18 Francesca Stavrakopoulou cult places for the veneration of possibly royal dead ancestors finds notable support in textual and archaeological evidence from the royal palace at Ugarit, and iconographical material from the Neo-Assyrian Northwest Palace at Kal˙u. In returning to the point at which this discussion began, it would thus appear that the biblical burial of kings Manasseh and Amon in a garden (2 Kgs 21,18.26) resonates with a greater religious and cultic importance than has been previously discerned. Consequently, the widespread assumption that a garden burial reflects a secondary or alternative funerary site is mistaken. Instead, it would appear that the association of royal tombs with a garden is most appropriate. However, this highlights an intriguing irony. In spite of the historical credibility of the garden burial of royalty, and despite the probable religious and ideological prestige of this form of interment, the garden burials of Manasseh and Amon function in the books of Kings as a symbol of theological castigation; in deviating from his formulaic references to the City of David as the site of the royal tombs, the biblical narrator segregates these most reprehensible of kings from their Davidic ancestors. Though this may find partial explanation in the condemnation of mortuary gardens and their associated practices in the book of Isaiah, it is interesting to note that this deviation is heightened by the double-designation of Manasseh’s burial site in 2 Kgs 21,18, in which the king is interred az[ ˆgb wtyb ˆgb, “in the garden of his house in the Garden of Uzza”. Whilst a consensus view is yet to emerge concerning the intended significance or likely identity of Uzza, the pronounced naming of the mortuary garden appears to function as an ideological strategy designed to distance it even further from the royal ancestral tombs by setting up an implicit contrast between az[ ˆg, “Garden of Uzza” and dwd ry[, “City of David”. The continued success of this strategy is reflected in several scholarly discussions in which the mortuary garden is geographically distanced from the City of David on the assumption that the garden lay beyond the walls of Jerusalem. Moreover, the veracity of the tradition naming the burial site as the “Garden of Uzza” appears uncertain upon closer examination. It was noted at the outset of this discussion that the Chronicler does not include this designation in his description of the burial place of Manasseh (2 Chr 33,20) (70), but instead refers only to Manasseh’s (70) Recall that the site of Amon’s burial is not mentioned by the Chronicler (2 Chr 33,24-25).