Ancient Romans and Greeks placed coins in the mouth of the deceased for passage through the mythological Styx; memorials are dedicated to victims of genocide; vultures consume bodies in the high mountains of Tibet; and in the era of technocracy, some loved ones even attempt to recreate a person’s presence with AI.
These are some of the ancient and modern customs surrounding death that Roger Luckhurst, a professor at the University of London, Birkbeck, charts in his new book Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead (Princeton University Press and Thames & Hudson, 2025). In the illustrated book, Luckhurst chronicles the history of human burials and funerary traditions around the world, examining their impact on the living. He also outlines how the living employ the dead for nationalistic, political ends.
The Standard of Ur, a wooden Sumerian box from around 2500 BCE inlaid with reliefs, one side depicting scenes of war, the other scenes of peace (photo by Alex-David Baldi via Flickr, CC BY 4.0)
During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, Luckhurst told Hyperallergic in an interview, the only place he could have a coffee was in a local park in London, where he returned frequently.
“And then I discovered that I’d been sitting in what was in fact a 19th-century graveyard and that the people serving coffee were sitting on top of thousands and thousands of bones,” Luckhurst said. The revelation sparked his curiosity. He soon began researching the graveyards and the city, and discovered that many streets in London were built on top of burial sites.
Eventually, his research evolved to include death and burial practices from across the world, which he compiled into a vast survey of what he described as “the massive variety” of global burial customs.
An unrecorded 17th-century German artist’s “The Dance of Death,” in which the central dance is surrounded by death’s encounters with living people from all walks of life (© Wellcome Collection, London; image courtesy Thames & Hudson)
“Observed rituals give us a cultural framework in which to mourn the dead, but they are also there to stop us being pulled down into the earth with our beloved dead at our rawest moment of grief,” Luckhurst writes in the early pages of Graveyards.
In some places, death rituals have attracted what Luckhurst refers to as “dark tourism” in his book. Tourists, including those from China, according to the book, visit Tibet to view a death ritual known as a “sky burial,” associated with Buddhist monasteries. Tourists also flock to the cliff cemeteries in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, where coffin vaults are visible and adorned with effigies.
“ What are we doing when we do that?” Luckhurst said, reflecting on the commodification of burial rituals in Asia in particular. “If it’s involving tourism to an actual funeral, I think that’s a real issue that we could perhaps explore.”
Egyptian mummy paintings, left: “Portrait of a young woman in red” (CE 90–120); and right: “Portrait of a thin-faced man” (CE 140–170) (both images public domain via the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
In a chapter titled “Recruiting the Dead,” Luckhurst examines how burials are weaponized by the living to exert political objectives. “ What I was most surprised by was the whole sense of bodies being, what I call in the book, ‘recruited’ to political projects,” he explained.
The chapter describes the death of Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, whose body was displayed against his widow’s wishes as part of Joseph Stalin’s bid to succeed him as head of the Soviet Union. Millions poured into Red Square to see Lenin, according to the book, “confirming to Stalin there was a reservoir of mass sentiment to be tapped.”
In Zimbabwe, a national cemetery for revolutionary heroes is shaped as an AK-47 rifle, a detail that Luckhurst described as his most “jaw-dropping” discovery from his research.
Lenin’s mausoleum in the Red Square in Moscow, Russia (photo by flowcomm via Flickr, CC BY 4.0)
“That memorialization of the dead is clearly a kind of sense of building a national identity around those who have been sacrificed in the process,” Luckhurst said. Another example he cited was the Arlington National Cemetery in the United States, where the dead are recruited to a “nationalist story.”
Luckhurst concludes the chapter by citing a 2023 New York Times report that the Israeli military destroyed at least six Palestinian graveyards, as it faces charges of genocide.
“The already dead remain a persistent target in war,” Luckhurst writes, “never more lively than when recruited to shore up the narratives of people and nations.”
While Graveyards primary subject is, fittingly, the titular burial site, Luckhurst sought to integrate the living and the dead in his book, an attachment that he sees as uncommon in modern culture. Some of that living with the dead happens in the confines of families, present and ancient, and other instances happen at much grander scales, including collective reckoning with mass death and atrocity. In each case, Luckhurst offers, there is an opportunity to construct a future.
”We quite often culturally want to separate the living and the dead, but actually what we’re doing constantly is living with our dead,” Luckhurst said. ”In an old city like London, I am literally living on the dead.”
