There are older cemeteries larger than the others. The one found on the Başur Höyük site, in the province of Siirt, south-east of Turkey, is of this caliber. And for good reason: scientists have all the sorrows of the world to unravel the mysteries of its burials, dating from the beginning of the Bronze Age. Until today?
The first ostentatious funeral rites observed on this site on the borders of the old Mesopotamia region date back approximately 3,100 and 2,800 BC. In total, eighteen tombs were discovered, ranging from simple pits to tombs covered with stone, but also to real funeral chambers filled with singular artefacts: copper objects, Pearls, but also leftover… adolescents.
One of these tombs, identified as a royal tomb, contained for example the skeletons of two children, surrounded by luxurious goods and, above all, many leftovers of sacrificed humans. At first, scientists thought that the remains were those of servants, a means, in Mesopotamian societies, to perpetuate the social hierarchy even after death. A new study came to upset this idea. Here, the sacrificed were … adolescents.
Do not leave your son lying around
Published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, this new study analyzed the remains of nine sacrificed from the cemetery. As a result, many were girls, most of them dead between 12 and 18 years old, and had no biological link.
No doubt for researchers, these adolescents were killed and united, not because of their social class or a close kinship link, but rather because of their age, in a form of extreme ritual. The richest tombs are often occupied by teenage skeletons which, sometimes, did not even come from the region, specifies this new analysis.
If the conclusion of the researchers stops there for the moment, some hypotheses are already emerging. Adolescence, a crucial development of development specific to human life, would have been at the time a key stage of social experimentation, summarizes the Smisthonian Magazine. To the point of developing complex rituals around this period inherent in life and surely indirectly linked here to death.
The research continues to remove the last mysteries of the Başur Höyük site.
