Death rituals and women in Anatolia in the First Millenium B.C.

Death, together with the culture of human being, has become an event that is evaluated and reacted differently in time. What constitutes culture is of course nature and human being who are harmonized through environmental conditions. However, it should not be forgotten that while its the people of today that shapes the culture, it is always the previous generations that built the society. Therefore, the causes and consequences of the behavior of people of the past, not of today, should be understood to reveal the factors that come into play during the formation of any culture, whether it be food, clothing, or burial. For this reason, in this study, it is tried to understand the process of the woman in Anatolia by burial traditions. For this purpose, iconographic, ethnographic, anthropological, epigraphic, mythological and archaeological data were used during the evaluation of women over the first millennium B.C. The lack of scientific research on women is remarkable in Anatolia, one of the places that have been involved in the formation of culture for a long time and gained identity with its unifying position directly between eastern and western cultures in the world. The diversity of studies conducted on women in the Near Eastern cultures, which are also considered as Greece and Mesopotamia, contrasts with the inadequacy of studies on women in Anatolia. This thesis was created in order to fill a deficiency that creates a big gap in the perception of the geography where Anatolia is a part as a whole. In the introductory part of the study, the main critical approaches to traditional methods followed in archeology are mentioned. Through these critical interpretations, approaches that are thought to contribute to the subject are shared. While examining this issue, the path of New Archeology movement that started to develop in the 1980s was used to explain the current study in the most comprehensive way. In the next section, the concept of death and the perception of death in humans are emphasized. The demographic characteristics and the criterion regarding the grave were taken into consideration, where clues regarding age, gender and social identity were evaluated together. In the second part of the study, after mentioning the chronological development of burial practices, the earliest examples of burials in Anatolia and technical issues about why criteria should be used when approaching the representatives of dead burial traditions in Anatolia were discussed. The criteria that were deemed appropriate through the evaluation of the previous studies were used in this section. The sample group which consisted of a total of 137 individuals (69 female and 68 male individuals) constituted the findings part of the study. They were seized from 19 settlements which were grouped chronologically. Thus, it was determined whether there was any change in grave types during the periods. Later on, the tomb types were separated by gender, and in the last stage, similarities and differences between the sexes were revealed through the finds. While the tombs where the material remains of death have been recovered and the burials can be reconstructed through the findings. All of the findings are insufficient to determine the pre-burial process. For this reason, it was thought that it would be possible to fill this deficiency through written sources and theater works that reflected daily life. The research has progressed in line with this idea. As a matter of fact, certain findings on pre and post stages of burial rituals, were obtained through theater plays. By following the data in the intellectual context and of course within the limits of imagination, the aim of reviving some of the sequences of this application was made possible.