Early British monuments

Cuchulainn's stone County Louth, Ireland. The Ulster Cycle stories are about rock formations and megalithic structures along the path of invasion of Ulster by Queen Mabd.

Beowulf's barrow (?) at Skalunda Sweden

Sutton Hoo  place of Wuffings  (Wiglaf and Wealtheow are Wuffings)

Stone Age

Cave paintings cir. 30,000 BCE indicate there was stone age belief system that food animals would die for glory. They traded their lives to hunters in exchange for art which made them immortal. An example of this magical art is the great hall of bulls at Lascaux in France.

Neolithic

Things changed with the domestication of animals and rise of agriculture in the Neolithic period.  The need to attract wild animals diminished. Human victims now were induced to die in exchange for posthumous glory, including literary memorials and worship ceremonies at their tombs. Early gods and heroes often are identified with animals (e.g., Zeus in the form of a bull, Heracles wearing the lion skin, Beowulf the bear-wolf).

The earliest city Catal Hoyuk (cir 7500 BCE) seems to have featured the burial of ancestors in the basement. The megalithic and barrow cultures in Britain, the pyramid necropolis cultures in Egypt, and the ziggurat cultures in Mesopotamia represent further phases of development

Ancient

Best known examples of heroic burial are the Giza necropolis pyramids (2500 BCE). A modern rendering of the grave goods taboo is  Curse of the mummy (2006 remake). Related horrors include the vampire, Frankenstein, and other hauntings of the living by the dead,  

Cycladic lyre funerary figurine (Aegean cir 1500 BCE)

Witch of Endor (cir 1100 BCE)

Babylonian Ziggurat (temple of Marduk cir 550 BCE).

Chinese first emperor (200 BCE)

Classical Greco-Roman

Mount Helicon (home to the Greek poet Hesiod cir 600 BCE)

The Greek hero cult is the basis for European heroic literature. Images show that this involved a muse, a lyre player, and libation pourers at a gravesite or lake. The purpose was to celebrate the dead through communion. Libation pourers awakened the dead by giving them drinks. The dead could speak to the living through the medium of the lyre player. Hero ceremony.

Greek heroic singer pouring libation cir 450 BCE

In Homer, the function is no longer ritual; it is entertainment. The setting is not the graveyard but the court or (with the development of Greek tragedy) the theater.

Odysseus visits the dead (cir 800 BCE)

Hero cults and Homeric literature spread east with Alexander to the classics of India and west with Roman imitation of Greek cultures. In a famous and influential imitation, Virgil's Aeneid showed how the heroic poem could be used for political propaganda.  Aeneid cave of sibyl

Greeks and Romans also held lakes to be the connection to the afterlife. Lake Avernus  in the crater of a volcano where nothing could live was one of the places you could go to meet  the dead (William Turner 1798).

Medieval

Early Christian literature picks up the ancient purpose of glorifying those who died for the community, starting with Jesus, martyrs and saints.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre (336 CE) is founded by Constantine the Great (who was familiar with Britain, crowned at York).

Martyr cults developed; relics were considered magical. All churches wanted to house bones, such as the tomb of Edward the Confessor under the floor at Westminster. Even individuals, holy men wanted to tote relics about, as satirized in Chaucer's Pardoner. 

Canterbury Cathedral  (begun 602 CE)

Westminster Abbey  (1050 CE)

Glastonbury Abbey supposed site of Arthur's grave (1100s)

Dante and Virgil (1321) visit the underworld (cf Beowulf and Wiglaf). My Dante page. and Inferno

Modern

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Madrid

Shakespeare's last words (1616)

John Dryden at Westminster 

Washington capital and rotunda : US Constitution : words of founders  

Death of Socrates (1787)

Davy Crockett's Almanac  (Davy and the bear)

9/11 Responder and firefighters for truth   (2001)

Islamic martyr memorial