GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN—Sandra Karlsson, a graduate student at the University of Gothenburg, has studied Hellenistic grave reliefs from the Greek city-states of Smyrna and Kyzikos, located in present-day Turkey, for information about the expression of emotions, grief, and conceptions of death. She found the dead were often shown with family members and servants, and the strongest expressions of grief were offered for deceased children and adolescents. It had been thought that high child mortality rates brought about conventions that suppressed expressions of grief at the death of a child. “This [little utilized] source material provides important information about funerary rituals, demographics, family structures, and ideas about life after death,” Karlsson told Science Daily.
