Grave goods: Did you mean...?

Sketch made by Hjalmar Stolpe, published in 1889, of the Viking Age grave found at Birka, Sweden, labelled 'Bj 581'. Buried with weapons and horses (things normally associated with warriors), this particular grave has been subject of much...

Stele showing a girl holding a doll in one hand and a bird in the other, which she seems to be offering with a gentle smile to the small dog jumping up to greet her, c. 340 BCE. Harvard Art Museums.

The Tomb of the Giants of Is Concias stands on the western slopes of the Sette Fratelli massif in the municipality of Quartucciu, Sardinia, Italy. The Nuragic monument dates back to the Middle or Late Bronze Age c. 1800-800 BCE.

A Mycenaean grave stele of poros stone depicting spirals and a charioteer. Grave Circle A, Mycenae, 16th century BCE. (National Archaeological Museum, Athens)

Greek grave stele depicting a couple greeting each other, affectionately taking one hand in the other. This grave stele came from the Kerameikos in Athens and is dated to the 5th Century BCE. It is now housed in the Minneapolis Institute...

A sandstone grave stelw from Palmyra, Syria. Known as the grave stele of Abkha, daughter of Akhou. 2nd century CE. (Pushkin Museum, Moscow)

The grave of the US author Herman Melville (1819 – 1891). To the right is the grave of his wife. Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York.

Ghosts in ancient Mesopotamia were understood as a reality of life just as they were in other civilizations of antiquity. Although the cultures of the various Mesopotamian civilizations differed between c. 5000 BCE-651 CE, the belief in ghosts...

The grave of the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893). Tikhvin cemetery, St. Petersburg.

An April 1945 photograph of a mass grave at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, a labour camp in Germany run by the Nazi SS. (Imperial War Museums)