Tagged “funerary”
The Lycian Rock-Cut Tombs
Why did one people spend two centuries cutting their houses into cliffs — copying, beam for beam and plank for plank, a timber architecture that has since rotted away completely, so that the only surviving record of how Lycians lived is where they buried their dead?
mainly 5th-4th centuries BCE, with the great cliff necropoleis concentrated in the 4th century BCE · Lycia — Myra, Telmessos (Fethiye) and Xanthos, southwestern TürkiyeAdded August 2026
HIGH WONDERPlain of Jars
Who carved thousands of stone jars — the largest several tonnes each — from quarries kilometres away, moved and set them across some ninety hilltop sites, and used them in a mortuary tradition, all while leaving behind no written record and no certain descendants?
c. 500 BCE – 500 CE, Iron Age (some jars possibly earlier) · Xieng Khouang Plateau, LaosAdded July 2026
Terracotta Army
How did Qin-dynasty workshops mass-produce roughly 8,000 life-sized clay soldiers — each with an individual face — some 2,200 years ago, using a modular assembly line of moulded torsos, heads and limbs that were then hand-finished, kiln-fired and painted to guard an emperor's still-unopened tomb?
c. 246–208 BCE, Qin dynasty · Lintong, Xi'an, Shaanxi, ChinaAdded July 2026