A 4200-year-old grave containing the skeleton of a man, who was apparently believed to be at risk of becoming a “zombie”, was unearthed in eastern Germany. Archaeologists came to this conclusion because this person, who was approximately 40 to 60 years old at the time of his death, was buried with a heavy stone slab placed across his feet.
It is reported by Ancient Origins Tours.
The slab was approximately three feet (one meter) long, 20 inches (50 centimeters) wide and four inches (10 centimeters) thick, and its purpose was to prevent the inhabitant of the grave from digging his way out of the grave.
The grave of the alleged zombie was found near the village of Oppin, which is located southwest of Berlin in Saxony-Anhalt. It was discovered during excavations that began along the route of a planned intercity underground power line to Bavaria.
While tales of zombies, vampires, and other dead ghouls were particularly common in Europe during the Middle Ages, not much is known about how deeply the concept of the revenants penetrated the mythology of people living in the Bronze Age. The discovery of this zombie burial site in eastern Germany demonstrates that people in the region knew the legends as early as the third millennium BC, suggesting that they go back even further in prehistory.
The living dead
Archaeologists and other officials involved in the excavations were pleased to find evidence of a belief in the revenants that predates the historical era.
“We know that even in the Stone Age, people were afraid of revenants,” said archaeologist and Project Manager Susanne Friederich, in an interview with the German public broadcasting outlet MDR. “Back then, people believed that dead people sometimes tried to free themselves from their graves.”
The revenant or zombie was an integral part of various ancient mythologies, including Celtic and Norse people. The fear of revenants was also a real phenomenon in Ancient Greece, as reflected in their practice of weighing buried corpses. Much literature shows that the Romans believed in revenants, and in their case it was a common practice to put stones in the mouths of the dead so that they would not rise again and eat the flesh of the living.
In medieval times such beliefs were extremely widespread, as it was alleged that deceased witches, possessed people, those who had committed suicide, and individuals who were bitten by vampires would break free from their graves to join the ranks of the walking dead. As recently as the 1600s there was an outbreak of anti-revenant (and anti-vampire) hysteria in Poland, with precautions frequently being taken during burials to trap people suspected of being zombies or vampires in their graves.
Placing a huge stone on the body was one way to prevent the evil dead from rising again. But it was not the only one.
"There are graves where the corpse even lies on its stomach," said Friederich. - "If it lies on its stomach, it burrows deeper and deeper instead of rising to the surface ... there are also dead bodies lying on their stomachs who were also pierced with a lance, so they were practically fixed in the ground."
The idea that zombies can only be killed by destroying their heads or brains seems to be a modern version of ancient legends. The closest equivalent can be found in Roman times, when apparently some bodies were dismembered before burial to protect them from the zombie curse.
Earlier, we wrote that scientists have reconstructed the face of a vampire who was buried in a mass grave of plague victims in the XVI century.