Res Mortis: Matters of Death in the Ancient Mediterranean. Ongoing, at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Res Mortis: Matters of Death in the Ancient Mediterranean. Ongoing, at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Votive sarcophagi in the shape of a hawk that would contain an image of Osiris constructed with wheat and Nile river mud. Egypt. Ptolemaic Period 323-30 BCE. Photographed at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Drawn from the permanent collection of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquities, this exhibition focuses on the rich mortuary cult traditions of ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean and features funerary objects at the center of each belief. For ancient Egyptians, funerary objects reflected their intense preparation to protect and sustain one's Ka, or spirit, in the afterlife. In classical Greece, ceramics were a popular funerary offering in place of costly metal vessels. Initially, decorated ceramics were repurposed as gifts for the dead. Roman sarcophagi frequently portrayed pagan symbolism pointing to a happy afterlife that Christianity would adopt when it became the empire's official religion.
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