But solicitude for the safety of the living has not been the only motive for the burial of the dead, for the destiny of man after death is clearly pointed out, and his doom to the earth is amply shewn by various expressions contained in the Holy Writings, and his burial or interment has been performed in obedience to the original or divine plan.
The interment or burial of the dead has likewise been considered as a rite due to the memory of the deceased, and a mark of respect which the friends and relatives were bound by every sacred obligation, to perform with all becoming solemnity.
To neglect the sacred office of interment, or any of the solemnities usually in practice, was, even among the earliest Greeks and Romans, to treat the memory of the departed with the grossest disrespect and indignity.
The denial of burial, with all its formalities, was esteemed by the Greeks as a mark of infamy due only to villains, traitors to their country, and those who died in debt, and the bodies of such characters were accordingly decreed unfit for ordinary interment.
The Jews interred the bodies of the dead for the most part contiguous to the high ways, in gardens, and on hills.
The Greeks and Romans interred their dead in the ground which surrounded their sacred buildings, and at the gates and porticoes of their temples.
The Saxons, Danes, and other Scandinavian nations, enclosed the bodies of the deceased in stone coffins, which were placed or built at the distance of two or three feet from the surface of the earth.
At this day, these stone coffins are occasionally discovered at a little depth from the surface. Some such coffins were lately discovered in the parish of Gladsmuir, in East Lothian, by the coulter of the plough coming in contact with them. On examination, the coffins were found to be only a foot and a half below the earth’s surface:—they were about five feet long, and were composed of several stones fitted together, or built up. Within were found human bones of the adult size, quite entire in figure, but so friable, as to fall to powder along with the clay in which they were imbedded, on being handled. The vertebræ or bones of the spine, which are at present in my possession, present the same accuracy of outline to be found in the recent skeleton.
The situation at which these coffins were found, is the very summit of Seton Hill, a point which commands a view of the surrounding country to a very great extent, and of the Forth, from its mouth to its meanderings in Stirlingshire, and which there is much reason to think, may have been at a very early time, a Danish or Saxon encampment.
The Hindoos dispose of their dead or dying by throwing them into the Ganges, where they rot and decompose.