Sematary - Cemetery Types - Arabian Tribal Cemeteries

Arabian Tribal Cemeteries

Most of the Saudis in Al Baha are Wahabi Moslems, and this is reflected in their cemetery and funeral customs. "The southern tribal hinterland of Baha — home to especially the Al-Ghamdi and Al-Zahrani tribes — has been renowned for centuries for their tribal cemeteries that are now slowly vanishing", according to the Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper: "One old villager explained how tribal cemeteries came about. 'People used to die in large numbers and very rapidly one after the other because of diseases. So the villagers would dig graves close by burying members of the same family in one area. That was how the family and tribal burial grounds came about... If the family ran out of space, they would open old graves where family members had been buried before and add more people to them. This process is known as khashf.'" During famines and outbreaks of epidemics huge numbers of people would die and many tribes faced difficulties in digging new graves because of the difficult weather. In the past, some Arab winters lasted for more than six months and would be accompanied with lots of rain and fog, which made movement difficult. But due to tribal rivalries many families would guard their cemeteries and put restrictions on who got buried in them. Across Baha, burial grounds have been constructed in different ways. Some cemeteries consist of underground vaults or concrete burial chambers with the capacity of holding a large number of bodies at a time. Such vaults include windows for people to peer through and are usually decorated ornately with text, drawings, and patterns. At least one resident believes that the graves unique in the region because many are not oriented toward Mecca, and therefore must pre-date Islam.