practicesGrave deposit

Egypt made the grave the standard destination. Amulets of gold, faience and carnelian appear in Old Kingdom burials in various shapes to protect different parts of the body, and the mummification sequence put them into the linen as it went on: the body was wrapped in strips with amulets while a priest recited prayers and burned incense. By the Late period a burial could carry heart scarabs, djed columns in gold and faience, Eye of Horus amulets, figures of deities and magical bricks set at the four compass points.

Particular amulets carry their own placement rules. A heart scarab went directly over the heart and was wrapped into the bandages; in a Third Intermediate Period variant, smaller and uninscribed, it went inside the chest cavity alongside the real heart. The amulet's job, in the Egyptian account, was to keep the heart silent at the weighing in the Duat, so that it did not testify against its owner, or to stand in for it. The first known depictions are Sixteenth or Seventeenth Dynasty, around 1690 BCE. Tyet amulets — the knot of Isis — began going into burials in the early New Kingdom, from Amenhotep III, and from then until the end of dynastic Egypt few people were buried without one in the wrappings, usually on the upper torso; Chapter 156 of the Book of the Dead calls for one in red jasper at the neck.

Jerusalem produced the oldest surviving biblical text this way. In 1979, two tiny silver scrolls inscribed with portions of the Priestly Blessing and apparently once used as amulets were found in one of the Iron Age Judahite burial chambers at Ketef Hinnom, a site whose 1975 salvage excavation Gabriel Barkay reported. They date to around 600 BCE and took three years to unroll. They are in the Israel Museum.

Han China buried its dead in stone. Jade burial suits were made of plaques joined through drilled corners with gold, silver, copper or silk thread, with the wire assigned by rank in the Book of Later Han — gold for emperors, silver for princes and marquises, copper for their children, silk for lesser aristocrats, and everyone else forbidden. Two complete suits found in 1968 in the tombs of Liu Sheng and Dou Wan at Mancheng, Hebei, settled a long argument about whether such suits existed. A suit took several years to make; some were too small for the body and were laid on a wooden effigy instead. Emperor Wen of Wei banned their production in 223 CE to reduce tomb looting, which is a dated statement about how much of this material was already being dug up.

Elsewhere the grave takes the same objects the living used. Fijian men were buried with their tabua, the polished sperm-whale teeth, along with war clubs. Hei-tiki were often buried when their kaitiaki, their guardian, died, and retrieved later to be kept somewhere special and brought out at tangihanga. Greek and Roman curse tablets were put in graves so that the dead person could carry the message, chosen often from those who had died young or violently. In Rome, by contrast, a boy's bulla left him at manhood and went to the household Lares rather than to the ground.

Inference — the timeline and the map in this atlas are built on graves. A material that survives burial and a custom of burying it together decide which traditions look old and which look recent; Egypt looks enormous partly because it buried faience by the thousand in dry ground. That is a fact about preservation before it is a fact about devotion.

Put on the body, wrapped into the bandages at the position the texts specify, laid in the coffin, or set at the compass points of the chamber. In several traditions the placement is the whole instruction and the amulet is otherwise an ordinary one.

Now mostly a question of who holds the objects. Grave goods are the most contested class in museum collections: in the United States the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act sets out how human remains and funerary objects in federally funded collections are returned, and repatriation claims elsewhere turn on the same distinction between an object given to the dead and an object traded by the living. Egyptian funerary amulets remain on open display in many collections, and the asymmetry between those two situations is itself an argument.