Places of the Dead: Death is Icky but Universal

[Lukc]

Every human being ends up dead - at least as far as we know - and every human culture comes up with rituals and ritual spaces to deal with the processes of dying (hospices), death (mortuaries), disposal (cemeteries, crematoria, towers of silence) and remembrance (memorials, mausoleums).

Here's a very interesting post I found today on the Zoroastrian towers of the dead. Be warned, some of the photos are icky.

It's something worth remembering when mapping a fantasy region - the culture and the history of a region determines the prevalence and type of memorials. Where I live, for example, the memory of World War I has left ossuaries, memorials, churches and military cemetaries scattered along the landscape - sometimes dominating the living towns of today, nearly a century later. In Cairo the teeming multitude still lives, works and dies beneath the funerary monuments of Khufu and his dynasty, 4500 odd years after they were erected.

Tower_of_Silence-01.jpg

Note: this tower map is not my work, I am merely adding it here as a reference to the link I have attached above.

[atpollard]

That was creepy and gross.
I prefer mausoleums.
Thanks for sharing the find ... it is definitely something different.