Burial Practices of the Rulers of Old

Alice C. Linsley

The burial practices and funerary imagery of the ancient rulers expresses hope for immortality and bodily resurrection. The Horite Hebrew Job wanted those who came after him to know that he believed in a Redeemer. He wanted it set in stone.

"Oh that my words were written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book! That with an iron stylus and lead they were engraved in the rock forever! As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, And at the last He will take His stand on the earth. Even after my skin is destroyed, Yet from my flesh I shall see God; whom I myself shall behold, And whom my eyes will see..." (Job 19:24-26)

Likewise, Ezekiel was to prophesy, saying:

"Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’” (Ezekiel 37:4-6)

Unlike the religions that seek to escape the material world, Christianity and Judaism value the body and believe it is not to be destroyed beyond the processes that are natural to death. Jews do not cremate. The early Christians did not cremate. Both Jews and Christians practice primary and sometimes secondary burial. It is common for Christian monastic communities to gather the bones of the deceased monks for secondary burial in a charnel house. Here are the skulls of monks who lived at St.Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai.

None of the ancient rulers in the R1b haplogroup were cremated. All their stone tumuli represent secondary burial. This involved gathering the ruler's bones and placing them in the tumulus. The primary burial was underground and was covered with stones. Here is an image of a primary and secondary burial site (Bronze Age) found near Hamburg, Germany.

Cremation was not the practiced among the Hebrew ruler-priests. They practiced secondary burial. They buried their dead after washing and anointing the bodies. The body was then swaddled in linen, perhaps representing the swaddling of a new born. After the body had turned to dust, the bones were gathered and placed in ossuary boxes which were put in family vaults.

The bones were placed in ossuary boxes. Researchers from Bar-Ilan and Tel Aviv universities confirmed the authenticity of an ancient ossuary that was plundered from a tomb in the Valley of Elah (where David defeated the Philistine warrior Goliath). The 2,000-year-old ossuary belonged to a daughter of the Caiaphas family of priests. It is marked with the 6 pointed star associated with the Horite Hebrew ruling caste, and an Aramaic inscription that says, “Miriam Daughter of Yeshua Son of Caiaphas, Priests of Ma’aziah from Beth Imri.” The inscription dates to the time of the Second Temple. Here is a photo of Miriam's ossuary.

The six prong solar symbol is also found on the ossuary of the High Priest Joseph Caiaphas (below).

The 6-prong solar image is called mer-ka-ba, a word of ancient Egyptian origin. Merkaba means "love of the body and spirit." In the worldview of the Horite Hebrew, immortality required that the body and spirit be together to avoid the second death. Therefore, great precautions were taken in the burial of the ruler, so that the body and spirit did not became separated. This is why the bodies of the Egyptian rulers were mummified. The R1b rulers buried in the Tarum Valley in China were also mummified.

The solar symbol appears on tomb stones in many parts of the world where the R1b peoples lived. The motif is found on this grave stone at Banais, Israel, near the source of the Jordan River.

The merkaba appears on artifacts throughout the regions populated by R1b peoples. It symbolizes the rising of the Sun, the emblem of the Creator among the R1b peoples. The same image is seen on some of these carvings from the oppida (a "high place") of the Castro culture in Galicia, Spain.

Related reading: The Ancient Tumuli of Rulers; Righteous Rulers and the Resurrection; The Question of Immortality; Genesis in Anthropological Perspective: On Blood and the Impulse to Immortality