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Revised Bibliography
TOMBS. In many European languages, to speak of “the
tomb” is synecdochically to speak of death. In other places
this is not true, since mortuary rites do not involve anything
resembling a tomb. Moreover, where they exist, there are a
wide variety of structures that may be described as tombs.
TOMBLESS DEATH RITUALS. There are ethnographic in-
stances where corpses are simply abandoned. When a death
occurs in the camps of some of the hunting and gathering
peoples of the Kalahari Desert, there is an outpouring of
grief, but nevertheless the band rapidly decamps leaving the
corpse just as it lay at the moment of dying. There is a ritual
response in that the site is avoided for years afterwards, but
it is about as minimal a response as can be imagined. Corpses
abandoned in this way are generally disposed of by carrion
creatures, most commonly hyenas. Across much of Africa,
hyenas are the subject of black humor, since they are always
ready to devour the injured or dig up shallow graves.
The same theme of disposal as carrion is found in the
Tibetan practice of “sky burial,” in which corpses are ritually
butchered by a caste of death specialists, and fed to vultures.
What this expresses in the starkest possible terms is the Bud-
dhist contempt for the body, whose transience stands in con-
trast to the eternal verities of the spiritual world. The Jain
“towers of the dead” use vultures in the same way, but the
doctrinal emphasis is on avoiding pollution of the earth.
If these cases seem obscure, consider the ancient Hindu
tradition of cremation, still followed by millions of people
in Northern India. The purpose is to allow the corporeal ele-
ments to return to their origins—vision to the sun, feeling
to the air, and so on. Consequently, rather than retaining the
ashes, they are cast into rivers so that they can be dispersed.
The most auspicious river of all is the Ganges, and the tem-
ples and burning ghats of Benares are a major focus of Hindu
ritual.
IMPERIAL MORTUARY COMPLEXES. At the opposite end of
the spectrum, there are examples of royal tombs constructed
on such a vast scale that they constitute some of the most
spectacular finds of archaeology. When Chinese archaeolo-
gists began in the 1970s to probe the mound associated with
the Qin Emperor Shi Huangdi, the first to unify the Chinese
into one state, they discovered a series of vaults containing
an estimated seven thousand life-size terra-cotta statues com-
prising an entire army of infantry, cavalry, crossbowmen, and
charioteers. The figures are extremely lifelike, each face dif-
ferent and thought to have been modeled from life. They
comprise a stunning artistic and technical triumph, but it is
not clear what ideology lay behind the complex, especially
as it was not imitated by subsequent emperors. At first sight
it seems to reflect the megalomania of an emperor who evi-
dently thought that he could ride into the afterlife at the head
of his army, but there were also sociological effects that may
or may not have been part of the emperor’s intentions. The
organizational challenge of such a project was appropriate to
a new state in the process of establishing its infrastructure,
especially as it must have trained thousands of artisans in pot-
tery techniques for which China has ever since been famous.
Moreover, it augmented a national cult focused on the
emperor.Much the same argument could be made about the mas-
sive pyramids of Giza in Egypt. Although the pyramids were
all built within a century near the beginning of the pharaonic
state, they can also be placed within the context of a religion
that developed over several millennia. The most famous ar-
chaeological discovery of the 1920s was the tomb of a rela-
tively unimportant pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty ob-
scure enough to have avoided the attention of grave robbers
in antiquity. By comparison with the temple complexes of
other pharaohs, Tutankhamen’s tomb was modest. Never-
theless, it contained a fabulous storehouse of treasures, in-
cluding enough furniture to equip a small palace. As is dem-
onstrated by the tombs in the Valley of the Nobles at Luxor,
such grandeur was not restricted to pharaohs.
GRAVE GOODS. The Qin emperor’s soldiers and Tutankha-
men’s furniture are examples, if remarkable ones, of the prac-
tice commonly found all over the world of entombing useful
or valuable objects with a corpse. It is often argued that such
grave goods are among the earliest prehistoric evidence of rit-
ual activity, and that they demonstrate belief in an afterlife.
This does not, in fact, follow. Other motives are possible,
such as the desire to prevent the further use of objects senti-
mentally associated with the deceased. Even so, grave goods
often do imply an equipping of the dead. For instance, in
parts of Borneo there is an elaborated theory of the journey
of the dead to the afterlife by canoe. Consequently, paddles
and sun hats are often hung from the sides of mausoleums.
These grave goods are of little intrinsic value, and in a similar
fashion even humble graves are often found to contain pot-
tery or tools.
Archaeologists are also familiar with finding valuables
in gravesites. Often these are goods originating from far
away, and so give evidence of ancient trade. Examples are theTOMBS 9225