Baby Burials in the Middle Bronze Age

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Almost as soon as people began making containers from clay, they began burying their dead babies in storage jars.¹

The custom of infant jar burials (IJBs) began in the Pottery Neolithic period (seventh–fifth millennia B.C.E.) and, in the Levant, lasted even beyond the Iron Age (1200–587 B.C.E.). It was most popular, though, in the Middle Bronze Age (2000–1550 B.C.E.), when IJBs are found at Canaanite sites from Syria to the eastern Nile Delta, and especially in the southern Levant.² A typical IJB contained an infant younger than one year and grave goods—one or two small vessels and maybe a scarab or a blade. The jars themselves are standard domestic store jars, usually buried under the floors of houses or courtyards, but sometimes deposited in communal tombs.

The earliest known burials of children date to the Middle Paleolithic period. The first sites with IJBs date to the Pottery Neolithic period of the northern Levant. This innovation spread in all directions. In the Chalcolithic era (fifth–mid-fourth millennia), IJBs became increasingly popular and were used for adult as well as infant inhumations. The custom reached its peak during the Middle Bronze Age, but in the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 B.C.E.), IJBs decreased in popularity, becoming uncommon by the end of the 13th century. Some date to the Iron Age I (1200–1000 B.C.E.), reflecting the roots of this funerary tradition deep within Canaanite culture. In the Iron Age II (1000–587 B.C.E.), they became increasingly rare, except in Phoenician sites along the Lebanese coast, where burial jars contained the cremated remains of infants and children. The Phoenicians retained this tradition when they settled in Carthage, Tunisia, where thousands of funerary urns with the cremated remains of the very young were buried in special cemeteries (seventh century B.C.E.–second century C.E.).^a

In the southern Levant, archaeologists have discovered two basic types of Middle Bronze Age burials: (1) tombs constructed of stone and (2) tombs cut into the earth (pits, caves, and chambers with shafts). Burials were split almost equally between those inside city walls (or on the slopes of tells) and those in cemeteries far removed from settlements. A single settlement might contain more than one place for burial.

Canaanites of the Middle Bronze Age viewed 042tombs as homes for the dead, meaning that members of an extended family unit who lived near each other would be interred together in a single tomb. In this way, tombs, like houses, highlighted familial relationships and marked territorial claims.

Men and women of all ages, and children too, were buried in all types of tombs. In some instances, an IJB was placed inside a burial cave, but jar burials were not the only means of interring society’s youngest. Tombs were also used, most commonly for children above three years of age. And, of course, as in any era, people who died through acts of violence or natural disasters might not be buried at all, but rather abandoned wherever they lay.

The popularity of IJBs increased throughout the Middle Bronze Age. They are found at 20 percent of Middle Bronze Age IIA (2000–1750 B.C.E.) sites and at 32 percent of Middle Bronze Age IIC (1650–1550 B.C.E.) sites. They appear under floors and walls and in open areas. The burials are placed both horizontally and vertically. Typically, a store jar contained only one body, but occasionally held two. Those interred were usually infants but sometimes children up to three years old.

Scholars interpret IJBs in many ways. They relate them to child sacrifice, infanticide, kinship affiliations, social status, religious beliefs, and mother goddesses. They think about the relationship between jars, wombs (human or divine), and fertility; about how children who were born too early or died too early could be cared for or possibly even reborn; about how deceased children could be kept within their communities or with their mothers; about deceased children as symbolic of seeds and the regeneration of the land; and, simply, about IJBs as child-sized coffins. All of these explanations have one thing in common: They emphasize that burying children in houses and courtyards reflects the desire to keep dead babies close to home.

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In my opinion, IJBs are expressions of social and family structure. IJBs must be considered within the context of Middle Bronze Age Canaanite culture and burial traditions, especially by looking at the expectations people had for those infants, had they matured. Gender roles within homes—and as they relate to mortuary customs—are also important.

While there is no single way to explain IJBs at any time and place, a significant factor in Middle Bronze Age Canaan was the integration of the deceased child into the living community—an integration that acknowledged the potential lost by that child’s untimely death. Across time and space, cultures integrate children into society at different ages and through different initiation rites or rites of passage. In some, birth, weaning, or growing teeth might mark the point at which a baby is considered a member of the community. In others, community membership is marked by naming, baptism, surviving the first month of life, becoming old enough to contribute to the household, or becoming old enough to drink wine. In some societies, children could not be integrated into the adult community because they had not yet borne children and therefore could not be reckoned as ancestors. Elsewhere, young children could be buried in ancestral tombs by virtue of their position in the family lineage.

In the Hebrew Bible, Levitical law (the law of the Temple priests) provides periods of seclusion for newborn boys (seven days; Leviticus 12:2-3) and newborn girls (14 days; Leviticus 12:5). After this period of seclusion, babies were integrated into their families. Levitical law additionally prescribes the social integration of boys through the ritual of circumcision on the eighth day of life (Genesis 17; Leviticus 12:2-3).

Returning to our investigation of the Middle Bronze Age, a lack of initiation or integration of the very young was not the across-the-board norm, as can be seen by the fact that some were buried in traditional communal graves. What might account for the difference? Perhaps the health of those interred in IJBs—whether stillborn babies, neonates, infants, or children up to three years of age—had been too fragile for them to have undergone rites of integration or initiation. Other infants and young children, robust in health until their sudden death due to accident, malnutrition, or disease, might already have undergone initiation rites and, therefore, would have been eligible for burial with other family members in tombs.

Seen in this way, IJBs are understood to reflect an alternate idea of social integration, the relationship between the very young and personhood. Consider the nature of the jar burial, which kept skeletal remains intact to an extent not possible in other kinds of burials. In this way, children who had not yet undergone initiation rituals would retain their physical integrity and, in that way, some degree of personhood. For older children who had already undergone a ritual of initiation or integration, physical degradation of the corpse would pose less of a problem.

The Middle Bronze Age was characterized by socially stratified communities living in autonomous city-states throughout the Levant. Those who controlled palaces and temples dominated not only the walled cities but also their rural hinterlands. The international nature of this era and its widely shared expressions of society made evident through a common material culture suggest interconnectedness among elites.

The maximum population of the southern Levant at any given time in the Middle Bronze Age is estimated at some 140,000–200,000 souls, but this number is not reflected in the comparatively few bodies retrieved from burial sites. It was the elite who were buried with luxury grave goods inside or outside their cities, in tombs. Most people, poor and unimportant, were buried in earthen graves outside their towns and villages, graves that are now lost to the archaeological record.

Demographic statistics indicate that in antiquity, a third of all infants did not survive their first year; nearly half did not survive past five years of age. Various factors—such as maternal age and health, number of prior pregnancies, mothers’ occupation and socio-economic status, and food insecurity—affected the survival of mothers and their babies. Low birth weight, birth defects, and early weaning imperiled survival. So, too, did physical trauma 044and acts of violence and abuse directed at pregnant women and at their children. Rampant unsanitary conditions led to the spread of disease, contributing to the high death rate for infants and new mothers.

Given mortality rates as high as these, it seems surprising that IJBs were the least common type of burial in the Middle Bronze Age. We should expect to find more of them in the southern Levant. This is the paradox we find in burial practices during this period.

We should also note the objects that are buried with the deceased. Grave goods included objects used by mourners to prepare the dead for interment, objects used by mourners in funerary rituals and then left in graves, and objects placed in graves to accompany the dead into the future. Over the course of the Middle Bronze Age, society became increasingly stratified, and grave goods changed accordingly. Early on, they included weaponry and tools. Later, luxury items, such as elegant ceramic vessels, scarabs, toggle pins, jewelry, ivory inlay from furniture, and occasionally even pieces of furniture, became typical. Ground stone tools, especially mortars and bowls, were also included.

Only a few objects—small vessels (especially juglets), blades, very small ground stone tools, and scarabs—were included in IJBs. Notably absent were weapons, ivory inlay, jewelry, and toggle pins, objects common in other types of Middle Bronze Age graves. In practical terms, of course, the size of burial containers dictated the limited number of objects, their small size, and even their position alongside corpses within burial jars. At the same time, both the store jars and the objects deposited in them served as symbols of identity, marking the lives that these dead infants would no longer be able to live.

When elders were buried, the grave goods buried with them marked their accomplishments, rendered possible by longevity. Families expected that children, from a young age, would undertake responsibilities linked to household maintenance and the subsistence economy. For those who died very young, those expectations were never realized. Their burial in store jars under house floors and courtyard surfaces reflected both this loss and their lack of social integration.

In Canaanite and some other cultures, pottery was sometimes ritually broken at the end of a religious ceremony to desacralize it and ensure that it could not be reused. Objects such as weapons, tools, cultic figurines, and model shrines might similarly be damaged and buried in favissae—refuse pits for deconsecrated cultic objects. Intentionally mutilated (or “killed”) pottery and objects are also found in burials. In the southern Levant, this custom began as early as the Chalcolithic period and was common in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages.

Sometimes, a store jar used in an IJB would be missing its upper end or have a hole punched through its side, which guaranteed that it could not be reclaimed by the living. These ritually “killed” burial containers, like other grave goods, were symbols of the identity of the deceased and markers of society’s expectations for those deceased children. Viewed differently, being rendered nonfunctional, “killed” objects corresponded to the deceased, who also lacked functional value for the living. Together, these factors highlight the economic value of grave goods, the sacrifice that their permanent deposition entailed, and children’s economic value to their families and society.

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Like the children who died, burial jars and the grave goods placed in them also represent loss to those children’s families. Of course, children interred in IJBs were too young to have been economic boons to their families, but as they matured, they would have become so. They would have been sons and daughters whose hard labor was essential to their family’s economic well-being and stability; sons who brought wives and their wealth and skills into their families; daughters who contributed first to their natal families and then to their marital homes. The tools interred with these children represent those with which the children would have produced food and other essentials for their families had they lived long enough to do so.

Human existence rested on the twin pillars of agriculture and animal husbandry, and it was in their requisite tasks and responsibilities that most people were engaged. Despite the chronological gap between the Middle Bronze Age (for which there are few texts) and the Iron Age (for which the Hebrew Bible provides a wealth of information), the basics of life remained constant.

Children from a young age were trained to participate in the domestic, agricultural, and pastoral economies. They were valued as contributors within the subsistence economy, helping to sustain their families, and they contributed in other ways as well. In Iron Age Israel, they served as debt-slaves, children whose parents placed them in service in households to which the parents were indebted (Exodus 21:2-11), and as slave children and hired laborers (Leviticus 25:39-46). Their deaths, therefore, represented losses that were not only personal but also economic—whether present labor or future earnings.

A store jar, then, was not only a burial container, but also a container that reflected the agricultural economy to which most people were tied as producers, processors, and consumers of comestibles. The small objects placed in IJBs were not only offerings but also sacrifices, underscoring what was lost with the death of the child.

The Middle Bronze Age store jar served as a symbol of nourishment, female fertility, and the process of reproduction. Inasmuch as the store jar symbolized the mother, its permanent transformation from household container to burial container might suggest that the mother, like the child, was dead. She may have died in childbirth or as a result of postpartum complications; her death may even have been a causal factor in that of her child’s. Here, too, the ramifications of loss and death would have been not only personal but also economic.

The dead, of course, have no voice in their own interments. The only people whose beliefs are expressed in burials are the people who do the burying. It is, therefore, essential to consider who controls the mortuary process and who makes burials happen to determine whose beliefs are expressed in those burials.

Since women managed domestic spaces on a daily basis, it was likely women who determined the placement of IJBs. Expressed differently, women determined the work that children would do in the household, and when their babies died, women symbolically prepared them for that work. Women had agency when it came to burying the very young in store jars under the floors of their homes and courtyards. The inclusion of materials from the domestic larder, both store jars and small utilitarian tools and vessels, indicates that women, in charge of allocating household resources, also allocated resources when burying their children.

Women were engaged in domestic religion. Just as they had ritual responsibilities in the sphere of life, so too did they have ritual responsibilities in the sphere of death. They enacted mortuary rituals, accompanying the dead to their resting places. Such responsibilities are documented in the Hebrew Bible. Accordingly, women’s funerary responsibilities included serving as professional mourners who chant laments for the deceased (e.g., 2 Samuel 11:26; Jeremiah 9:17-20, including mothers teaching dirges to their daughters; Joel 1:8); participating in family rituals at burial sites; preparing and sharing the funerary meals that were part of burial ceremonies (including those venerating ancestors) and annual memorial commemorations (Deuteronomy 26:13-14); serving as necromancers or sorcerers (e.g., Exodus 22:18; 1 Samuel 28:3-25); weaving the sackcloth worn by mourners (e.g., Genesis 37:34; Isaiah 22:12); and perhaps preparing the dead for interment (Numbers 19:11-13). Women, of course, also mourned the dead with traditional rites and rituals (e.g., Jeremiah 31:15).

Women’s authority in domestic religion extended to their roles in funerals and subsequent commemorative ceremonies. In Middle Bronze Age Canaan (as in Iron Age Israel), women prepared bodies for interment. They prepared meals for funerals and annual commemorations, and they participated in funerals as family members or as professional mourners. It was (mostly) women who selected grave goods—whether in family tombs or in IJBs—and even the burial jars themselves. Given women’s authority in matters of the home, as in childbirth, childcare, and the education and training in aspects of domestic production, it was women who selected the place—whether inside their homes or in their courtyards—for the interment of burial jars.

In brief, women’s agency in the domestic setting was a crucial factor in the Middle Bronze Age tradition of intramural burials of infants in store jars. Caring for their youngest—in death as in life—was one of the many ways in which women fulfilled their responsibilities to their families and their communities.

Almost as soon as people began making containers from clay, they began burying their dead babies in storage jars.1