Burial chamber

“ It was hopeless to try to tell to which of the tombs the few remains belonged, and hence in enumerating them the chamber in which they were found can alone be given.
Pit Tomb No. 31. A ‘dug-out’ painted coffin burial with roughly painted shawabti box, and the lower portion of the stela found in Tomb No. 27 (Pl. LIV) . In its chamber were found a few examples of pottery.
Pit Tomb No. 32. First chamber—an interesting type of a female figure made of painted wood with pottery head. [36] Second chamber—a Rîshi coffin (Pl. LIII. 3) belonging (?) to the original burial. ”

“ Most powerful of all in its favor is the prevention of premature burial. All these are on the side of cremation, and against it is but one—sentiment. It seems more beautiful to lay our friends to rest, softly pillowed, shrouded in satin, inclosed in rose-wood, covered with flowers, and of anything beyond we refuse to think. We erect the imposing marble, set out the blossoming plant, and carry flowers to the spot. The cemetery appeals more strongly to the sentiment than does the crematory. ”

“ When the coffin is not laid in contact with the soil, but entombed in a vault or walled grave, the occupied space is covered by a stone cemented down, air-tight, upon a ledge in the wall, and the raising of which is for ever forbidden. The entombment may also be made by an air-tight surrounding of concrete. The best practice of vault burial is to place some charcoal or disinfectant along with the coffin, so that no foul gas shall escape should reopening be necessary. ”

“ The small urn containing the parental ashes may be taken by migratory man into the new world or the old, always preserved as the most sacred relic of the family.
How much more beautiful and better would it not be to have the remains of our kin near at hand, in the house. Only then we would be reminded of them every day. Every building could be made to contain a mortuary chamber. Then we would know our dead shielded from the elements. ”

“ All that must now be thought of, is how to deceive the commander of the believers; and I am of opinion, that you should immediately cause a wooden image resembling a dead body to be carved. We will shroud it up in linen, and when shut up in a coffin, it shall be buried in some part of the palace; you shall then immediately cause a marble mausoleum to be built, in the form of a dome, over the burial place, and erect a tomb, which shall be covered with embroidered cloth, and set about with great candlesticks and large wax tapers. ”

“ These are wooden planks cut in the shape of tombstones and roughly painted. Sometimes they bear also the image of a saint. They are erected—often in a row of thirty and more—on the roadside, in fields and meadows, near chapels and crucifixes, in the village streets—in short, everywhere; they are even nailed to houses and barns. They do not mark burial-places, as might be supposed. As soon as a person has died the corpse is put on a board, and there it lies in state until it is put into the coffin shortly before the funeral. ”

“ If the men intended going to a certain grave at night, late in the afternoon a woman, in deep mourning, would walk round the part of the cemetery in which the grave was situated, and contrive to detach the wires from the guns. Loose stones were placed on the walls of the grave-yard, so as to make scaling the walls almost an impossibility; this [Pg 76] was useless when the custodian had a house with a window looking into the burial-place. ”

“ But the galleries of the catacombs are not wholly occupied with graves. Now and then they open on either side into chambers (cubicula) of small dimension and of various form, scooped out of the rock, and furnished with graves around their sides,—the burial-place arranged beforehand for some large family, or for certain persons buried with special honor. Other openings in the rock are designed for chapels, in which the burial and other services of the Church were performed. These, too, are of various sizes and forms; the largest of them would hold but a small number of persons ”

“ On the four corners of the great black pall were sprigs of immortelles, and at the head of the casket, a wreath of orange blossoms. The floor of the chamber was of slabs of white marble, skillfully laid and joined together.
At the side of the room, upon a low couch, lay the skeleton of a human being; the grinning skull was turned upon one side, with its yawning, eyeless sockets turned toward the casket in the center of the chamber. ”

“ The dead were not now buried merely, they were cremated, as often in ancient central and northern Europe, and as in these regions the bones were placed in urns of gold, bronze, or pottery, wrapped in linen, and bestowed in a stone-built chamber, beneath a mound or cairn of earth, on which was set a memorial pillar. ”

“ There is nothing beautiful nor impressive about the church; the interior is bare and dingy, every one walks about wearing his hat, without any outward respect for the place or its occupants; people rush down the steps leading to the burial vaults, crowd against each other, peer through the iron bars of the gates at the coffins in the dusky interior, with the same eager curiosity as if viewing the victims at a morgue. ”

“ There was a cemetery above, and as the bones were turned up from the shallow soil to make room for others still clothed with their flesh, they were thrown down the orifice. For those who did not wish to be disturbed after death, the charnel-house was the securer place of burial. Here, as in the underground church, one sees numerous recesses in the wall which were made for tombs. Those who feel the need of sombre ideas will be as likely to find the incentive to them here as anywhere. ”

“ At a burial there is but darkness, at a cremation rosy light unaccompanied by fustiness; the dead is really reduced to ashes, and with him the time-honored saying, “Peace to his ashes,” is not a hollow phrase, as it is with those who are interred.
Those who do not wish to miss religious and other ceremonies at incinerations may use any form of burial service they like, and those who desire to dispense with them may do so. And those who already have beloved dead in the cemeteries may rest by their side when the end is come, for the ashes can be interred as well as the body. ”

“ If the guardians of consecrated sepulchres, in which people have paid an honest fee to be buried, are to dig them up and cart them off as in England, or make a show of them as here, why, I can only say that cremation will gain a good many converts. Any one would prefer urn burial to the chance of being thus made a spectacle. So good, too, it must be for the rising population to take off the edge of any salutary horror they may feel at death and decay, or of reverence for the dead. ”

“ In some cemeteries corpses are allowed to remain in a grave only a stipulated time; in English burial-grounds, where a freehold right is not secured, the remains may rest undisturbed but seven, in France five, years. ”

“ Of course, some of these invalids succumb, and from time to time a death occurs; but a funeral is seldom or never seen. When a death happens, the hotel people keep it as long quiet as possible. The authorities take charge of the burial, and the body, which must lie unburied twenty-four hours after death, is removed in a coffin after dark to the mortuary adjoining the cemetery, where the relations assemble usually on the following day, and it is buried. ”

“ In other places again, the corpse was laid in a sort of canoe-shaped coffin and deposited among the branches of a tree in a grove, where it remained for several months. This burial in the branches of a tree seems to [Pg 21] have been usually adopted for the bodies of commoners; the corpses of chiefs, enclosed in coffins, were placed in mausoleums, carved and painted red, which were raised on pillars. Whether buried in the earth or placed in a tree or on a stage, the body was left until the flesh had so far decayed as to permit of the bones being easily detached ”

“ In order to accomplish this herculean task it was the common practice to burn the older coffins in the minister’s house, under his copper and in his fireplaces. Between the coffins and the floor of the chapel there was nothing but the boards. In time the effluvium in the chapel became intolerable, and no one attended the services, but the vaults were still used for interments, so that “more money was made from the dead than from the living”—a state of affairs which existed in many of the private burial-places of the metropolis. ”

“ In these latter days when over crowded cemeteries and the levelling of graveyards in the midst of our metropolis have called forth the cry of "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," by some new means, and some means quicker than the old; when even cremation has come within the bounds of possibility, surely the Parsee mode of burial will commend itself to many foreseeing minds. True that we do not like to think of the vultures hovering around the funeral procession for the last few miles, nor of others awaiting it, perched on, and greedily gazing down into, the tower ”

“ Cremation seems in many cases to have been preferred to burial in a tomb. The funeral pile was constructed at some distance from the town, on a specially reserved area in the middle of the marshes. The body, wrapped up in coarse matting, was placed upon a heap of reeds and rushes saturated with bitumen: a brick wall, coated with moist clay, was built around this to circumscribe the action of the flames, and, the customary prayers having been recited, the pile was set on fire, masses of fresh material, together with the funerary furniture and usual viaticum, being added to the pyre. ”

“ During the period we are considering, both inhumation and cremation were practised, sometimes together. The placing of the interments was as diverse as the forms and construction of the barrows. For the moment we will confine ourselves to the inhumated class. In the simplest mode of burial, the body was laid on the ground and the mound heaped over it. But often, perhaps usually, something was done to fence it in, or to protect it from the material of the mound. ”

“ Now, if it be true, as Mr Grant Allen supposed, that the shape of the circular tumulus was determined by the cinerary urn around which it was piled, while the form of the long barrow depended on the subjacent chambered tomb—the underground home or palace of the dead person [652] —we begin to see a glimmer of light. For the subterranean chamber, being intended to hold an uncremated corpse, would be roughly adapted to the form of the human body. In like manner, when inhumation was again enforced, there would be an unconscious return to the use of the long mound. ”

“ Cemetery is derived from κοιμάω, to sleep, because the primitive Christians spoke of death as a sleep, from which men are to awake at the general resurrection. The first Christian sepulchres were crypts or catacombs. The custom of burying in churches was not practised for the first 300 years of the Christian era; and severe laws were passed against burying even in cities. The first step towards the practice of burying in churches, was the transferring of the relics of martyrs thither: next, sovereigns and princes were allowed burial in the porch: in the sixth century churchyards came into use. ”

“ The new vault was consecrated the 31st August, 1683. This accounts for the apparent want of an entrance to the centre of the crypt; as all visitors to the church are aware, you look through little apertures to the place where a few post-revolution burials have taken place. I commend all these particulars, which exemplify the horrors of burial above ground, with the rifling of tombs and coffins perpetrated by the officers of the Convention, to the opposers of cremation. ”

“ Friends and relatives often placed objects on the newly-made grave, such as a flower or an oyster-shell, so that they might be able to tell if the earth had been disturbed. These objects were generally carefully noted by the resurrection-men, and were put back in their exact places after the body had been removed and the grave re-filled.
In some burial-grounds, houses were built in which the bodies could be kept until they were putrid, and therefore useless to the resurrection-men. Such a house is still standing in the burial-ground at Crail. ”

“ At present we have considered only the different modes of burial during the Middle Ages, but we may now proceed to speak of the coffin and the tomb. No work of art is more curious, or fuller of historical and picturesque information, than the funeral monuments of all ages. But it must be remembered that there is a marked distinction between the coffin and the tomb, one being the receptacle of the dead, the other only a monument raised to mark the spot of ground in which the coffin has been interred. ”

“ We left this sad chamber, and descending a flight of steps made of precious stones, the walls lined with beautiful, polished marbles, we stood in a subterranean chapel, a mausoleum, shelves on each of the eight sides, and on each shelf a bronze sarcophagus, and in each coffin a dead king or queen. The name of each occupant is inscribed on the outer shell. One of the queens scratched her name on her coffin with a pair of scissors before she was put in. ”

“ The citizens, therefore, having a very natural repugnance to being drowned, after having died a natural death upon their beds, choose to have their last resting-place a dry one; and hence the great number of tombs, and the peculiar features of this burial-place.
Returning, I glanced into the old Catholic cemetery, in the rear of the chapel before alluded to. It was crowded with tombs, though without displaying the systematic arrangement observed in the one I had just left. There is another burying-place, in the upper faubourg, called the Protestant cemetery. ”