In antiquity, the dead without a tomb were a danger to the living – 05/30/2023 – Darwin and God

I never needed an excuse to read about Antiquity (you know how it is, love, we don’t explain), but if someone asks me why it’s worth knowing more about peoples from remote times and places, the answer is always on the tip of my tongue : because they help to shake out of our head what seems obvious. For example: why do we bury the dead? Or, if we don’t bury them, do we cremate or give some other type of very specific treatment to the mortal remains of loved ones?

I had one of those shakes when reading about the tragic end of Sargon II, king of Assyria (which was located more or less in the north of present-day Iraq) who died in combat in the year 705 BC (The image below was probably produced during his reign or in of his son, Sennacherib.)

The big question here is that Sargon’s body was never found and was never, therefore, buried with the proper funeral rites. And there are a number of hints that this became a political and personal trauma for Sennacherib, the king’s successor.

It wasn’t just the shame of having lost his father in a military defeat. The Assyrian belief, which was shared by virtually everyone in antiquity, is that unburied corpses, which have not been treated with due respect after death, literally PRODUCE ghosts. If the person is not decently buried, two things happen, according to this widespread belief:

1) The gods of the underworld basically slam the door in the poor thing’s face, so her spirit has no rest;

2) A soul vilified in this way may well end up turning against the living. There is nothing more dangerous and full of resentment than the unburied dead.

It is clear that the modern mentality has moved far from this view. Even very religious people today don’t think that a loved one won’t be able to “rest” if their body is totally destroyed in an air crash or a fire, for example.

But the reason why we still attach so much importance to funeral rites most likely represents a “fossilized” element of this ancient belief.

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