and resources involved in burying the dead and preserving their memory. How much did funerals cost? What resources were devoted to remembering the deceased? And what can these choices tell us about power, status, and the ways communities constructed memories of their past?
In this four-part blog series, members of the Land, Space, and Power project explore “the cost of death” through literary sources, inscriptions, archaeology, and papyri. Each contribution approaches death from a different angle, asking what was spent, what was preserved, and what was at stake when people chose how (and whom) to remember. These different approaches allow us to look beyond the moment of death itself and ask how communities invested in burial, commemoration, and remembrance.
Our inaugural blog features PhD candidate Finn Lindo-Dunn, who examines the literary tradition surrounding the burial of the famed Saladin. His analysis shows how the commemoration of powerful rulers transformed burial into an act of political investment, where the symbolic value of a tomb could far outweigh the wishes of the deceased.
| Author | Blog Title |
| Finn Lindo-Dunn | Seeing Saladin: Memory and Politics at the Tomb of Islam’s Greatest Hero |
| Kyle Longworth | The Economics of an Epitaph |