Al Bahah - Traditional Tribal Cemeteries

Traditional Tribal Cemeteries

"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 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,” he said. The old man continued, “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. Elderly people remember that in olden times, the winter used to stretch for more than six months and would be accompanied with lots of rain and fog making 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 are 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 writings, drawings and patterns. Muhammad Saleh, a local resident, said, “One of the things that is so iconic about many of these graves is the fact that many of them are not directed toward the Kaaba. This tells us that some of these graves are from the pre-Islamic era. In Islam the face of a dead person should be toward the Kaaba.”"