Architecture and afterlife: small portable shrines and ritual activities from Tyre to Ibiza

Abstract

The miniaturization of architecture in past and modern societies is a cross-cultural phenomenon, which has received enormous attention in scholarship, particularly in works relating to the Bronze and Iron Age eastern Mediterranean. This article focuses on some small-scale terracotta buildings known from Phoenicia around the seventh to the sixth centuries BCE, argues for their identification as portable shrines, compares them to similar examples from Cyprus, and includes finds from Carthage, Malta, and Ibiza in the discussion. All of this evidence reflects a time when small chapels were increasingly adopted in Phoenician architecture, reproduced at different scales in multiple media, and used in a variety of contexts. Finally, Tyre al-Bass Tomb 8 and other funerary assemblages yielding portable shrines support the idea that they were the focus of ritual activities at burial sites, and their deposition may have followed their use in practices involving storytelling, the libation of scented liquids, and/or the burning of aromatic substances.