Hypogeum of Yarhai
About
This underground family tomb was cut into the rock south of Palmyra's colonnade in 108 CE, its walls lined with painted limestone busts of the dead set above their burial niches. Robert Amy and Henri Seyrig excavated the hypogeum in 1936 under the French Mandate antiquities service, recovering dozens of these portrait reliefs before moving them to the National Museum of Damascus, among the best-preserved funerary sculpture to survive from Roman Syria.
What happened here
The tomb is built where the traffic is: on the road out of town, facing the carriageway, close enough to read at walking pace. That is the design brief. Inside there may be a single chamber for one family or niches for dozens, with cremation urns or, increasingly, bodies laid out. Outside there is a portrait, an inscription giving the dead their offices and their years, and often a bench, because visitors come back. The family returns on the anniversary and at the February festival of the dead, brings wine and food, and eats a meal at the graveside. Endowments are left to keep it up and lawsuits follow when they are not honoured. A grand tomb is the last public building a family gets to commission.
Sources
Nearby
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