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A history of the world in 7 faces: from Tutankhamun to the Virgin Mary
From a Stone Age Venus and an Egyptian death mask to an unflinchingly challenging 21st-century sculpture, Fay Bound-Alberti introduces seven depictions of the face that track humanity’s ever-evolving relationship with creativity, hierarchy and self-image
1. The art of darkness This enigmatic head is a 25,000-year-old testament to the innate urge to capture the essence of a person in art In 1894, an archaeologist called Édouard Piette walked into a cave in the village of Brassempouy in south-west France and came face-to-face with humanity’s distant past. Lying in the darkness was a fragment of mammoth-ivory carved to depict a head. That head was tiny – so small that it could nestle in the palm of Piette’s hand – and yet it had survived for 25,000 years, carved by an artist deep in the Palaeolithic period. Piette couldn’t have been aware of it at the time, but he had just discovered one of the earliest known representations of a human face in art. That representation is both awe-inspiring – and deeply enigmatic. It would soon be known as ‘The Venus of Brassempouy’ – there were other Venuses in the same cave, with those rounded hips and breasts associated with fertility symbols – and yet we can’t even be sure if it depicts a woman. Despite these uncertainties, the fact that this rare and portable object exists at all tells us that it was important for the artist to capture something of the essence of a person – and with a level of detail that is unusual for a Venus figurine. That depth of detail is most evident in the intricate, chequerboard-patterned hair – possibly a wig or hood – from which the object derives its nickname, ‘La Dame à La Capuche’ (Lady with the Hood). The face, by comparison, is a blank canvas. It has a prominent forehead, nose and brow, but it lacks a mouth. Was this artistic decision influenced by convention? Religion? Personal style? Time? We do not know. What we do know is that the Venus of Brassempouy stands as a symbol of how representations of the face have evolved over 25,000 years. Today, we take it for granted that our face represents us – a phenomenon I have termed ‘facehood’. It is marked on our passports and unlocks our mobiles; it is captured in photographs countless times over our lifetimes. It has become a shorthand for a unique, individual person in a way that simply wasn’t the case with the Venus of Brassempouy. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/dreamstimel48080984-74bcdd9-e1777286681457.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The gold funerary mask of Tutankhamun with blue‑striped headdress, inlaid eyes, and royal cobra and vulture emblems." title="Tutankhamun’s golden burial mask presents an idealised, godlike face symbolising divine transformation in the afterlife (Image by Dreamstime)" /> 2. From death to deity Tutankhamun’s dazzling mask was designed to transform a mortal man into a god In ancient Egypt, memorialising people did not mean remembering what they looked like. It was wealth, power and similarity to the gods that mattered. For proof, look no further than one of the world’s most recognisable objects: Tutankhamun’s golden burial mask. Revealed in 1925 by British archaeologist Howard Carter, three years after he discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb, this dazzling artefact measures 54cm high – a fit for an average adult’s head. Weighing over 10kg, the mask is made of solid gold, with intricate inlays of lapis lazuli and carnelian. Yet the most intriguing feature is its 2.5kg golden beard. That beard, which is long and plaited, extends down from the chin with a formal, geometric appearance and rectangular shape. Look at the mask in profile and you’ll see that it is not intended to look naturalistic; the beard is held in place with a band beneath the chin – as it would have been in a ceremony. Tutankhamun died c1323 BC, aged just 18 or 19 – too young to grow such a beard. This – coupled with the fact that the mask has pierced earlobes, the preserve of women and children – has led some Egyptologists to argue that it was never intended to be used by Tutankhamun at all. It was, they argue, designed for his stepmother, Nefertiti. Yet for ancient Egyptians, faces had symbolic rather than literal, gendered meanings. Eyes, for instance, had mystical connotations – as illustrated by the ‘Eye of Horus’ and the ‘Eye of Ra’ (representing wellbeing, healing and protection). Both male and female rulers wore fake beards in ancient Egyptian ceremonies and art – to display divine power and royal authority. The principle was practical, but the practice was genderless. Hence Tutankhamun’s mask resembles the gods Osiris and Ra, whose bodies were made of gold and lapis lazuli. An inscription on the mask reads: “Your forehead is Anubis, your right eye is the night boat [of Ra], your left eye is the day boat, your eyebrows are in the company of nine gods.” The mask was intended to be seen by the gods, not by humans. Such images were theological objects that transformed a corpse into a deity. Read more | Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun: was the tomb really cursed? 3. Age before beauty The Romans believed that wisdom – and, therefore, fitness to rule – was etched in the lines of the face We do not know the identity of the artist, or indeed the subject, of this ‘Head of a Roman Patrician’. So what do we see when we look at it? We might conclude, from the richness of the drapery, that this was someone important. After all, plebs and slaves were not sculpted in marble. He is a serious man, with a poker-straight posture and a solemn expression, whose face and neck are wizened by age. The skin on his forehead and balding brow is deeply lined by years of thinking – and, perhaps, by responsibility. Earlier scholars suggested that the sitter was Cato the Censor, the famously austere Republican statesman. Yet we should beware making the mistake of thinking the sculptor aimed at realism, or likeness, as we understand it. This bust is an example of ‘verism’, a style of Roman portraiture that sought symbolic rather than literal truth. Roman sculptors and philosophers followed the rules of physiognomy that meant character was revealed in the lines and structure of the face. Why? Because Romans needed a visual language that demonstrated political legitimacy in a system where power was contested. In later centuries it would be important for monarchs to have individually recognisable portraits for propaganda and coinage. But their rule was assured by blood or war. In the Republic of Rome, rulers showed their fitness in the experience, wisdom and expertise etched on their faces. Women – wives and daughters of those rulers – were not depicted as aged and wise, because female value, then as now, was too often based on beauty, not intellect. Men could also be subject to gendered idealism. Since a Republican politician often needed to embody not only the wisdom and experience of age, but also the physical prowess of a warrior, some sculptural portraits had wizened faces but youthful, vigorous bodies. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-463895209-ee1b31f-e1777286825978.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A seated Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child, surrounded by haloed saints and angels against a gold architectural backdrop." title="The medieval church developed a visual code that the entire population could recognise, as exemplified by Giotto’s Madonna Enthroned (Image by Getty Images)" /> 4. Why the long face? In the Middle Ages, religious portraiture relied on symbolism rather than realism to spread the word of God Patricians symbolising leadership in ancient Rome were concerned principally with their peers – the literate elite who read character in wrinkles. The medieval church faced a different problem: it needed to communicate to vast populations, most of them illiterate, many of them poor, none of them experts at what faces meant. So the church developed a visual language of symbols in portraiture. These symbols told viewers instantly who Jesus and the saints were, as well as religious martyrs, local landowners and wealthy donors who invested in the church fabric. Giotto’s Madonna Enthroned is one of the most famous examples of a symbolically laden portrait. Here, the Virgin Mary’s image lacks the emotionality and fleshiness of later artworks such as Raphael’s Madonna del Granduca (c1506–07). Painted around 1310, Giotto’s work was influenced by Byzantine tradition, which dominated Italian art, though he began introducing more naturalism. Gold leaf, bright colours, formal poses and slender, otherworldly faces were what people expected from divine images. What made Mary instantly recognisable were her symbols: the dark blue mantel, the white headscarf, the Christ child on her lap, the throne, the surrounding saints with their haloes and attributes, the gold trim and background. She might also be shown with a crown of 12 stars, roses, rosary beads and a heart pierced by a sword. In a world before consumer capitalism, bureaucracy and mass urbanisation, personal portraiture that showed an ordinary person simply wasn’t necessary. Read more | Medieval family planning: meet the strong-willed women who redefined motherhood in the Middle Ages 5. The man in the mirror By the 17th century, symbolism was being swept aside by portraits that sought to reveal the unvarnished truth In 1659, the Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn sat before a mirror to capture his reflection. Unlike the Roman patrician, Giotto’s Madonna – or indeed Hans Holbein the Younger’s portraits of Henry VIII a century earlier – there is nothing idealised about Rembrandt’s self-portrait. What he produced was unflinchingly realistic. Rembrandt wears a dark coat and a black beret, and stares out from a dark, featureless canvas. Nothing distracts from the face, the centre of emotion, humanity and the self, with a posture and expression that reveals emotion in the creases round the mouth and eyes. His skin is weathered, his features irregular, his nose is prominent, his jowls sagging. This is a man who has suffered – Rembrandt was care-worn from a recent bankruptcy. His eyes meet ours, offering an invitation to connect. Unlike earlier self-portraits – Rembrandt created almost 100 during his lifetime – there are no elaborate symbols on display here: no artist’s palette, no jewels signalling status, no books to indicate learning or hourglass to warn of time’s passing. Self-portraits of his era reflect the fact that the status of the artist was becoming more important, as well as the idea of interiority and psychological individualism. Rembrandt’s portrait is an archetype of modern portraiture – it betrays a feeling face. We can see what he looked like as a specific, unique person, and the same face ageing across different self-portraits. In medieval portraits, faces had been more stylised and generic, and painters often re-used faces, because they were not the focal point of the painting. With its radical approach to symbols, identity and the face, the Renaissance changed all that. From now on, artists would seek to portray their subjects as distinctly individual and recognisable. Portraiture, then, did not only reflect a growing interest in the face, but also encouraged and perpetuated it – much as photographic portraits did in the 19th century. 6. What lies beneath Photography forced artists to look beyond the skin to the sitter’s core, with often unsettling results This Head of a Woman was crafted in 1909 by the great Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. It is modelled on Fernande Olivier, an artist in her own right. Olivier is usually credited as Picasso’s muse, yet flattery was clearly not a consideration in this particular portrayal of her. Picasso’s ‘Head’ is roughly constructed, with no attempt at realism. But why? To answer that question, we need to consider the dramatic technological changes that had convulsed the art world between the ages of Rembrandt and Picasso. When Rembrandt plied his trade, artists could make a good living. Their success came from their ability to capture some essential truth about appearance – to reproduce the world as it really was. But between the 1840s and the 1870s, with the invention and popularisation of photography, everything changed. Once a camera could capture likeness with mechanical precision, the project of realistic portraiture became obsolete. If a camera could do in a few minutes what took a painter months, what was the job of the artist? For artists such as Picasso, the answer lay in achieving in their paintings what a photograph could not: penetrating the core of a person to capture what the mind feels. Picasso’s Cubist work embodies this approach. For all the head’s lack of realism, skill is not an issue here. Picasso was accomplished at realism in painting and sculpture. Rather, the focus was different. The face was now a problem to be solved and understood – a structural puzzle, rather than an object to be copied. For artists that followed, such as Francis Bacon and the surrealists, the artist’s job was to ferret out what could only be discovered through their special insight. In such hands, and increasingly after the crisis of confidence caused by the First World War, the portrait was a tool for psychological investigation rather than social documentation. Read more | Did he photograph the ghost of a president? Meet the scheming Victorian who exploited a grieving America <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-489164501-21e92a2-e1777287214373.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large white sphinx-like sculpture with human features inside a vast industrial hall, with people standing nearby for scale." title="Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby features a towering sugar sphinx that confronts racism, exploitation and the politics of visibility (Image by Getty Images)" /> 7. Sweet scents and rotting flesh This installation serves as a reminder that, over the history of portraiture, not all faces have been equal Today, the question is less how faces are portrayed, but rather, whose faces. For centuries, the canon of western portraiture has, for the most part, not included black people. And where they were included, it was as servants, slaves, exoticised presences in paintings made by, and for, white subjects. There are exceptions: Juan de Pareja, enslaved and painted by Velázquez; Frederick Douglass, photographed repeatedly after achieving freedom. But these instances are rare. For most of history, black people have appeared as exhibits, in the margins, in the background, or not at all. However, in the 21st century artists such as Kara Walker have begun to subvert Victorian artistic styles, such as the silhouette – a medium historically associated with genteel portraiture – to critique the racist depictions of black faces found in art and culture, from slavery advertisements to blackface. In 2014, Walker created A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, a monumental installation in the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. At the centre of that artwork stands a sphinx coated with 8 tonnes of sugar – the commodity that built American wealth on the backs of slaves. The face of the statue invokes that mammy archetype, Aunt Jemima, while the gaze stares straight ahead, as impassively as the Great Sphinx of Giza, on which it is modelled. But the body is exposed and sexualised, as black women’s bodies have been in history. Around the sphinx are smaller figures: molasses-covered children, whose bodies are deteriorating, some with missing limbs and empty eye sockets. The sweet smell of sugar gives way to the acrid stench of rotting flesh. What is beneath the surface here is not some secret interiority – as was the case for Bacon or Picasso – but the question of who is being looked at, and who is doing the looking. It is the nature of artistic production and consumption itself that takes centre stage. Fay Bound-Alberti is professor of modern history, and director of Interface at King’s College London. Her new book, The Face: A Cultural History, was published by Allen Lane in February This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
History's most notorious crime scenes: from Lizzie Borden's lair to HH Holmes's 'murder castle'
What is it about places marked by murder and violence that continue to pique our interest, long after the crimes have been committed? Caitlin Blackwell Baines uncovers the history behind some of the world's most morbid locations – from a crumbling Slovakian castle to Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel
1. Canterbury Cathedral, Kent, United Kingdom Founded in AD 597, Canterbury Cathedral is Britain’s oldest and most important religious complex: the ‘mother church’ of the Anglican faith and seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury. With its soaring 250-foot central tower and 13,000 square feet of stained-glass windows, the cathedral draws more than a million visitors each year – some who come to worship, others simply to marvel at its serene majesty. Such a setting would seem an unlikely place for a murder, but, ironically, that murder has been a big part of the pull for the past 850 or so years. The victim was Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, who, on the night of 29 December 1170, was hacked to death in the cathedral’s northwest transept. Once a royal favourite – Henry II’s chancellor and closest confidant – Becket ran afoul of the monarch soon after being ordained in 1162. By refusing to uphold the king’s authority over that of the church in the following years, the archbishop effectively sealed his fate. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/1-GettyImages-2188130261-ad7bb3e-e1773932992660.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A medieval illuminated manuscript shows three armored knights striking a kneeling, haloed cleric at an altar. The cleric prays as blood streams from his head. A chalice and open book sit on the altar, and the background is filled with ornate red and gold patterns" title="A medieval manuscript illumination depicts Thomas Becket’s gruesome demise. The archbishop was brutally killed in Canterbury Cathedral, turning a place of worship into a crime scene" /> “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Henry is reported to have ranted to his courtiers. Interpreting this as a kind of kingly hit order, four of his knights stole away under the cover of night, travelling in secret from Normandy to Canterbury, where they accosted Becket as he entered the cathedral. At first, the knights attempted to arrest the cleric, but when he refused to accompany them, a violent scuffle broke out. As Becket desperately clung to a column, the knights slashed at him with their swords, eventually striking a fatal blow to the top of his head, spraying blood and gore across the cathedral floor. The gruesome crime shocked the whole of Christendom, quickly transforming victim into martyr, and crime scene into pilgrimage site. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/2-GettyImages-999672134-08df4e0-e1773934721665.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A ruined stone castle stands on a rocky hilltop above a dense green forest, lit by warm sunrise or sunset light. Rolling hills fade into the distance under a soft pastel sky" title="A panoramic shot of Čachtice Castle, western Slovakia. Now a crumbling ruin, the castle was supposedly the site of dozens of murders perpetrated by Countess Elizabeth Báthory (Image by Getty Images)" /> 2. Čachtice Castle, Slovakia You’ve probably heard of Castle Dracula, the seat of the titular character in Bram Stoker’s classic horror novel. But have you heard of Čachtice Castle? It is the setting for a real-life horror story far more frightening than anything dreamed up in Gothic fiction. Now a crumbling ruin, teetering on a rocky outcrop in the Trenchin region of western Slovakia, the castle was once home to Countess Elizabeth Báthory – purportedly the most prolific female serial killer in history. Čachtice Castle began its existence as a 13th-century fortress built to defend the western border of the Kingdom of Hungary. Over the centuries, it was expanded and transformed into a stately home. Passing through several hands, it eventually came into the possession of nobleman Francis Nádasdy II, who, in 1575, gifted it to his 14-year-old bride, Elizabeth Báthory, as a wedding present. By all accounts, the marriage of Francis and Elizabeth was a happy one. Home life at Čachtice Castle, on the other hand, was not exactly the picture of domestic bliss. With Francis frequently away on military campaigns against the Ottoman Turks, Elizabeth was left behind to manage the family’s household and vast estates, and in her husband’s absence, the countess seems to have taken up an unusual hobby: the torture and murder of her servants. Her many victims – a revolving door of peasant girls recruited from nearby villages – were variously cut, burnt, bitten, beaten, starved and even frozen to death. Posthumous rumours that Báthory bathed in the blood of her prey to preserve her youth have never been proven, but the available evidence suggests that her actions went far beyond that of a harsh mistress. Read more | Elizabeth Báthory: a 17th-century 'serial killer' She was a sadistic killer whose position of power and relative isolation at Čachtice Castle allowed her to operate unchecked for over two decades. During this time, she is estimated to have killed as many as 600 young women and girls. Had the cruel countess stuck to her original victim pool of poor servants, she may have escaped capture. Indeed, it was only when several young noblewomen invited to the castle to attend a gynaeceum (finishing school) went missing that the authorities finally took notice. In December 1610, Čachtice Castle was raided on the orders of King Matthias II. Báthory was seized during a post-Christmas feast – and not, as it was later claimed, in the middle of a murder. Owing to her high station, however, she managed to avoid trial (and inevitable execution) and was instead placed on house arrest in her castle. She died there four years later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/3-GettyImages-167652325-3e2d3aa-e1773934794798.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Historic three‑storey corner building with wrought‑iron balconies and arched windows in a busy street scene" title="The present-day LaLaurie Mansion in New Orleans. The original building burned down in 1834, revealing evidence of Delphine LaLaurie’s horrific torture of enslaved people (Image by Getty Images)" /> 3. LaLaurie Mansion, New Orleans, United States Sadistic slave-owning socialite Delphine LaLaurie might just be New Orleans’ answer to Countess Báthory. If ever you travel to the city, you will inevitably hear of the notorious madame and her house of horrors. It is a stately three-storey French empire-style townhouse located on Royal Street in the heart of the historic French Quarter, the city’s main tourist district. On 10 April 1834, the mansion caught fire, attracting a large crowd of curious onlookers. At the time, the LaLaurie Mansion was renowned for its lavish interiors and decadent soirees – as well as for something more sinister. Rumour had it that the mistress of the manor treated her slaves exceptionally cruelly – which spoke volumes, given that most slave-owners thought nothing of whipping their workers at the time. These rumours would soon prove to be true. When concerned members of the community entered the house to help extinguish the flames, they made a horrific discovery. According to reports, behind the padlocked door of the attic, they found “seven slaves more or less horribly mutilated… suspended by the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to another”. So shocking was the scene that the once-respected society hostess was run out of town by an angry mob. Nearly 200 years later, the legend of Madame LaLaurie lives on as one of the darkest chapters in the city’s pre-Civil War history. Though privately owned and publicly inaccessible, the present-day LaLaurie Mansion (rebuilt three years after the fire) still manages to draw hordes of tourists, who come to gawk at its paradoxically elegant exterior. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/4-GettyImages-117081718-8c2be8c-e1773938765180.jpg" width="1500" height="1002" alt="Black‑and‑white photo of a worn brick building with an arched passageway and a sign reading ‘Millers Court." title="The exterior of 13 Miller’s Court, Whitechapel, c1900. In 1888, the body of Mary Jane Kelly – the last of Jack the Ripper’s ‘canonical five’ victims – was discovered inside (Image by Getty Images)" /> 4. 13 Miller's Court, London, United Kingdom No list of historical true crime would be complete without an entry on Jack the Ripper, the pseudonymous serial killer responsible for the brutal slayings of at least five women in London's Whitechapel district between August and November 1888. Easily the most infamous unsolved murders in global history, there’s no shortage of Ripper-related content out there: books, films, TV shows, websites – and even historical walking tours offering the opportunity to follow in the mysterious murderer’s footsteps. Of course, there’s not much for the modern Ripper tourist to see. The gritty East End streets that comprised the killer’s hunting grounds were long ago transformed as part of a series of early 20th-century improvement projects designed to eradicate the scourge that was the Whitechapel slums. But before this modern uplift, at least a few intrepid explorers were able to visit the crime scenes and view them much as the killer would have done. Read more | He's the Victorian serial killer you've never heard of – and we may now know who he was On 20 December 1890, The Birmingham Mail published the account of one journalist’s journey through Jack the Ripper’s East London. The highlight of his adventures in so-called ‘Murderland’ was a trip to 13 Miller’s Court – the site of the last (and most ghastly) of the canonical Ripper murders. It was inside this squalid one room tenement that, just two years earlier, Mary Jane Kelly – a sex worker in her mid-20s – was found mutilated beyond all recognition. According to the journalist, “for a long time after the murder [the room] was vacant. Nobody would take it, owing to the rumour that it was haunted by Jack’s victim”. But, by the time of the journalist’s visit, it was occupied by “an old crone” and her “bedridden husband” who, for the “drop of half-a-crown” would show visitors the “ghastly relics of the crimes”. These included “a huge crimson stain” on the floor, “the fading imprints of a bloody hand on the wall”, and some pencil scratched graffiti purportedly left behind by the killer. Such “ghastly relics” were ultimately destroyed when, in 1928, the property was demolished to make way for the rebuilding of Spitalfields Market. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/5-GettyImages-145262286-5b9ade9-e1773938831936.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white sketch depicting a tall, three-storey building with several windows. Telegraph poles and lines stand outside the building, and the street out front has lots of people walking around" title="HH Holmes’ infamous ‘Murder Castle’ in Chicago. The three-storey structure, long since demolished, was rumoured to contain a network of secret passageways (Image by Getty Images)" /> 5. 'Murder Castle', Chicago, United States At around the same time that Jack the Ripper was roving the streets of Victorian London, another pseudonymous serial killer was wreaking havoc across the pond in Chicago. Operating under the alias ‘HH Holmes’, Herman Webster Mudgett was a conman posing as a pharmacist, who, between the years of 1891 and 1894, lured as many as 200 men and women to their deaths. But where the Ripper seemingly killed for the sheer thrill of it, Holmes had ulterior motives – namely money. Most of his victims were the unwitting targets of insurance schemes and romance scams. And unlike his British counterpart, who committed all but one of his crimes outdoors, the nefarious ‘Dr Holmes’ preferred the privacy of his own home: 601–603 West 63rd Street, a sprawling three-storey structure, aptly dubbed the ‘Murder Castle’ by the Windy City press. Having been gutted by fire shortly after his arrest in the autumn of 1894, Holmes’s ‘Murder Castle’ is a bit of an enigma. According to contemporary reports, it possessed a labyrinthine layout, replete with secret passageways, soundproof rooms and a network of chutes and trapdoors purportedly designed for the fast disposal of dead bodies. But was it purpose-built for murder? The oft-repeated story that Holmes hired new building crews each week to ensure that no single person knew the property’s layout is likely apocryphal. Instead, he was probably attempting to cheat his contractors out of fair pay. Holmes’s astonishingly high body count may too have been exaggerated – he confessed to 27 murders, of which only nine have been confirmed. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/6-BordenHouse92SecondStFallRiverMassachusetts1892-24f9fc3-e1773938890143.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Black‑and‑white photo of a two‑storey wooden house with a gabled roof and a leafless tree in front" title="230 Second Street, Fall River – where 32-year-old Lizzie Borden allegedly murdered her father and stepmother – is one of America’s most notorious addresses" /> 6. The Lizzie Borden House, Fall River, Massachusetts, United States 230 Second Street, Fall River, Massachusetts. At first glance, this modest clapboard cottage hardly stands out in a city where the streets are lined with Victorian buildings – many of them far grander than this home. But this is actually Fall River’s most famous landmark: the Lizzie Borden House. Almost all Americans know of the alleged crimes of the accused axe-murderer Lizzie Borden. Outside of America, however, Lizzie is perhaps less well-known. And yet, most will be familiar with this little ditty: Lizzie Borden took an axe Gave her mother forty whacks. She gave her father forty-one. Andrew Borden now is dead, Lizzie hit him on the head. Up in heaven he will sing, On the gallows she will swing. But if all you know of Lizzie is the morbid nursery rhyme, you don’t know much. On the morning of 4 August 1892, Lizzie Borden, the 32-year-old daughter of Andrew Borden, a wealthy yet miserly property developer, allegedly killed her stepmother, Abby, using a hatchet. Lizzie struck 18 (not 40) blows to Abby’s head in an upstairs bedroom. When her father returned home from work for a mid-morning nap on the parlour sofa, Lizzie killed him with a more conservative 11 whacks as he slept. Read more | These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators? The second verse gets it wrong too. Lizzie was acquitted of the murder charges in 1893, thus escaping the gallows. She then lived out the rest of her days in a larger, more luxurious home purchased with her father’s fortune – worth about $9.5 million (£7.5 million) in today’s money. And if we are to believe the reports of thrill-seeking tourists, Andrew is hardly singing up in heaven. He’s moaning right here on earth, forever stuck in his former home, now known as the Lizzie Borden House, a murder-themed bed and breakfast since 1996. Ghost-hunting guests claim to have encountered Andrew, Abby, their family maid Bridget – and even Lizzie herself – in the house. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/7-GettyImages-51096199-6211f5a-e1773938947804.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black‑and‑white photo of a patterned wallpapered wall with dark stains and a closed double door." title="The basement room at the Ipatiev House, Yekaterinburg, where the Romanovs met their end. The wall has been torn apart by investigators looking for bullets and other evidence of the crimes committed there (Image by Getty Images)" /> 7. The Ipatiev House, Yekaterinburg, Russia The fall of the House of Romanov, the imperial family that ruled Russia from 1613 to 1917, irrevocably shaped the history of their country – and indeed, the world. As anyone with even the faintest recollection of their secondary school history lessons will recall, the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and subsequent execution of his entire family laid the foundations for the first socialist state in history. What most of us will be less familiar with is the house that hosted that fall: the Ipatiev House, a fairly unassuming former merchant’s home in the city of Yekaterinburg. Built in the 1880s for mining industrialist Ivan Redikortsev, the two-storey neoclassical manor would have been perfectly in keeping for a man of Redikortsev’s station, just as it was for subsequent owners: gold-dealer IG Sharaviev and military engineer Nikolai Nikolayevich Ipatiev. But for a family who had once resided in some of the most resplendent residences in Russia – including the 2.5-million-square-foot Winter Palace in St Petersburg – it was something of a downgrade. In the spring of 1918, Tsar Nicholas, his wife Tsarina Alexandra, their five children and household staff were moved into the house, where they would spend 78 days confined to just four upper-storey rooms. Under the watchful eye of Bolshevik guards, the prisoners were occasionally permitted time outdoors – though the house’s modest grounds with their oppressively high fences would have paled in comparison to the Tsarina’s private garden at the Winter Palace. Finally, on 17 July, the family was ordered to the Ipatiev’s basement where they were executed by firing squad. Meanwhile, the house itself wouldn’t fall until 1977 when it was demolished under the orders of the Soviet government. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Church on the Blood was erected on its site, with a cross marking the exact location of the Romanov murders. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/8-JohnSowdenHouseLosAngeles-e1773939013743.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A geometric, reddish‑brown building partially hidden behind dense tropical plants, including palms and large-leafed greenery" title="Despite its impressive architecture, Sowden House is best known for being the former home of George Hodel – the prime suspect in the infamous ‘Black Dahlia’ murder" /> 8. Sowden House, Los Angeles, United States Like many old Hollywood mansions, Sowden House is steeped in a long and colourful history. Constructed in 1926 for its namesake, artist John Sowden, for nearly a century the property has played host to lavish parties, film crews and fashion shoots. It’s featured in Oscar-winning films like LA Confidential and The Aviator, and reality TV programmes like America’s Next Top Model. But did it also bear witness to one of the most notorious unsolved murders in American history? On the night of 14 January 1947, did the enigmatic ‘Black Dahlia’ take her final breath in the bowels of this 5,600-square-foot fortress of luxury? Maybe… Located in Los Feliz, a hillside community east of Hollywood, Sowden House is one of countless mansions in this upscale district. Yet, even in a sea of swanky properties, it sticks out – partly owing to its unusual appearance. Composed of giant concrete blocks configurated and carved in designs meant to mimic an ancient Maya step pyramid, the house is perhaps the most iconic example of the Mayan Revival Movement of the early 20th century. It is widely regarded as the pinnacle of achievement for architect Lloyd Wright (not to be confused with his more famous father, Frank Lloyd Wright). Surprisingly, however, none of these things are what Sowden is best known for. Its main claim to fame is for being the former home of one Dr George Hodel, a prominent LA physician and prime suspect in the 1947 slaying of Elizabeth Short – a 22-year-old budding starlet (christened the ‘Black Dahlia’ in the press on account of her raven hair), whose mutilated and dismembered body was found in a vacant lot, six and a half miles south of Sowden House. Aside from his surgical skill and supposed sadomasochistic interests, there’s actually very little to connect Hodel to the crime. Still, legions of armchair detectives are convinced of his guilt. His own son, Steve Hoddel – a 30-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department – is adamant that the Dahlia’s dismemberment took place in the basement of his childhood home. Caitlin Blackwell Baines is an art historian and author who specialises in Georgian art and architecture. She is the author of How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession (Profile Books, 2025)
Medieval vampire slayers: why did our ancestors dig up and dismember the dead?
At the turn of the 12th century, two men from a Staffordshire village died suddenly. A few days after they were solemnly laid to rest, they were spotted walking around the village, with their coffins on their backs. John Blair investigates the medieval terror of the living dead
In the last decades of the 12th century, the townsfolk of Annan in the Scottish borders were terrified by a sinister nocturnal revenant that stalked the dark byways. “Each night his corpse, driven by Satan, left his grave and wandered through the streets” accompanied by howling dogs and spreading sickness and death, according to the contemporary chronicler William of Newburgh. Desperate to put an end to the unholy scourge, two brothers whose father had been carried off by the plague opened the grave and “exposed the corpse, which was distended to a huge corpulence, with a swollen, livid face. It was observed that the shroud, which had been wound around it, was completely shredded up. Too angry to be frightened, the young men struck a blow at the lifeless corpse, whereupon such a flow of blood gushed out that they understood it to be a sucker of many people’s blood. Dragging it out of the town, they quickly built a pyre.” Recalling the accepted wisdom that such a being would burn only after they’d cut out its heart, the brothers took their shovels and hacked out the organ – after which the cadaver was immolated. The curse was finally over. Walking corpses To modern ears, this story stretches credulity far beyond breaking point. Not so to William of Newburgh: he recorded another three such tales, and hinted at many more. There are “numerous modern cases and abundant reports”, he wrote, but “it would be just too laborious and burdensome to write down all episodes of this kind that I have heard to have happened in our own times”. Yet though walking corpses were boringly commonplace in the 1190s, they had almost vanished from the English scene only a few decades later. Apparently they retreated northwards, leaving only occasional traces south of the border with Scotland. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/W45702webready-05b1689-e1769699879666.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration shows two people standing over a cut up body, with the person on the left handing the decapitated head of the body to the person on the right" title="A corpse is dismembered in a medieval illustration. During the Middle Ages, mutilation was inflicted on cadavers believed to be restless (Image by Alamy)" /> This spotlight on high medieval Britain illustrates a basic fact about ‘vampire’ beliefs in many periods and places across the globe: they tend to come and go. Though some societies retained low-level fears about dangerous corpses over many centuries, there have also been many short, sharp episodes of corpse-killing that reached an intensity justifying the label ‘epidemic’. Some are described in medieval texts such as William of Newburgh’s, covering a period from about 1050 to 1200. Others leave no written evidence, and must be inferred from distinctive patterns of mutilation found in excavated burials: corpses turned upside-down, hearts pierced or removed, limbs broken or bound, heads removed, craniums and jaws separated. Read more | Long before Dracula, an ancient Mesopotamian civilisation raised the world's oldest vampires Why do communities suddenly erupt into frenzies of corpse-killing? Fundamentally, the act reflects fear of social disruption, fear of political or religious change, or fear of disease. In fact, it can be defined as a form of persecution mania – that tragic, paranoid reaction that makes people turn against minority groups in their midst. But there is a crucial difference: unlike witches or heretics, corpses cannot suffer because they are dead already. Killing the dead is better than killing the living. Archaeological evidence from late Roman and early Anglo-Saxon England suggests several persuasive cases of posthumously ‘killed’ corpses. There are too few of them to suggest clear patterns – until we reach a group of distinctive female burials in Yorkshire and County Durham from c550–80 AD. These women were buried face-down – often accompanied by charms and other ritual items – in strange, contorted attitudes, often with one leg or arm raised so that it almost touched the surface of the grave. It looks as though these were traditional healers or ‘wise women’ – powerful in life and potentially troublesome after death, so measures to restrain them were necessary. In that society, as in many others, the dangerous dead were mainly female. Unholy nuns From around 650, that perception carried over to the new world of royal nunneries that dominated early Christian England. Traditionally powerful women could reinvent themselves as holy nuns and abbesses, exercising something like their erstwhile supernatural powers within the new belief system. One narrative from Wimborne nunnery in the 720s hints at corpse fears. It recounts the story of a sadistic prioress who died unreconciled with the young nuns whom she had tormented. They gleefully danced on her grave – but then, to the abbess’s horror, the grave-earth sunk, a phenomenon explained in later eastern European folklore as a sign that the corpse has climbed out. In England around 650–700, a series of non-monastic burials – almost entirely of young women – were mutilated in a consistent way: the corpse was pulled over onto its front, the heart was possibly removed or pierced, the head was removed, and the cranium and lower jaw were thrown back in different parts of the grave. Read more | Marvellous medieval medicine: why their curious cures were better than you think The seventh century was a period of rapid religious change and social transformation, so it is unsurprising that people felt disorientated, and that their fears focussed on certain ‘special’ women who were perceived to be reservoirs of supernatural power. Corpse anxieties seem to have died down across the eighth century, but did not disappear entirely. Young women were still sometimes targeted, their trussed and mutilated corpses laid face-down in boundary ditches. The gender balance then shifted. In a ninth to 10th-century cemetery at Godalming in Surrey, it was mostly male corpses that had nails and iron spikes driven into their shoulders, necks and knees. The age of castles, military power and ‘feudal’ dominance was approaching in northern Europe, and there was no lack of disruption and psychological trauma to breed paranoid fears. In this increasingly man’s world, as traditional wise women declined in power and status, violent corpses were increasingly envisaged as male. That brings us back to the lurid prose of William of Newburgh and his contemporaries. The high medieval British epidemic coincided with a period of greater theological sophistication in north-western Europe (including, for instance, the elaboration of the idea of purgatory), more complex scholastic thought, and higher levels of literacy. Accordingly, there was more questioning of received doctrine, and more concern by the clerical establishment to define, stigmatise and punish ‘heresy’. It is very interesting that, whereas the French persecuted heretics and not corpses, England saw virtually no heresy trials but widespread corpse-killing – an excellent illustration of how attacks on the dead can help to spare the living. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/BAL1278768webready-497e003-e1769698475877.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A red, blue and black stained glass window showing four people sitting alongside one another, praying" title="Souls in purgatory, shown in a 14th-century French stained-glass window. The Catholic doctrine of purgatory may have shaped medieval concepts about the dead who had not moved on (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Noxious corpses Ten stories survive from 12th-century England, all concerning noxious male corpses: excommunicates, oath-breakers, corrupt judges, dissolute priests. One Buckinghamshire man paid unwelcome night-time visits to his widow, “took to dancing around wildly among the animals”, and finally “started wandering around by day, frightening everyone though visible only to some”. For sheer excitement, a story recorded by a monk of Burton-upon-Trent, and set in a nearby village around 1100, is in a class of its own. Two perjured villagers died suddenly and were buried. They then appeared walking around the village, sometimes carrying their coffins on their backs and sometimes in the shape of animals. They behaved threateningly and spread disease, causing many deaths. When their graves were opened, the corpses proved to have resisted natural decay, and the cloths over their faces were “very horribly bloody”. Their heads were cut off and placed between their thighs, and their hearts were cut out and burned on a hilltop, where they crackled with a loud noise; a black crow flew up from the flames. Read more | “Ghoul-like beyond nightmare dream, they were the living dead”: belief in Vampires through history After 1200, most of the British evidence comes from Scotland. A story set in the Clyde Valley west of Glasgow in 1295 describes how an evil-living monk returned from his grave to visit a knight’s house. “Having assumed a body – it is uncertain whether natural or aerial, but it was dank, gross and tangible” – he appeared in broad daylight in his monastic habit, and took to climbing around on the roofs. People tried to shoot and stab him, but anything penetrating “that damned substance” immediately burned up. No later Scottish stories are quite so lurid, but a resilient substratum of belief can be seen in the many post-medieval oral ballads that describe dead relatives and lovers coming home in bodily form. A strand survived the Reformation and was assimilated into Calvinist theology in the idea that the devil could occupy the corpse of even a virtuous person. In his Daemonologie of 1597, King James VI (later I of England) observed reassuringly “that the Devil may use as well the ministry of the bodies of the faithful in these cases as of the unfaithful, there is no inconvenient: for his haunting with their bodies after they are dead can no-ways defile them, in respect of the soul’s absence”. Beliefs about the dangerous dead didn’t disappear from England entirely. There seems to have been an undercurrent of low-level but persistent anxiety that surfaced at different times and in different places. A 14th-century story from Byland Abbey in Yorkshire recounts that a local rector who died and was buried near the abbey’s chapter house developed “the habit of going out by night, and one night he put out the eye of his concubine”. His body was dug up and dumped in a local lake – though the oxen pulling the cart carrying the corpse “almost sank through fear”. Stone dead Some suggestively mutilated bodies from later periods have also been discovered. Perhaps the latest and strangest was a victim of the 1665–66 plague who was buried in a London church. He was later found to have a large stone in his mouth – a mode of corpse-killing that was standard in Lutheran Germany at the time but unknown in England. Was he a member of the immigrant mercantile community? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/BAL5864439webready-7cd79c8-e1769698055247.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white engraving showing a man standing facing a skeleton, representing Death." title="Death meets a German mercenary in an engraving. Beliefs in the dangerous dead led to stones being placed in the mouths of corpses to quell them (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> It’s not entirely clear why such beliefs were so rare in late medieval and early modern England at times when they assumed epidemic proportions in some parts of central Europe. For instance, the Black Death plague pandemic of 1347–51 seems to have whipped up corpse fears in Greece and Serbia – so why did it have no such effect in England? It may be because the people of England now widely believed in the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which offered a different framework for conceptualising the dead who had not quite moved on. Another factor could be the English enthusiasm for persecuting witches at points in the 16th and 17th centuries. Except in a few locations – Scotland and Moravia, for example – witch-killing and corpse-killing tended to occupy different spaces in early modern Europe, and seem to have provided alternative outlets for the same anxieties. European beliefs in the dangerous dead were never the same again after a series of lurid corpse-killings in Serbia in 1725–32 were widely reported for the first time in the western press. These reports brought with them a new word – vampire – that quickly drove out all synonyms. From that moment, folklore and fiction became inextricably entwined. Sensational novelists embroidered what they read, and their own readers in turn assimilated their work into popular beliefs. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1871–72 novella Carmilla sensitively reworked the idea of a loving but predatory dead female derived ultimately from ancient Chinese tradition. But it was of course Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) that imposed an indelible – if highly misleading – image of the ‘European vampire’, overlaying and ultimately obliterating the last traces of genuine English popular belief. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/RJGAYDwebready-0963212-e1769700002267.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white engraving of a woman creeping towards a person laying in a bed, with her arm reached out towards them" title="An illustration from the 1871–72 Gothic novella Carmilla shows the eponymous bloodsucker approaching her victim. Sheridan Le Fanu’s tale drew on ancient stories of predatory dead women (Image by Alamy)" /> Remarkably, the idea of turning a potentially dangerous corpse upside-down survived a decade or two longer. In rural Devonshire sometime around the turn of the 20th century, a farmer was recorded telling the tale of a wicked local woman who had recently died “cussin’ and dam’in”, and whose coffin had been turned over. “Her ’ont be troublesome then, ’cause if her do begin to diggy her can on’y diggy downwards,” he claimed. The grim finale to this particular English superstition was acted out during the First World War, after a slim English youth had killed a “huge, scowling” German soldier. “Later,” an officer observed, “I found our men burying him most carefully – face downwards. You know why. If he began digging his way out, he would only go deeper.” Epidemics of the undead Five periods when fears of living corpses terrified societies around the world Ancient Mesopotamia: eternal non-sleeping Fears of the dead plagued inhabitants of the neo-Assyrian empire in the near east between c911 and c605 BC. An inscription (left) in the tomb of eighth-century BC queen Yabâ of Nineveh curses any robber by imposing “eternal non-sleeping on his corpse and ghost”. And an omen text of the mid-seventh century BC describes what will happen if one sees “a dead person restrained with cloths, uprising, complaining”. The silence of earlier and later sources suggests that this may have been an epidemic generated by the violence and trauma of imperial expansion in the provinces. Early 18th-century Serbia: dawn of Dracula In the western Balkans after 1700, the central European tradition of dangerous-dead beliefs converged with a Caucasian one. This highly coloured mixture of fantasies reached an epidemic scale on the violent, unstable military frontier between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Cases in 1725–26 and again in the 1730s came to the attention of the Habsburg authorities, whose reports created a Europe-wide sensation. The details were actually rather atypical – for example, in their emphasis on bloodsucking – but inspired a series of fictional works culminating in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. 16th-century Saxony: rise of the chomping dead Devastated by plague and destabilised by the Lutheran Reformation, after 1540 the German electorate of Saxony suffered the strange visitation of the ‘chomping dead’. It was widely believed that some corpses lay in their graves noisily eating their own shrouds, and that they spread plague among the living. This idea had older roots, but it reached epidemic levels in this traumatised society. The remedy was to open the grave to check for shroud-eating and, if evidence mandated action, to behead the corpse with a spade. Martin Luther himself spoke out against the belief, but it endured for several decades before dying away naturally around 1600. 19th-century New England: a war on organs As tuberculosis swept the US between the 1780s and 1890s, the strange idea developed that internal organs of buried victims were spreading the disease. Between 1784 and 1892, at least 70 exhumations are known to have been undertaken in New England, mostly involving turning the corpse face-down, extracting the heart, liver and lungs, and occasionally burning the body. At Altoona, Pennsylvania in 1949, the exhumation of a soldier to burn his uniform represents the last known ‘corpse-killing’ in any non-Balkan and non-Aegean western society. Independent Haiti: zombie slaves In the 19th and 20th centuries, many Haitians believed that some apparently ‘dead’ people had actually been poisoned by sorcerers to induce a death-like trance. The ‘corpses’ were then reputedly stolen from their graves, revived and made to work on sugar plantations. Famously, Clairvius Narcisse (1922–94), who claimed to have escaped from such a plantation, was photographed sitting on his own tomb (above). This strangest of variants – walking ‘corpses’ that had never died – had roots in African beliefs, but developed a unique twist in this fragile republic with its tragic origins, where the unquiet dead were enslaved. Professor John Blair is emeritus fellow in medieval history at Queen’s College, University of Oxford. His latest book is Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World (Princeton University Press, 2025) This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
Alice Roberts: “Christianity didn’t invent itself as an empire from nothing: it adapted existing Roman structures”
Alice Roberts speaks to Danny Bird about the evolution of the new religion that swept across the Roman empire and beyond
Danny Bird: What made you decide to write about the collapse of the western Roman empire and the rise of Christianity? Alice Roberts: I’ve long been fascinated by this historical period, especially in Britain, where written records are scarce. This book grew from my interest in burial archaeology, shaped by excavations I took part in 20 years ago on a Welsh cliff. Bones were eroding from the cliff face, and we uncovered cist graves – stone-lined, coffin-like structures – some dating from as early as the fifth century. One grave even had a stone lid carved with a simple cross. These early Christian burials sparked my curiosity. More recently, I visited an excavation at Llantwit Major, where archaeologists are investigating what may be Britain’s earliest monastery, possibly dating to the fifth century. This raised further questions: why was Christianity spreading so early? And who was behind it? Rather than relying on broad generalisations, my book focuses on individuals: the people who carried Christianity across regions, and their motives. A story that began with burials in Wales led me across the Roman world from Istanbul (formerly Constantinople) to Alexandria, aiming to find out how Christianity spread so widely, and what that reveals about the fall of the western Roman empire. Christianity presents itself as a faith for the powerless, but your book suggests that it was adopted by urban elites in its early centuries. How does this challenge the mythology surrounding its origins? It stands in stark contrast, really. It’s a tricky point, because those writing about Christianity were necessarily literate members of the elite. So, from the outset, we’re seeing a movement that appears to have spread among relatively well-off individuals. By the fourth century, it had clearly reached the highest echelons of Roman society. Emperor Constantine had begun to take notice, convening a council of bishops in AD 325. But even in the earliest years, this was a movement involving influential figures. Take Saint Paul – or Saul, as he was originally known. One of his first actions was to meet the governor of Cyprus – not preaching to the poor but engaging with powerful individuals in the Roman empire who had the means to support him. The governor then sent him back to what is now Turkey to reconnect with his family. It seems that Paul recognised that patronage by adopting the governor’s name, ‘Paulus’ – which is a very Roman thing to do when offered someone’s backing. What’s your take on Constantine? Is it right to describe him as the ‘Christian emperor’? It’s not as straightforward as it seems. We have a biography written after his death by Eusebius, who explicitly claims that Constantine was Christian and experienced a conversion on the way to the battle of the Milvian Bridge. Eusebius describes Constantine having a vision and carrying a Chi-Rho [a combination of chi and rho, the first two letters of the Greek word for Christ] into battle, supposedly with Christ supporting him. It’s quite striking, because at that point the context is entirely military: Christ becomes someone you want on your side as you move to defeat the emperor in Rome and claim sole rule. (Constantine was never destined to be emperor; he effectively eliminated the other three rulers until he was the last man standing.) Eusebius asserts that Constantine’s conversion occurred en route to that decisive battle. Afterwards, Constantine erected a triumphal arch in Rome. If the vision and conversion had truly occurred en route to the Milvian Bridge, you might expect some Christian symbolism on that arch – but there’s none. Instead, it’s full of traditional Roman iconography. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-486776899webready-38d8437.jpg" width="4369" height="2913" alt="Did Constantine’s (above left) use of the Chi-Rho symbol indicate his Christian faith, or was that a later interpretation? (Image by Getty Images)" title="Did Constantine’s (above left) use of the Chi-Rho symbol indicate his Christian faith, or was that a later interpretation? (Image by Getty Images)" /> What’s important to remember is that none of this history comes to us without agenda. Any written account, then or now, reflects the perspective of its author. Eusebius – a bishop – clearly had reasons to portray Constantine as a committed Christian. However, when you examine Constantine’s broader communications – particularly coins, which were vital tools of imperial messaging in a largely illiterate empire – you see something different. His coins continued to depict Roman gods including Sol, to whom he appeared especially drawn, well after his supposed conversion. That led me to investigate the Chi-Rho more closely. More than 1,000 different coin designs were minted during Constantine’s reign, and only a handful bear the Chi-Rho. Even on those coins, it appears in subtle ways: on a military standard, on a helmet – all very martial in character. Read more | “The Roman empire cannot have been governed by a series of psychopaths. It would not have survived”: Mary Beard on Roman Emperors What surprised me most was discovering the Chi-Rho’s ancient origins. The symbol appears in pre-Christian literature and papyri. There’s even one on a Greek bust dating back to a time before the supposed birth date of Jesus Christ. The most plausible explanation from the papyri is that Chi-Rho was originally an abbreviation for the Greek word archōn, meaning ‘ruler’, not Christos as Eusebius claimed. So even if Constantine did carry the symbol into battle, did it mean Christ? Or was that the first time anyone interpreted it that way? Up until then, it meant something else entirely. And we can’t even be sure he used it in the battle. Another contemporary account says he carried a cross, not a Chi-Rho. Why do you think the early Roman church was able to so deftly fill the power vacuum as imperial rule declined? Christianity didn’t invent itself as an empire from nothing: it adapted existing Roman structures. Early on, it functioned like a collegium – a Roman guild – offering social support, patronage and mutual aid, just as Roman professional associations did. This model suited the well-to-do among Roman society, and helped embed Christianity within everyday life. As elites adopted Christianity, it became tightly woven into their world. Roman aristocrats were educated in the liberal arts, and expected to govern provinces and cities. Over time, church institutions began to provide this same education, adding scripture to the traditional Roman curriculum, the cursus honorum, which fast-tracked noble-born Roman men into various civic offices. Christianity thus became the default cultural and ideological framework for elite careers. By the fifth century, bishops had effectively become city administrators, assuming roles once held by imperial officials – such as distributing the grain dole. Rather than creating something entirely new, Christianity absorbed and continued Roman civic functions. This fusion made the church remarkably resilient. As the western Roman empire fragmented, Christian bishops continued running cities. In Gaul, for instance, elite families retained their status across the Roman, Visigothic and Frankish regimes. Individuals such as Saint Sidonius Apollinaris exemplify this continuity, remaining influential under the shifting political circumstances. It’s unlikely that anyone at the time consciously planned to create a resilient ideological-administrative system that could survive the empire’s collapse. They were probably more concerned with preserving their own careers and ensuring opportunities for their children. For instance, elite Roman families would have been thinking pragmatically about how to secure a future for their sons amid instability. Of course, reducing everything to economics would be simplistic. Christianity was also a compelling system of ideas and belief. Many were genuinely devout, drawn to the religion for spiritual reasons, whereas others were more focused on its social and political benefits. These different motivations coexisted and contributed to Christianity’s development. There was no single way to be a Roman Christian. Is this Roman-ness still evident in Christian practice and ritual? The fact that the pope still rules from Rome and has the title of Pontifex Maximus (the most senior priestly rank in the ancient Roman religion), together with the church’s use of Latin and its adoption of imperial purple, all perpetuates this legacy. Plus, high-ranking members of the church are often canonised, echoing the Roman practice of deifying emperors. I traced some of these continuing rituals in my earlier books. When writing Buried (2022), I looked at Roman graveside feasting rituals, particularly at a burial in Caerleon, south-east Wales. A pipe from the surface was used by mourners to pour libations into the grave while holding feasts there – not just on the day of the funeral, but also nine days and 50 days afterwards, as well as on set days for honouring the dead. When I mentioned this pipe burial to my Russian friend Natasha, who grew up in Siberia, she exclaimed: “We did that!” She described a day when families would gather with food in cemeteries, the adults drinking vodka. She believed this was a Russian Orthodox celebration called ‘Parents’ Day’. When I researched further, I discovered that it mirrored the Parentalia festival of the ancestors in the pre-Christian Roman calendar. Read more | Roman gods and goddesses: 17 of the most important deities of ancient Rome These traditions carried over into Christian practice. And such customs persist in both the Greek and Russian Orthodox calendars, as well as in the Catholic church and the Church of England. For instance, the moveable feast known as Pentecost occurs 50 days after Easter; elements of Pentecost recall Rosalia, an ancient Roman summer day of the dead, when graves were decorated with roses. It’s another example of Roman traditions persisting in Christian ritual to this day. A few weeks ago, I happened to be in Orvieto, Italy, on Pentecost. A friend told me to look out for the medieval procession, so I stayed to watch. It was remarkable – people in full medieval dress parading through the streets to the cathedral, and women carrying great armfuls of flowers. The tradition continues. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/A0R03Cwebready-245b12f.jpg" width="5020" height="3347" alt="Children parade with flowers at the Sciò la Pica Pentecost festival in Monterubbiano. Like many other Italian celebrations, this tradition seems to be rooted in ancient pre-Christian beliefs (Image by Alamy)" title="Children parade with flowers at the Sciò la Pica Pentecost festival in Monterubbiano. Like many other Italian celebrations, this tradition seems to be rooted in ancient pre-Christian beliefs (Image by Alamy)" /> What was the relationship between Christianity and pre-existing faiths and philosophical thought? The early Christians were Jewish, and Christianity emerged within a Hellenistic-Roman context. These influences were deeply intertwined. Greek philosophy played a huge role in shaping Christian ideas but, from the start, theology was diverse and fragmented. To maintain unity and authority, the early church had to suppress doctrinal splits. Councils such as that at Nicaea (now İznik, Turkey) in AD 325 were about enforcing consensus, not simply defining belief. Still, divisions continued: between east and west, and, much later, Protestant and Catholic, because interpretation remained contested. Claims of Christianity’s radical uniqueness are often overstated. There are strong parallels with other cults, such as that of Mithras, and even Roman emperors’ devotion to a single god in the classical pantheon suggests a tendency towards monotheism. The term ‘paganism’ to describe non-Christian beliefs is a Christian invention, originally derogatory, which implied that the individuals who adhered to such beliefs were rustic or not ‘soldiers’ of Christ. We still use it for lack of a better alternative, though it defines by exclusion. The idea that Christianity invented charity is false, too. Roman society valued public service, and philanthropy was expected, especially from the elite. Caring for the vulnerable was essential to civic life. What Christianity did was adapt to the needs of growing urban centres. As cities expanded and poverty increased, the church offered a system to manage – not eliminate – urban destitution. Supporting the poor served both moral and political aims, helping to extract wealth from the rich while reinforcing the church’s influence. How important were Roman bishops and saints in entrenching the hegemony of Christianity more widely? That was very evident in the Celtic west, where Christianity was spreading as the Roman empire disintegrated, in locations that the empire never fully reached – places such as Ireland. You see early Christianity spreading through individuals with very Roman names – including Patricius, otherwise known as Saint Patrick. There are fascinating tales of voyaging saints, often travelling in small coracles, sometimes even with stone coffins. These journeys were just a continuation of what the elite were already doing. They were extremely well connected. In the hagiographies and accounts of these voyages, the saints are rarely heading to places where no Christian has ever been. By the time we hear about these saints, they’re visiting other Christians, often kings. These so-called ‘missionary’ journeys often involved being welcomed at royal courts. It’s always been about nobility and the interconnectedness of powerful families. Some of these saints were bishops, some kings; some began as generals and became bishops. Take, for example, Germanus of Auxerre. He remained rather military in outlook. At the request of the bishop of Rome, he travelled to Britain to deal with the growing divergence in Christian practice, which was causing concerns that the British might splinter away from the church in Rome. So Germanus was sent to bring them back in line, arriving with troops and even joining some battles. It’s striking how these figures, often romanticised as humble ascetics, were anything but isolated. They didn’t retreat from the world; instead, they established themselves close to the seats of power – for example, Saint Cuthbert on Inner Farne island, overlooking Bamburgh Castle. Do you think it’s time we stopped talking about the ‘fall of Rome’ and start seeing it more as a rebrand? I absolutely do. You’ve hit the nail on the head. This is essentially the thesis of my book. The Roman empire, particularly in the east, continued for another thousand years until the Ottomans entered Constantinople in 1453, marking its end. When the Ottomans took that city, the sultans declared themselves to be the Qaisar-e-Rum (‘Caesars of Rome’). In other words, they saw themselves as the inheritors of that legacy. In the west, the empire officially disintegrated in the fifth century but, as we’ve discussed, much of its culture endured and was repurposed by those who filled the power vacuum. If we define the empire as the emperor, then that connection is severed. But if we understand the empire as the broader system – its administration, education and social hierarchy – then that continues under the Roman church. Read more | Religion in Roman Britain: spreading the word of the gods You’re a former president of Humanists UK and one of Britain’s best-known atheists. How did that shape your approach to this foundational era of Christian history? I hope it didn’t, because I’m trying to approach this history by meeting people on their own terms and understanding why this set of ideas was being spread. In the book, I focus mainly on the political, economic and cultural perspectives. In some ways, that means I’m not approaching it from a position of personal investment in the ideas themselves, though I’m fascinated by them. I know a fair bit about them, having been brought up as a Christian, and being immersed in that tradition. I’m especially interested in where those traditions come from – for example, how some church festivals today trace back to pre-Christian times. I think Christianity is a compelling and important part of our culture. As society becomes more secular, and biblical knowledge declines, we risk losing sight of Christian history. Yet there’s still, I feel, a tendency to obscure the history of early Christianity, treating it as if it simply appeared fully formed. For me, it’s about cultural evolution: understanding where it began, who adopted it and who helped spread it. I hope I’ve explored that as objectively as possible. Alice Roberts is an anthropologist, broadcaster and author, based at the University of Birmingham. Her newest Channel 4 series, Roman Empire by Train, will air early in 2026. She will be touring the UK with her new book, Domination, from August to November. alice-roberts.co.uk/tour This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Why we should be better about talking about death, with Dr Helen Gittos
For our ancestors, death was part of daily life. We can learn from their open conversations about this taboo topic, says Dr Helen Gittos, and create modern rituals to help us cope
We don’t know how to talk about death. It’s a modern taboo. Search the topic online and you’ll quickly find people who deal in end-of-life matters arguing that we need more transparent, more honest conversations about an event that is, after all, going to come to us all. Charities like Hospice UK definitely want us to be better about talking about it. It wasn’t always this way. In fact, it’s only really in the 20th century that we’ve actively disassociated ourselves from death. The process has been institutionalised and medicalised. The palliative care physician and author Kathryn Mannix wrote about it in a Guardian article a few years ago. In the 19th century, according to the historian Judith Flanders, discussing Victorian death and mourning on a recent episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, “ it was part of daily life. It wasn’t tucked away neatly in hospitals where you go in and visit for an hour, but you don’t see all the day-to-day stuff, you don’t see people die”. She continues: “Many people go happily through their whole lives without ever seeing a dead person, which is simply not possible in the 19th century. Then, hospitals were very limited in the kind of diseases or illnesses they cared for. They were very specifically for certain things only. If you could afford it, you were looked after at home. Hospitals were a place of last resort for people who were too poor, too desperate, so everybody saw death.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-464472069-ccb7e8d.jpg" width="5204" height="3383" alt="A bracelet with two gold edged picture frames on it. In each, there is a photo of a girl with brown ringlets and wearing a purple dress" title="This Victorian bracelet has a band of woven hair and may have been a piece of mourning jewellery, which was in fashion during that era (Image by Getty Images)" /> Past and present rituals I went to a funeral the other day. It was of a dear friend who had died far too young, of cancer. She knew it was coming and had been able to prepare, and had, I think, had frank and open conversations with her husband and daughters. I don’t think that’s the norm, but that did mean that the crowded crematorium felt more like a genuine celebration of her life. There was also a modern ritual as we wept through a slide show of her greatest hits, set to music. Obviously my thoughts were drawn to this when I was talking to Dr Helen Gittos, a medieval historian at Oxford University. Her Life Lesson from History was that rituals really matter, and that we can learn from the past to make better use of them. It can be hard to identify what medieval people were doing by way of rituals, because that sort of activity isn’t necessarily documented. We’re talking about things that might be more informal and familial. That’s where archaeology comes to the fore. Helen told me about her research into a collection of 12th-century lead crosses that had been discovered in the grounds of the monastery at Bury St Edmunds. They all had scratched inscriptions on them. Read more | “There was a general perception that Queen Victoria’s mourning was neither normal nor acceptable” Helen worked out that the inscriptions related to a ceremony of consecration of a new church, and they were the words the bishop would say as he stepped over the threshold of the building. But these crosses had nothing to do with new church foundation – they were found with the remains of dead monks. Helen concluded that this was evidence of some sort of protective ritual for the monks, to keep the devil away and Christ close. We wouldn’t know that without her close detective work and leap of imagination to tease out the ritual underlying the artefacts. Navigating grief <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-132703805-1e3ce2e.jpg" width="2710" height="3840" alt="A painting shows a woman leaning over the edge of a bed, holding the arm of an unseen person. She has her head resting on it and a sad expression on his face" title="A 13th-century fresco by Giotto shows St Clare mourning St Francis, one of the many depictions of lamentation in the Middle Ages (Image by Getty Images)" /> Rituals and death are close bedfellows. End of life is a time when we need a support structure to navigate the grief. Helen’s academic experience sadly collided with her everyday as she coped with the death of her young daughter, Harriet, and the challenge of finding the right way to say goodbye. “At the time at which she died, I was writing that piece about the Bury St Edmunds crosses. I was in the middle of it and it’s hard sometimes to be a historian and not to turn off your historian’s head. So all the way through, I was watching and contrasting the way in which we now deal with death, with what I was looking at in the 11th and 12th centuries,” she explains. “Harriet died in hospital and the staff there wanted to try and help us, to wash her, to give her the kind of care that would have happened at home in the period that I was studying. Real efforts were made to try to include families, but there were also bits of it that were just so far away from what I’d been seeing that these monks were doing.” Helen described the perfunctory experience of being handed a “cool bag and a chit, which was a bit like the kind of thing you might get if you’d taken your shoes in to be mended” for her daughter’s body in a hospital. She felt “the contrast between thinking of those monks who were employing such care, love, attention, effort and craft to help their loved ones. That was one of those sudden moments of shock, a reminder that history isn’t a linear progression of things getting better. Sometimes the contrasts are really, really stark.” Death as part of life <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-2198979076-d1954a9.jpg" width="4960" height="3364" alt="A group of people dressed in smart Victorian clothing (waistcoats, white shirts and long coats) stand around fresh burial spot" title="A painting of a peasant burial in the 19th century, an era when the realities of death and dying were not hidden away (Image by Getty Images)" /> The medieval world, like the later Victorian period, was, as Helen points out, a place where death was a close reality, not hidden away. People died at home, surrounded by family, and the community came together to mark the passage from life to death. Helen told me this ritual process started before the death. People got ready for the inevitable: “One of the most striking things is that you have these ritual texts that are about guiding you to a good death.” It seems that people in the Middle Ages strove to make death a community activity, to create “a moment in which people were coming together to commemorate and note what’s passing, and also to manage the change that comes with that”. Fascinatingly, and I’d agree that this is something we really don’t do enough of today, Helen explains how there were rituals designed to follow up after someone’s death. “There were rituals for the deathbed, for the moment of death, for the funeral, and for the months and years that followed,” she says. “We’re all very good at contacting somebody in a moment of crisis. Many of us are less good at contacting them a month later, three months later, a year later. One of the things that was really characteristic about the Middle Ages was this formal way in which there were rituals that followed death that helped people to negotiate the aftermath, not just the moment itself.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-2188132656-f7fb776.jpg" width="3803" height="5369" alt="An illustrated page that shows a small yellow skull on a green table, surrounded by a pink letter O and several flowers" title="A 15th-century illuminated initial with a skull, a symbol of death, found at the start of the Office of the Dead, a Christian prayer read in spiritual preparation for death (Image by Getty Images)" /> Reclaiming ritual and conversation So what can we do? How can we learn from the past to face death more honestly and compassionately? Read more | What do we know about Viking funerals? Helen believes that we need both structure and flexibility. “Ritual often gives us a sort of framework for how to act at moments in which we feel lost, shocked and uncertain, and when we want a map for how to navigate some period of major change and a way of doing that collectively. But I think what rituals also do, and we have increasingly understood this, is to give a sense of freedom, flex and scope to create anew within that framework. That allows these improvisations to feel right and appropriate.” She describes how, in planning her daughter’s funeral, she drew on both historical knowledge and personal intuition. “I was glad that what we crafted in a very short period of time did end up feeling really right. We dispensed with all of the formality and we simply put together things that involved real music and musicians playing live. A friend found a wonderful pianist and we had a whole series of family members who read things that mattered to them. And then afterwards we took everybody and we walked back to the hospital where she died because there was a playground there, and we all gathered there among these play things and were able to be in an environment that felt right for me and right enough for the people who were close to us.” Moving forward <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-2188126796-c3a9a0b.jpg" width="4361" height="6408" alt="An illustration of a group of people dressed in green and brown robes surround a body wrapped in a shroud and rope, which they are burying" title="A burial scene from the Middle Ages, as shown in 15th-century illustrated romance in verse titled Barlaam und Josaphat (Image by Getty Images)" /> So I’m getting a couple of really good lessons here from Dr Helen Gittos, and from our medieval forebears. Firstly, we should be better about talking about death: with our families, our friends, and our communities. Secondly, we should be open to claiming and creating the rituals that help us to mourn and remember, and we should not be afraid to improvise, to make them our own. As Helen put it, “Rituals are things that we can use creatively in order to be able to manage. I think that we can be braver about creating rituals that work for us, even with the institutional context that so often surround major moments in our lives. We don’t have to simply accept the impersonal, formulaic, 30 minutes in and out of the crematorium.” She points out that there are people who are “creating new ways of doing things, burying people in woodland, making services which are a bit less formulaic, a bit more creative”. This can be “enormously beneficial for feeling like these are moments that we have managed, that we can dare to navigate ourselves – that we don’t need to rely on outside professionals to do them for us.” Let’s embrace rituals that help us cope with times of grief, and let’s be creative about them. Let’s talk about death. It’s going to happen to us, and our loved ones. We can make things easier on ourselves, and everyone around us, by just being a bit more honest and open about it. This article is part of HistoryExtra's new Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter for more articles and podcasts exploring the ways in which history can help us live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.
Chris Naunton on the search for the resting places of famous Egyptians such as Nefertiti and Cleopatra
Egyptologist, author and broadcaster Chris Naunton talks about the search for the resting places of famous Egyptians such as Nefertiti and Cleopatra.
Seeking eternity: 5,000 years of ancient Egyptian burial
While the ancient Egyptians' hope for eternal life remained constant, their burial practices were ever-changing. Dr Margaret Maitland, senior curator at National Museums Scotland, charts the remarkable changes in Egyptian tombs and the extraordinary objects that filled them…
Evidence of ancient Egyptian belief in life after death emerged as early as c4500 BC. Over the following millennia, the Egyptians’ preparations for eternal life changed significantly, with different styles of tombs, evolving mummification practices, and a wide variety of funerary objects. Egypt’s dry climate, secure geographic position, and wealth of resources means that we have been left with an abundance of evidence about burial practices. In the early 19th century, Europe’s race to uncover ancient Egyptian mummies and treasures amounted to little better than tomb looting. However, recently the archaeological recording of burials and a systematic approach to their study have made it possible to make sense of Egypt’s changing funerary traditions. An upcoming exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland, The Tomb: Ancient Egyptian Burial, charts the development of burial in ancient Egypt, and examines one of the first tombs to be excavated and recorded in detail: a tomb that was used and reused for more than 1,000 years. An eternal holiday The ancient Egyptians saw the afterlife as a potential extension of their lives on earth – but an idealised version, almost an eternal holiday. Preparations for the afterlife are first evidenced in prehistoric Egypt (c4500–3100 BC) by the placement in burials of pots containing food and drink for the deceased. Through this period an increasing number of provisions were placed alongside the dead, such as stone or pottery vessels, eye makeup palettes, flint tools, and beads. In this early period, the dead were buried in pits, usually laid facing west, towards the setting sun. Throughout ancient Egyptian civilisation, the sun held particular importance. To reach the afterlife, the Egyptians hoped to join the sun god, who set every evening and was reborn at dawn each morning on his eternal journey. The pyramids built to house the tombs of Egyptian kings evoke the descending rays of the sun – a stairway to heaven – and were often given names with solar associations, such as ‘King Snefru Shines’. The Great Pyramid was named ‘The Horizon of King Khufu’. Some of the earliest detailed information about Egyptian beliefs comes from the first funerary texts, inscribed on the walls of the burial chambers in royal pyramids around 2400–2250 BC. These were magic spells intended to protect the king’s body, and to reanimate it after death in order to help him ascend to the heavens. Some spells were intended to be recited at the funeral, while others were written in the first-person, to be spoken by the deceased king addressing the gods. These pyramid texts reveal that, as well as wishing to join the sun god, the deceased hoped to become like the god Osiris. According to myth, Osiris was the first king of Egypt. He was the first person to be mummified and brought back to life after death, thus becoming ruler of the afterlife. This dual system of afterlife beliefs, relating to both solar and Osirian rebirth, was to characterise burial through the rest of ancient Egyptian history. Inside the tomb The tomb itself was intended help magically transform the dead into a semi-divine being like Osiris. Pyramids and royal tombs even had associated temples in which the king would be worshipped as a god after his death. Wealthy individuals had a decorated tomb-chapel – a public part of the tomb above ground, separate from the actual burial chambers – where relatives could visit to remember the deceased, and priests could make offerings and recite prayers. In prehistoric burials, bodies were sometimes preserved naturally through the dry heat of the desert sand. The earliest active attempts to preserve human bodies involved wrapping the dead in resin-soaked linen, but the first real mummification took place during the pyramid age, or Old Kingdom (c2686–2134 BC). The body was dried using natron, a naturally occurring mixture of salts, and wrapped in linen. Sometimes the internal organs, the parts most likely to decay, were removed and mummified separately. The Egyptians believed that a person’s soul had the potential to leave the body to enjoy the afterlife, but it needed the preserved body as a resting place to return to each night. During the Middle Kingdom (c2030–1800 BC), the funerary spells originally written inside royal pyramids began to appear on the coffins of priests and high officials. God of the afterlife Osiris also grew in importance. Rectangular coffins were slowly replaced by anthropoid coffins that depicted the deceased holding royal regalia, transformed into Osiris to ensure their resurrection. Wooden models depicting food and craft production were initially introduced to burials to magically provide for the dead and transfer their wealth and status into the afterlife. These developed into funerary figurines called shabtis, initially intended to act as a substitute for the deceased, in case they were called up by conscription to perform physical labour in the afterlife. A major change in royal burial came In around 1530 BC, after a period of foreign occupation, when Egypt was reunified under the rule of a king from Thebes. Burial traditions in Thebes favoured rock-cut tombs in the cliffs on the west bank of the Nile, so royal pyramids were abandoned in favour of tombs hidden in the Valley of the Kings. This period, the New Kingdom (c1550–1069 BC), marked the height of the ancient Egyptian empire. The civilisation was extremely wealthy; a fact reflected in the hundreds of tombs constructed by officials opposite the capital city of Thebes. In addition to magical items produced specifically for burial, such as coffins, canopic jars, and shabtis, the prosperous now wanted to take their wealth with them. They filled their tombs with all the beautiful things that they enjoyed in life, from jewellery to furniture. Another new innovations of this time was the Book of the Dead, a collection of magical spells developed out of the texts written inside royal pyramids almost 1,000 years earlier. For the first time, these spells were written and illustrated on papyrus scrolls, shrouds and amulets for the wealthy to take with them to the afterlife. Our exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland focuses on a tomb built in the New Kingdom period for a chief of police and his wife. When it was excavated in 1857, detailed records and plans were made of the tomb’s layout and the objects found within it. It was enormous, carved 38m into the desert cliffs, followed by a shaft 6m deep leading to several burial chambers, making it larger than some of the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Ironically, while the chief of police was in charge of the security in the Valley of the Kings, he wasn’t able to protect his own tomb, which was eventually robbed. The only surviving object from his burial is a beautiful pair statue [a statue depicting a couple]. A change in fortune As Egypt lost control of its empire and became politically unstable (c1069–650 BC), the country fractured between the north and south and eventually succumbed to foreign rule. This change in fortune meant that people looked to cut costs in their burials – the people of Thebes could no longer afford to build new tombs and fill them with lavish burial goods. Since wood was scarce and expensive, a new form of mummy-case made from linen and plaster (cartonnage) was invented. Old tombs were reused and recycled. A number of objects excavated in the tomb featured in our exhibition reveal that it was reused by several individuals during at least two different time periods between 800 and 650 BC. With widespread tomb looting and reuse, Egyptians worried that organs stored in canopic jars might become separated from the body. The integrity of the body was important, so internal organs were mummified individually and then returned to the body. Canopic jars were technically no longer needed, but some people still made solid dummy canopic jars for the sake of tradition and symbolic protection. Objects from daily life were generally no longer placed in the tomb; instead the focus was entirely on magical items made specifically for burial. Originally just one single shabti figurine had been placed in the tomb, but this number quickly grew (as quality decreased significantly), eventually becoming a workforce for the afterlife. Over time, funerary objects like shabtis and canopic jars began to disappear, and even coffins became rare. By the time Egypt became part of the Roman empire in 30 BC, burials were focused entirely on the body itself; the most commonly used burial items were shrouds and either a mask or classical-style portrait placed over the face of the mummified person. The realism of classical portraiture may have appealed to those wishing to preserve the body and bring the dead back to life: in a portrait, they appeared alive again. On the other hand, traditional practices invoked ancient magic: gilded mummy masks aimed to make the dead semi-divine, based on an age-old belief that the skin of the gods was made of gold. The final reuse of the tomb featured in our exhibition was by an important Egyptian family who lived under the last pharaonic ruler Cleopatra and witnessed the conquest of Egypt by the first Roman emperor. The burials of the high-official Montsuef and his wife Tanuat can be dated specifically to 9 BC, by inscriptions on their funerary papyri. Unlike the earlier standardised Books of the Dead, these were personalised with vignettes about the couple, attesting to the virtuous lives they had led. The new Roman influences in this era are evident in the gold and copper wreath Montsuef’s body wore over a traditional gilded mask, a classical symbol of victory re-interpreted as a symbol of triumph over death. Montsuef’s funerary canopy is an amazing object – completely unprecedented in the history of Egyptian burial. Yet other elements of it are entirely traditional, such as its Egyptian temple shape, royal cobras and winged sun-disk motifs. Like other objects from this period, it demonstrates how much Egypt was being transformed by external influence, but also just how determined the Egyptians were to hold onto their traditions in their pursuit of the afterlife. While shrouds decorated with ancient Egyptian symbols were produced until around the late third century AD, with the introduction of Christianity to Egypt, followed by Islam, burial practices that had lasted thousands of years were finally abandoned. Nevertheless, the ancient Egyptians still live on today, given eternal life through their extraordinary burial objects. Dr Margaret Maitland is senior curator of Ancient Mediterranean collections at National Museums Scotland. The Tomb: Ancient Egyptian Burial presents the story of one extraordinary tomb, built around 1290BC and reused for more than 1,000 years. The exhibition runs from 31 March until 3 September 2017 at the National Museum of Scotland and comes ahead of the opening of a new permanent Ancient Egypt gallery in 2018/19.
Five places Richard III may have wanted to be buried (and none of them are Leicester)
Richard III may have wished to be buried in Middleham, Northamptonshire, London, York or County Durham, leading historian Michael Hicks has said. This article was first published in May 2014
Speaking exclusively to History Extra, Hicks said that at one time or another, the last Plantagenet king envisaged being buried at at least five different locations. Hicks, who is head of history at the University of Winchester, said: “Death was ever-present in the Middle Ages, and people prepared for it at much younger ages than they do today. “Determining what happened to their possessions was a factor, but it was more important to ensure salvation and to mitigate sufferings in purgatory after death. “Richard III died at the age of 32. He drafted wills – none of which now survive – and planned his death on several occasions. Each will would have succeeded the previous one. “Richard died a traitor, with all his possessions seized by the crown. He died intestate [as though without making a formal will]; therefore we do not know for sure where he wanted to be buried. But I believe there are a number of possible places.” The result of a judicial review over where the remains of Richard III should be buried is expected this month. The judicial review will examine the justice secretary’s decision to authorise the exhumation and reinterment of the monarch’s remains in Leicester. It has been brought by a group of Richard III’s distant relatives, the Plantagenet Alliance Limited, who are campaigning to see the former king reburied in York. Here, Hicks explores five sites Richard may have wished to have been buried: Fotheringhay College Where? The mausoleum of the House of York, Northamptonshire Why? Richard was born at Fotheringhay, and I think the presumption must have once been that he would be buried at the family mausoleum at Fotheringhay College. It was founded by the Dukes of York, and contains memorials to many of the members of the House of York. There, in 1476, Richard presided as chief mourner at the reburial of his father, Richard Duke of York, and elder brother, Edmund Earl of Rutland, both slain by the Lancastrians in 1460 at the battle of Wakefield. [They were previously buried at Pontefract]. I think, until he had his own family and mausoleum, Fotheringhay was the most likely place Richard would have been buried. Richard also helped to endow St George’s Chapel Windsor, which his eldest brother Edward IV planned to be his own mausoleum. Edward was indeed buried there. He allotted space within it to at least two trusted Yorkists, Lords Hastings and Ferrers: perhaps Richard planned to join them As king, Richard moved Henry VI there from Chertsey. Perhaps he expected to make this the new royal mausoleum. However, he later became dynastic, marrying Anne Neville and having at least one child, and his burial place of choice probably changed. It’s also worth noting that the other three family burial places of Richard and his wife, Anne Neville, available to him – Warwick College, Tewkesbury Abbey and Bisham Priory – were located too far away from where Richard lived to be viable options. They did not fit in with his role as ‘lord of the north’. Middleham parish church and Barnard Castle chapel Where? North Yorkshire and County Durham respectively Why? In 1478, Richard decided to found two collegiate churches of dean, canons and choristers, in the north: at Middleham parish church and the chapel in Barnard Castle. It was logical for Richard to establish his own mausoleum. Therefore, he gained permission in 1478 to start endowing these churches. Richard gave Middleham parish church substantial estates, and aimed to found and incorporate a college there for a dean and six secular priests. He assembled some building materials to extend the east end and add living accommodation, but had not got very far when he died. St Alkelda’s Church at Middleham survives. Perhaps he meant Middleham to become the burial place for his family, but more probably he had such plans for the chapel in Barnard Castle – its foundation was to be much bigger and grander, for a dean and twelve priests. Nothing of it now remains. However, when Richard became king, both Middleham and Barnard were rendered out of date – neither were grand enough for a king. York Minster Where? York, North Yorkshire Why? As Duke of Gloucester, Richard made himself ‘Lord of the North’. When Richard became king in 1483, he celebrated especially at York, where his son was invested as Prince of Wales. Richard founded a chantry at York Minster of 100 priests, to pray for the good of his soul and those of his family. One hundred priests was an unheard of quantity – the wages would have been about £1,000 a year, and the plan required a £25,000 capital investment. This was an enormous investment: about a third of the income of the English crown at the time. This was a bigger endowment than for any other medieval chapel. We know that some clergy were appointed and paid, and celebrated mass at existing chapels in the minster. Materials were assembled to extend the minster, and to establish living accommodation, but we know nothing of the plans that were dropped after Richard’s death. Professor Barrie Dobson suggested that York Minster was to be Richard’s sepulchre. This is unproven but, given the evidence, perfectly feasible. Westminster Abbey Where? Westminster, London Why? Richard’s wife, Anne Neville, died at Westminster in March 1485, and was buried with all the honours due to a queen at Westminster Abbey by the door to Edward the Confessor’s chapel. It could have been that Richard planned to join her there – it was common to be buried with your wife. But only four months later – in August 1485 – Richard himself was dead. He therefore had no time to construct a splendid tomb for Anne, and perhaps for himself too. The problem with Westminster Abbey, however, was that there was little space – this was why Henry VII added his massive Lady Chapel at the east end. And while we might argue that Richard wanted to be buried at Westminster with his queen, there is some evidence that he tried to replace her before she died. And why might Richard not have wanted to be buried at Leicester? Leicester is home to the mausoleum of the House of Lancaster – Richard’s enemy – so it’s very unlikely he would have wanted to be buried there. But history happened, and he was killed in battle in Leicester. People who died in battle didn’t have any say in where they ended up [being buried]. Prof Hicks last month raised doubts about whether the skeleton discovered in Leicester is in fact that of Richard III. Click here to read the article. 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With just a few days to go until the Plantagenet king is reburied, we speak to Phil Stone, chairman of the Richard III Society, and historian Alexandra Buckle about this momentous event
With just a few days to go until the reburial of the last Plantagenet king in Leicester Cathedral, we speak to two experts with close connections to the event. Phil Stone, chairman of the Richard III Society, considers the ways that the recent discoveries have changed our view of the king. Meanwhile, Alexandra Buckle of Oxford University, explains how her research will inform the reinterment ceremony.
Victorian burials and the history of psychology
Ruth Levitt explains how Britain struggled to bury its dead during the 19th century, while Martin Sixsmith gives us the lowdown on his new Radio 4 series
Ruth Levitt describes how London's cemeteries couldn't cope with the rising number of dead in the 19th century and reveals the solutions the Victorians devised for this problem. Meanwhile, we speak to Martin Sixsmith, presenter of the Radio 4 series In Search of Ourselves, about the history of psychology.