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In the 18th century BC, an official called Bahdi-Lim wrote a letter to his lord, Zimri-Lim, the King of Mari in present-day Syria, asking for advice in a difficult matter. What should he do with a certain severed head (probably belonging to King Qarni-Lim of Andarig): ‘They buried his body in garments in the Habur river. His body I didn’t find, [but] his head lies in Qattunan. Is his head to be buried, and in which city is it to be buried, and where is it to be buried Is it to be buried outside [or] inside the city?’
This Akkadian cuneiform tablet – one of few written sources concerning burial procedures at all – illustrates the serious challenge of dealing with exceptional cases of death and burial.
So-called ‘irregular’ or ‘deviant’ burials, which differ from their contemporaries in particular aspects, are a phenomenon known from many cultures. Prominent examples include the Iron Age bog bodies of north western Europe, the disposal of criminals or suicide victims at gallows hills in the medieval to early modern period, and cases of corpse mutilation or immobilisation aimed at supposed vampires and revenants. Little is known, however, about comparable findings from the cultures of the ancient Near East: the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians.
Intriguing interments
The most common burial procedure in ancient Mesopotamia was inhumation, with cremation only attested in limited areas and periods. Graves were located beneath the houses of the living or in extramural cemeteries, with the deceased interred in simple pit graves (sometimes lined with reed matting or sherd coverings), ceramic pots, sarcophagi, or brick-built tombs and vaults. Well-known exceptions include the disturbing retainer burials of household members in the Royal Cemetery of Ur, who were violently put to death to accompany their royalty into the netherworld, and the heaping of corpses into mounds after battles according to various inscriptions.
A new study published in the journal Altorientalische Forschungen (https://doi.org/10.1515/aofo-2025-2012) provides the first review of other deviant burials found at regular funerary sites from ancient Mesopotamia of the 3rd to 1st millennia BC. Based on published excavation reports, the study compiles a catalogue of more than 100 cases of unusual burials from 13 sites, reaching from the Upper Euphrates to the Persian Gulf, and displaying different abnormal features.
In the Sumerian city of Ur, Charles Leonard Woolley unearthed at least 27 burials where the skeletons were partially burnt, mostly at the head and upper body, concentrated in one part of the cemetery. Two similar burnt burials are attested from the city of Mari, as well as four burials with the bones scattered throughout the grave. In eight burials from Ashur, Hafaga, Halawa, Nippur, Ur, and Uruk, the skull was missing. In several other cases, it was found dislocated from the spine in another position; sometimes limb bones were missing or displaced as well. Burials in contracted or prone positions, with their hands apparently tied behind their backs, are known from Tell Zubaidi, Kish, and Uruk.
In some cases, several anomalies are combined in one burial. The skeleton of a woman in Burial 110 of Early Dynastic Halawa was missing her skull, hands, and feet, and was oriented not with the head to the west and facing north like other women in the cemetery, but with the head to the south and the body facing west. Also remarkable is Grave 9 from Neo-Sumerian Uruk, which belonged to a 40-year-old man buried in the corner of two house walls. Both of his hands were missing, with the wrists showing cut marks, and one lower and both upper arm bones broken. On his feet lay a block of limestone. Is it possible that the Sumerian of the 3rd millennium BC were trying to prevent the revival of some of their dead?
The waking dead
As Irving Finkel vividly demonstrates in his 2021 publication The First Ghosts, the belief in ghosts was widespread and well attested in ancient Mesopotamia. A fear of the corporeal undead, however, can only be deduced from a few text passages mostly of later dates. The cuneiform tablets of the series Šumma alu list omens concerning apparitions of both ghosts and ‘dead people [acting] like living ones’, climaxing with ‘a dead man reviving in his grave among people’. In incantations against sorcery, a witch is commanded by the gods to be led away to the netherworld to ‘not rise from her grave [again]’. Another text proclaims, ‘In the grave, where she is buried, she shall not reach the body’ of a living person; moreover, the corpse of that witch shall be covered with a large net!’.
Further references are given in John Blair’s 2025 study Killing the Dead. Among those he mentions is a tablet of Old Babylonian dream omens, which predicts legal consequences if a dead father in a dream ‘after he has been buried, lives and is killed [again] and for a second time they anoint and bury [him]’, or even ‘comes up from the grave, is stuck until his middle, but passes through [eventually].’ It seems, therefore, that the fear of the dead coming back to life to haunt the living can be documented for ancient Mesopotamia, just as for many other cultures, and should be considered a possible reason for irregular burials.
However, we must also take into account other possible explanations for these burial anomalies. Human remains were frequently disturbed or relocated due to grave-robbing, successive interments, and secondary reburial; many burials contain no undisturbed skeletons at all. Human skulls could be used in rituals, as attested in textual sources, sometimes to be returned to their place afterwards. The mutilation of bodies may even have served as an act of retroactive revenge on enemies, as with King Ashurbanipal of Assyria, who boasts of having desecrated the tombs of the former kings of Elam.
Ultimately, the irregular burials of ancient Mesopotamia cannot be attributed to a single cause: their background must be considered individually in each case. However, examples of such anomalies are numerous, even though most of the burials reviewed in this study were old finds, often poorly documented. It is, therefore, essential that future excavations of burials in this region are prepared to consider any deviant feature and traces of enigmatic practices not previously thought of.
