What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife

by Robert Garland

Overview

An entertaining and enlightening book about how ancient peoples dealt with death—and what we might learn from them

A lively story of death, What to Expect When You’re Dead explores the fascinating death-related beliefs and practices of a wide range of ancient cultures and traditions—Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hindu, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Early Christian, and Islamic. By drawing on the latest scholarship on ancient archaeology, art, literature, and funerary inscriptions, Robert Garland invites readers to put themselves in the sandals of ancient peoples and to imagine their mental state moment by moment as they sought—in ways that turn out to be remarkably similar to ours—to assist the dead on their journey to the next world and to understand life’s greatest mystery.

What to Expect When You’re Dead chronicles the ways ancient peoples answered questions such as: How to achieve a good death and afterlife? What’s the best way to dispose of a body? Do the dead face a postmortem judgement—and where do they end up? Do the dead have bodies in the afterlife—and can they eat, drink, and have sex? And what can the living do to stay on good terms with the nonliving?

Filled with intriguing stories and frequent humor, What to Expect When You’re Dead will be a morbidly delicious treat for every reader alive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691268538
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/08/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	344
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Robert Garland is the Roy D. and Margaret B. Wooster Professor Emeritus of the Classics at Colgate University. He is the author of many books, including The Greek Way of Death, Wandering Greeks (Princeton), and Athens Burning. He has also recorded six courses for the Great Courses, most recently God against the Gods.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“What to Expect When You’re Dead is a remarkable book, as broad as it is deep. Garland’s urbane, witty style makes his grand synthesis of ancient approaches to death eminently instructive for scholars and compellingly entertaining for the general reader. To say this book is well written is an understatement. I can’t imagine a single person who would not learn from it.”—Jennifer T. Roberts, author of Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture

“Vital and vivacious, Garland’s sometimes sobering, sometimes irreverent, but always informative overview takes readers on an awfully big adventure. Bringing to life 100,000 years of human responses to death, this book poses timeless questions about the greatest known unknown of all.”—David Stuttard, author of A History of Ancient Greece in 50 Lives

“Robert Garland is, in the nicest possible way, an expert on death, especially on ancient Greek ways of death. Here he turns that expertise to splendid account, ranging informatively, illuminatingly, and provocatively across death culture in not only Greece but also Etruria, Egypt, Rome—and even our own contemporary world.”—Paul Cartledge, author of Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece

Editorial Reviews

"Fascinating. . . .As well as an incredible depth of knowledge, one of the highlights of this book is the occasional light, humorous touch that Garland brings to one of life’s most difficult topics. He shows us how past societies dealt with death and the idea of an afterlife in a way that was often full of vibrancy."—-Jackson von Uden, All About History 

"[A] rollicking excursion into death in the ancient world. . . .Enlightening."—-Caitlin Mahar, Inside Story

From the Publisher