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
Tikal Temple I
How do you bury a king with a 3.9-kilogram jade necklace and a bundle of inscribed bones at the bottom of a hole, then raise fifty-five metres of limestone on top of him — and cut the doorway lintels from a wood that is still holding thirteen centuries later?
c. 732 CE (Late Classic), raised after the death of Jasaw Chan Kʼawiil I in 734 and completed under his son · Tikal, Petén Department, GuatemalaAdded August 2026
HIGH WONDERTikal Temple V
Why raise 57 metres of solid limestone — the second-tallest thing at Tikal — to carry a summit room less than a metre deep, sealed behind a rear wall nearly five metres thick?
c. 650-700 CE (Late Classic); radiocarbon centres on c. 700 CE, while associated ceramics point to the reign of Nuun Ujol Chaak in the second half of the 7th century · Tikal, Petén Department, GuatemalaAdded August 2026