Funeral Rites And Their Practices In Antiquity

Funeral rites and their practices in antiquity

Introduction.

The beginnings of the practice of funeral rituals date back to the time of the prehistoric man specifically to the Neanderthals, in many excavations rudimentary graves were found where skeletons courted of different objects such as vessels are observed, and some hunting tools, likewise, paleontologists have studiedThe cave paintings that these impregnated in rocky walls, where there was clearly a type of ritual. 

For these, death was not the end of human existence, but a change from the earthly world to another spiritual (support for duel). In the same way it is believed that offerings to deceased people began to take shape in China or Egypt, continuing the Arabs back in the eighth century. Later, the art of offering the dead was imported by the Moors of the Iberian Peninsula.

Developing.

These rituals arise from the need that the human being has to prepare and dismiss their loved ones, also for having the satisfaction of the permanence of the spirit of the deceased among others, these rites have been conditioned by various factors such as religious beliefs and theway to face the death of each culture This is why each society has a different vision of this phenomenon, however, all has points in common wake, burials, incinerations, mummifications, cremations, creation of monuments or tombstones, sacrifices.

Despite their surprising variability, funeral rites have the frequent purpose of ensuring the destiny of material components such as the body and immaterials such as souls and the memory of the deceased through formulisms, ceremony or more or less elaborate customs.

The initials in discussing funeral rituals beyond the Homo Sapiens were the brothers Jean and Amédée Bouyssonie, there were two Catholic priests who in 1908 discovered the remains of a Neanderthal of 50.000 years in the Cave of the Chapele-Aux-Saints, in France. 

According to the Bouysonie, the fetal position of the body and the tools that accompanied him in the ditch where they found him pointed to an intentional burial. Abundant in speculation, they said that the authors of that ritual had symbolic capacity and believed in a life after death.

Conclusions.

The bioarcheology of funeral practices, which has also been called tanatology archeo, works the treatments provided to the deceased. Try to reconstitute the different times of the funeral sequence by analyzing the disposition of human remains in the archaeological contexts where they were discovered.