14 DAY TRIAL // A Bronze Age, 3,500-year-old cemetery was discovered by Russian scientists in the village of Staryi Tartas, Siberia. The macabre sites feature more than 600 graves, from which more than a dozen contain couples buried together for eternity.
The tombs contain both male and female bones, but what amazed the scientists were the few graves that contained couples facing each other and holding hands in a bizarre love for eternity type of burial. Some believe it to be one of the first cemeteries to focus on nuclear family or murdered couples buried together.
Another theory suggests that the couples were either sacrificed together or individually murdered after the passing of one of them. The position in which they were found proved to be of a huge interest for the scientists as they are trying to understand the meaning of the macabre love tombs.
“Archaeologists are struggling for explanations and believe DNA tests will provide the answers to these remarkable burials,” notes The Siberian Times. Alongside the couples buried in the loving embrace, there were also tombs containing the remains of children resting with what seemed to be their parents.
“We can allege that husband died and the wife was killed to be interred with him as we see in some Scythian burials, or maybe the grave stood open for some time and they buried the other person or persons later, or maybe it was really simultaneous death,” Professor Vyacheslav Molodin, director of research at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Science, Siberian branch said, according to The Siberian Times.
In order to accurately determine the circumstances in which the couples were buried, scientists started with a variety of hypotheses and DNA research. Some believe the cemetery to be linked to ancient Deeksha rituals that focused on reincarnation and that those resting in the grave were buried together so that they spend the next life together as well.
In this particular belief, the dead should complete the ritual of reincarnation by simulating relations between a man and a woman, and this particular embrace in which they were buried symbolized the reproduction act needed in order to complete the ritual.
For the moment, nothing has been proved and just theories concerning the unique tombs have surfaced. The archaeologists cannot precisely answer the questions of the Siberian cemetery yet, but they can offer a number of hypothesis related to the lovers buried for eternity. To keep the fairy-tale idea surrounding the finding, people like to believe that the couples lived in a happily ever after kind of world and died at the same time.