AN INFANT JAR BURIAL FROM ZARNŪQA: MUSLIM FUNERARY PRACTICES AND MIGRANT COMMUNITIES IN LATE OTTOMAN PALESTINE

The article presents an exceptional late Ottoman-period funerary assemblage excavated in 2001 at the former Arab village of Zarnūqa, on Israel’s southern coastal plain. The assemblage, which formed part of a small cemetery in which mostly children were buried, included three storage jars covered by a stone surface—one contained the remains of a newborn baby, another contained grains and the third had an unknown content. The burial and grain jars were of Egyptian origin. In this article we present an updated inventory of Muslim jar burials from historical Palestine. When analyzed against this database, the Zarnūqa assemblage raises key questions pertaining to Muslim funerary practices, religious belief and magic, and to the migration of Egyptians to late Ottoman Palestine.