Emerald graves lost ruins professional#

The dead body was not embalmed, but professional mourners washed and perfumed it, clad it presentably, painted its cheeks, darkened its eyelids, put rings upon its fingers, and provided it with a change of linen. In Babylonia, the dead were buried in vaults, although, as Durant notes:Ī few were cremated and their remains were preserved in urns. In the region of Mesopotamia which came to be known as Babylonia, it was believed that the dead “went to a dark and shadowy realm within the bowels of the earth, and none of them saw the light again” (Durant, 240). It was far more fitting for one's soul to descend to the underworld with other human souls. If one were cremated, it was thought, one's soul ascended skyward toward the home of the gods and, as a human soul, would not be at home there. The earliest grave uncovered thus far in Europe is that of the 'Red Lady of Wales' which is 29,000 years old.Ĭremation was uncommon throughout Mesopotamia owing to the scarcity of wood but, even if fuel for a fire had been available, the Mesopotamians believed that the proper place for the souls of the dead was in the netherworld of the goddess Ereshkigal and not in the realm of the gods. Burial of the dead in the ground has been traced back over 100,000 years of civilization as evidenced by the Grave of Qafzeh in Israel, a group tomb of 15 people buried in a cave along with their tools and other ritual artifacts. Whatever kind of grave or tomb was constructed, however, the importance of the proper burial of the dead was emphasized by every ancient culture and the rites accompanying burial were among the most elaborate and significant in many ancient cultures. Graves in the cultures of the ancient world were usually marked by a stone bearing the person's likeness and name or by an elaborate tomb (such as the pyramids of Egypt or the tholos tombs of Greece) or megalithic stone dolmens, passage graves, and cairns such as those found in Scotland and Ireland. In cultures such as Mesopotamia, tombs and graves were cut into the ground in the expectation that the soul of the individual so buried would more easily reach the afterlife which was thought to exist underground. Burial of the dead is the act of placing the corpse of a dead person in a tomb constructed for that purpose or in a grave dug into the earth.