Some Thoughts on Ancient Burial Practices

             So, lately (when I’m not working on my visual novel), I’ve been reading a book about the royal tombs at Ur.  Specifically, it’s an out-of-print book I found at the antique mall near my house; the book was the one that was published to accompany the national tour of the artifacts from said tombs when their home museum was being renovated about twenty years ago now.  (Ugh, I feel old.  I remember being awed by the artifacts when that tour came to town here…after I had moved back home after dropping out of my first attempt at getting a Master’s Degree.)

            Anyway, while the book has me pondering a lot of different things—mostly regarding the appropriateness (or rather lack thereof) of a bunch of European and American archaeologists going around digging up everyone else’s ancient kings and then toting (many/most of) the grave goods back home (as Hergé pointed out in The Seven Crystal Balls, how would the people of Europe feel if a bunch of Egyptians came and started digging up all their kings?), also wondering just what those ancient dead would actually think about the matter if you could travel back in time and tell them what would happen to their graves a few thousand years later—what I just read last night has put me on a more precise and yet also highly speculative train of thought.

            Specifically, what I read late last night was about Ur’s excavator, Sir Laurence Woolley, trying rather futilely to explain why one of the “Royal Tombs” had more than seventy other bodies in it, apparently the bodies of retainers sacrificed at the time of the king’s burial.  This was accompanied by various more modern scholars trying to explain it—with a four page sub-essay on some literary examples from recovered Mesopotamian texts (a sub-essay that was not marked out in any way as different from the rest of the text, so it looked like a page was simply deleted from the file pre-printing)—and ultimately the only answer anyone could come up with was “well, we don’t really know why so many people were sacrificed, but it’s not like other cultures didn’t do the same thing, even if 70+ is a lot more than the usual number.

            It got me to thinking, though, about just how such a practice could have gotten started in the first place.  Because, if you think about it, funerary human sacrifice is typically found in the cultures whose technological level is still pretty low.  They’re stratified—obviously!—and certainly highly sedentary and agrarian, but it’s not the sort of thing you normally find in a culture that has, say, developed the steam engine.  The kinds of cultures that usually practiced funerary human sacrifice were typically also cultures where you would expect human life would be pretty highly valued, since life was so hard; why throw away a strong, healthy young person who could help the civilization survive?  (It would be another matter entirely if the extra bodies in these tombs typically belonged to old, sickly people!)  Now, yes, of course they’re more valuable as sacrifices for exactly that reason, because of their value to the society, and yet if you think about the typical items buried with regal dead, they’re things with artificial value, rather than true value.  All the gorgeous gold jewelry in the world has very little true value in a survival sense:  its value is based entirely on aesthetic reasons, nothing utilitarian.  (And, now, educational value when the jewelry in question is ancient, of course.  But that’s our civilization, not theirs.)  Sure, the dead were often buried with weapons, but they were often elaborate ones that were decorative more than functional.  It’s not a perfect point for a great many reasons (even when you only look at cultures and funerary human sacrifices that fit my basic point) but I hope the core of my logic at least makes sense:  I’m more trying to set up the reason that the entire practice, world-wide, feels like it’s a bit off and could do with some theoretical explanations that come from outside the box.

            Most of the modern scholars trying to explain the phenomenon, in terms of the particular examples at Ur, were really bogged down in typical archaeological theory.  One even structured it as a change in the nature of kingship, etc.  The kinds of reasons that are only applied by scholars at great remove from the subject in question.

            I want to look at the notion from a more human, more “in-world” view, even if it’s also far more speculative and entirely unscholarly.  Though what I’m about to go into is purely in the case of those cultures that didn’t also practice non­-funerary human sacrifice:  when human sacrifice is already part of the culture’s everyday operating parameters, applying it in a funerary context is going to seem far more normal.  (And it is, of course, extremely possible that some of these ancient cultures did, in fact, practice non-funerary human sacrifice, but only in a way that left no material traces, or at least none that archaeologists have so far discovered.  Or that they practiced such sacrifice at a time in their even more remote past, and it was that which shaped the funerary version, which remained part of the culture long after the non-funerary version ceased.)

            So the question is, what would make a culture decide to kill the healthy in order to bury them with the dead?

            The typical scholarly answer is usually “so that they may attend on the deceased in death as they did in life” in one form or another.  The form of service varies—household servants, concubines, guards, etc.—but that’s the basic motivation that’s usually used as an explanation for the sacrificial practice.

            And I’m not saying it’s wrong.  It’s probably right…but that’s after the practice was established.  How did the practice get started?

            Like so many questions, it’s one that can’t be answered (without a time machine).  But I feel like I’ve hit on some possible explanations.

            Take a culture where the king (or other powerful/wealthy male) was often buried with his concubines, lesser wives, maybe even his primary wife.  How did that get started?

            There are a couple of possible explanations, or rather two major pools from which many possible explanations can be derived.  The most charitable one would be to assume that the first king (or whatever) who was buried with one or more of his concubines/wives/etc. was buried with concubines/wives/etc. who had loved him so much they took their own lives in mourning at his death; their suicides might have been covered up and called a sacrifice, particularly if suicide was viewed as shameful for the culture.  A less charitable (and more likely, in my opinion) explanation would be along these lines:  king (or whatever) dies without issue, but a handful of concubines/wives, with whom he was known to have been intimate not long before he died.  His successor does not feel secure in his position, and worries that if one of the dead man’s concubines/wives turns out to be pregnant, then the baby would be a threat to his position.  The solution?  Sacrifice all the concubines/wives before they have time to figure out if they’re pregnant, and then the dead man’s potential children die with him, and the successor’s position is secure (at least from that particular threat).

            How about a culture where the king (etc.) is buried with his household staff.  What might explain that?

            There are a lot of possible explanations for the start of that one.  Maybe he was assassinated, and his household staff needed to be silenced quickly lest news get out…or the assassin-turned-heir be fingered as the responsible party.  Or maybe he was assassinated and it seemed to be an inside job, but no one was quite sure which member of the household staff was responsible.  Or maybe he died of a particularly nasty illness and it was worried that it might be a plague (or it just plain was a plague) and his household staff was judged likely to be contaminated—or maybe they were in fact visibly suffering the same illness—and needed to be put to death to keep the disease from spreading.

            And one where the king was buried with some of his soldiers?

            The easiest explanation is that the soldiers in question were deemed too loyal to the old king, and likely to turn on the new king, particularly if the new king was not the old king’s son.  Or maybe the old king died in battle, and the soldiers in question were those who failed to save him (though depending on the culture, it might seem like rewarding them for their failure).  The assassination possibilities from the household staff bit above could also easily apply here, too.

            Of course, all of these describe individual incidents, not an entire cultural tradition.

            But see, that’s the kicker.  All of these also involve secrecy, right?  The new king doesn’t want anyone knowing he’s killing the old king’s concubines in fear that they might be pregnant, so he says he’s “sacrificing them so they can continue to serve his late majesty in the next world” or whatnot.  So what happens when he dies?  His own heirs, remembering what he had done for the previous king’s funeral, decide they should emulate it, because surely he knew what he was doing, since he was king and all.  Then the heirs’ heirs do the same thing, and it becomes tradition, accepted into the culture’s basic beliefs.

 

            Obviously, I’m not saying “yes, this is what happened!”

            I’m saying “this makes sense to me as how this sort of thing may have gotten started.”

            I could be so totally wrong that no civilization ever went through any of these steps.  Or maybe it happened once or twice, but most of them came to their funerary human sacrifice in radically different ways.  (Maybe those cultures originally had non-funerary human sacrifice practices that we just don’t know about because they were just too old.)

            But I thought it was an interesting “what-if” kind of theory.

            Also the kind of thing I might use in some piece of fiction at some point.  If I ever have a situation where it might apply.  (Probably more as world-building than as a direct incident in a story...or maybe not.  Who knows?)

            And I thought I’d post it to the blog because…hey, I need to start posting things that aren’t just the monthly Insecure Writers’ Support Group stuff, right?