Lidewijde de Jong succeeds in presenting a concise picture of funerary practices, customs and beliefs in the Roman province of Syria. This was no easy task; archaeology in Syria and Lebanon followed different trajectories from the time of the early travellers, with the focus shifting from monumental tombs to the Bronze Age or prehistory. Early epigraphists often recorded funerary inscriptions separately from the monuments to which they belonged. Before the Second World War, excavators rarely cared to preserve skeletal remains. Sites were (and still are, unfortunately) often looted, with easily portable antiquities taken out of their original context. Despite the difficulties, de J. gathered information from over 200 sites and almost 2,000 tombs from Roman Syria. Of these, 517 tombs can be dated with certainty within the Roman period, classified in terms of form (for example, tower tomb or pit grave or sarcophagus) and located within the landscape. These 517 tombs formed the core of the study.

The book is divided into six chapters. The first looks at the spatial relationship between the settlement and the areas reserved for burials. There was a clear demarcation between the two, with cemeteries located outside the city walls, following pre-Roman customs. As cities grew, however, cemeteries sometimes had to be abandoned or even incorporated within them, though many were used for centuries. ‘The construction of non-funerary architecture in the cemetery, and its roadside location, were mostly new features of the Roman period’ (29). The next chapter examines the types of tomb known from Syria. It highlights the great diversity that existed in types and decoration, the co-existence of communal tombs alongside tombs for individuals and the existence of ‘regional funerary styles’ (59), while noting a general emphasis on ‘visibility and monumentality’ in the Roman period. The types, variety and quantity of funerary gifts are examined in the third chapter. Unlike tomb architecture and elaboration, grave goods seem to follow earlier, regional traditions. The fourth chapter examines how the identity of the deceased was expressed through portraits, inscriptions and the treatment of the body. Regional differences appear more pronounced here than in monumental tombs. The penultimate chapter is the most ambitious of all, as it tries to reconstruct funerary beliefs solely on the basis of the tombs and artefacts found in them, including human remains, since there is no relevant surviving literature. The focus is on burial practices rather than beliefs in the afterlife, as one might expect from the chapter's title. Through the archaeological data, it is possible to see changes in commemorative practices in the Roman period. Each chapter clearly distinguishes between what was traditional and what was Roman in each case, while the final chapter offers a comparison between sites in Syria and across the Roman Empire. The book concludes with a postscript that identifies areas of further research, such as local identities in the Byzantine period, invites more emphasis on visual material culture and calls for the intensification of interdisciplinary research and for archival material to be utilised to its full potential.

A glance at the appendices will shows how variable is our knowledge of Syrian tombs, which range from the well published to the barely mentioned. The strength and success of the book is in the synthesis of all these diverse data into a coherent whole that focuses on two big questions: first, how was the identity of the dead expressed by their families and communities; second, how does Roman Syria relate to the Roman Empire? Answering these questions makes it possible to draw some conclusions about the identity of the people of Roman Syria, as seen through the lens of funerary customs and beliefs. The image that emerges is of an area where local and ‘Roman’ culture intersected visibly, where traditions were followed but also discarded in response to empire-wide trends, and where particular circumstances (for example, violent or untimely deaths) caused people to deviate from established rituals in their treatment of the dead. De J. succeeds in demonstrating that material culture can express complex and diverse ideas about the body, a person's place within their family and community and the community's place within the Roman Empire. Roman Syrian identity as seen through the data was not static, but could change between sites or from period to period. Furthermore, her careful methodology can serve as an example of how to deal with disparate datasets and archival material.

The book is accompanied by online appendices that pull together all the information from the sites in a clear form. This is a particularly important and welcome addition to scholarship, especially since it makes information from sources published in different languages accessible in English.