The funeral was accompanied by a feast in the cemetery. This banquet, called a "mrz", is attested in inscriptions of the fourth and third centuries BC, but is known in the Levant in earlier periods. The attendees decorated an altar and sacrificed an animal which they then ate. The feasts included the consumption of wine, which may have had symbolic links to blood, the fertility of the Earth, and new life, as it did for other Mediterranean peoples. At the end of the feast, the crockery was smashed or buried in order to ritually kill it. Cemeteries included spaces and equipment for food preparation. The feast may have played a role in determining inheritance and could have symbolised the enduring bond between the deceased and their survivors. These funerary feasts were repeated at regular intervals as part of a cult of the ancestors (called "rpʼm", cognate with the Hebrew "rephaim"). In Neo-Punic texts, the "rpʼm" are equated with the Latin "Manes". At Monte Sirai in Sardinia, tombs included amphorae to channel libations offered on these occasions down into the tomb. The funerary stelae and baetyls erected on top of tombs, which are often inscribed with the name of the deceased and anthropomorphised, may have been intended as the focus for worship of the deceased within the context of this ancestor cult. Small stone altars were found in the cemeteries at Palermo and Lilybaeum in Sicily and are depicted on funerary stelae in Sardinia and Sicily. It appears that fires were lit on top of them as part of purification rites.