Burial Rites
Burials at Varna have some of the world's oldest gold jewelry. There are crouched and extended inhumations. Some graves do not contain a skeleton, but grave gifts (cenotaphs). Interestingly, the symbolic (empty) graves are the richest in gold artifacts. 3000 gold artifacts were found, with a weight of approximately 6 kilograms. Grave 43 contained more gold than has been found in the entire rest of the world for that epoch. Three symbolic graves contained masks of unfired clay (photo).
Read more about this topic: Varna Culture
Famous quotes containing the words burial and/or rites:
“How shall my animal
Whose wizard shape I trace in the cavernous skull,
Vessel of abscesses and exultations shell,
Endure burial under the spelling wall....”
—Dylan Thomas (19141953)
“The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.”
—Thomas Hardy (18401928)