Ship Burials and Funeral Boats: The Universal Symbol of Transcendence in Ancient Cultures

In many cultures around the world, ships have formed part of the physical funeral and gravesite. In some cases, the ship, packed with the corpse, offerings, and even sacrificed spouses and slaves, was set adrift on the waters, whereas in other cases, the boat with its contents was entirely inhumed or set up on posts, as in a scaffold burial. Despite the obvious diversity, these practices may in fact be related in terms of a complex of themes and symbols that involves transcending (“crossing over”) a water barrier on a journey to the other world.

The symbolism of the ship certainly varies from culture to culture, but it is instructive that a ship is rarely blamed for its own shipwreck. One may blame the gods, the weather, the unruly nature of water itself, or fate, but tales rarely, if ever, impugn a ship that sank. Rather, ships generally figure in myth and poetry as romantic, even transcendent, symbols— vessels that take humans across danger to places they could never venture unaided. Perhaps for this reason, Greek sailors (who were, of course, male) always chose feminine names for their ships, which signified not only a feminine “vessel” but a thing of beauty. Such ship names included “Salvation,” “Grace,” “Bringer of Light,” “Blest,” “Victorious,” “Savior,” “Providence,” “Peace,” “Dove,” and so on (all feminine nouns in Greek). Again, Noah’s ark was the vessel of salvation for human and animal kind, providing a temporary home and saving a select few from the universal catastrophe. In this sense, then, a boat may be a symbol of transcendence over water, for water very often means “danger,” if not “destruction.” In this sense, too, although the sun is often thought to be pulled by a chariot, frequently (as in ancient Egypt) the sun was carried in or pulled by a ship of the heavens. In general, a ship is a means to “cross over,” which is the literal meaning of “transcendence.” However, individual cases must be brought to bear on such a general theory in order to test its validity.

Ship burial was widely practiced in ancient Egypt, though authorities do not entirely agree as to why. Entire ships loaded with equipment have been found buried at several ancient Egyptian sites, for instance, around the Great Pyramid. There, four boat-shaped pits were found, and although three were empty, the fourth actually contained the remains of a large wooden ship. To explain this practice, it must be noted that boats served many purposes in the ancient Egyptian funeral. First, the burial site was often across an actual river, so the funeral procession had to be loaded onto boats in order to get there. Second, as the cult of Osiris grew in prominence, the esteemed dead were often taken via the Nile to the cult sites at Busiris and Abydos, the shrines of Osiris, to partake in his death and resurrection. Boats may have been merely instrumental in the funeral—so why bury them? In Egyptian belief, everything connected with the person who died (clothing, embalming tools, personal possessions, often even wives and slaves) was considered “dead” by association and had to be disposed of at the burial ground. Thus the boats that carried the dead may have been routinely buried due to “death pollution.” But this belief alone does not explain the fact that from the Old Kingdom period onward (c. 3000 BCE) reliefs of boats, references to boats, and model boats complete with crews and cabins can be found in the tombs. Clearly, these were associated with the funerary boat of Osiris, which both carried him down into the underworld (in the west) and around again to the east each day with the rising sun. There can be no doubt that in some cases the deceased (most often a pharaoh) was thought to join or even become Osiris on his underworld ship drawn by the sun. Thus, burying the boat of an important personage may have had more to do with afterlife hopes than ritual impurity.

It may be true that whole ship burials were limited to the Old Kingdom, but scholars James Hamilton-Paterson and Carol Andrews point out that the ship symbolism was carried on in Egypt long after the physical burials of boats ceased. Clearly, ships were associated with the Egyptian funerary complex from start to finish and must be understood as having a deep religious significance to a people who were so interested in death—not as the end of life but as the beginning of immortality.

Ancient Scandinavians also buried entire boats, with the dead in full regalia sitting upright surrounded by gifts, including animal and even human sacrifices. Ship burial was by no means an everyday affair in Scandinavia, but it does appear to have been a frequent practice for the funerals of nobles or heroic persons. Sometimes the loaded ship was cremated and then buried, and other times it was inhumed intact; in either case, the burial site was covered with a large mound. Most ship burials in Norway were vessels less than 10 meters long, and only five have been found larger than 20 meters. The Gokstad ship, found 50 miles south-southeast of Oslo, measures 23-1/3 meters long and had sixteen pairs of oars, sails, a rudder, and an anchor. It and three smaller boats, all covered with a great mound, date to the end of the ninth century. Such a lavish burial indicates the deceased’s prominence.

Often the boat and its deceased passenger were cremated, and only the discovery of boat rivets in a grave shows that it was a ship burial. Another version of the ship burial in Scandinavia involved outlining the shape of a boat using upright stones over the cremation spot. It is not clear whether the outlined ship and the buried ship were ritually equivalent or whether some alteration in Scandinavian belief brought on the change in funerary custom. Yet another variation on the Scandinavian ship burial was the practice of loading a ship up with its dead voyager and equipment and launching it out to sea. In the Norse myth of the death of the beautiful god Balder, this practice appears to be combined simultaneously with cremation.

One great ship cremation in central Europe was observed firsthand by the Muslim historian Ahmad Ibn Fadhlan, who was serving on an embassy from Baghdad to the Bulgars on the Volga in 922 CE. After a ten-day funeral ceremony, during which there was music and merrymaking, the deceased chieftain was placed on a couch amid a dome of wood on the ship and was cremated along with a slave-girl “wife.” Another Arab writer, Ibn Rustah, describes the burial of a ship and chieftain in which the “wife” was buried alive in the grave. It is possible that the persons performing these ship burials in central Europe were Scandinavians abroad, or the custom of ship burial may have migrated to nearby lands. Some Anglo-Saxon tribes are known to have practiced ship inhumation, and an example from myth is recorded in the epic Beowulf.

Certain Native American groups also used a boat in funerary customs, mainly those tribes located on the northwest coast of the United States. The Chinook, Twana, and Clallam, all tribes of Washington State, used to carry out canoe burials, though this practice faded out after centuries of white influence. H. C. Yarrow provides several accounts of how this was done. Four holes were punched in old canoes, which were then fitted with four upright beams (or the entire canoe was placed in the branches of a tree) to keep the dead away from wolves and other wild animals. Frequently, two canoes were used—one placed upright on the poles, serving as a platform, and a smaller one, inverted and placed on top of the other to protect the dead from birds of prey and other depredations, though a trunk, coffin, or thick blankets were also used as the inner covering. Burial in a canoe or setting the dead adrift was also practiced at times by other tribal peoples, for instance, the Arctic Eurasian tribes such as the Vogul, the Ostyak, the Sea-Lapps, and the Yakut—all of whom made their living, in part, from the sea.

The Story of the Flying Africans. An African people known as the Igbo were among the millions of individuals forcefully taken from West Africa across the Middle Passage to be sold into slavery. In 1803, one group of Igbo slaves on a ship bound for St. Simon’s Island (located off the coast of the current US state of Georgia) rose in rebellion. The Igbo uprising took the lives of the white overseer and two crewmen. Archival evidence suggests the Igbo decided to drown themselves at a place now known as Ebos Landing, choosing death over capture and a life of slavery. Although this act of rebellion was an important historical moment during the Transatlantic Slave Trade, it has since acquired mythical status and is remembered quite differently in various communities. In oral traditions among African American communities of the Georgia coast, the tale of the brave Igbo as “Flying Africans” is remembered not as an act of organized suicide but rather as “flight” and return to Africa. In this view, the Igbo slaves were said to have returned to Africa in spirit form, freed from captivity. The retelling of this story thus evokes a successful physical and spiritual resistance to slavery during the horrors of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Monica Drake and Rainer F. Buschmann

Using a canoe as a coffin is also common in many parts of Polynesia and greater Oceania, though again this practice has faded greatly because of modernization. In Timor Laut, an island east of Timor, the dead are placed in canoes and exposed on high platforms or tall rocks on the shore, and on the Luang-Sermata and Leti Islands (just off the coast of Timor) miniature boats filled with food and other offerings are either buried in the ground near the deceased or set adrift on the ocean to take the soul of the dead with them to the “island of the dead.” The practice of setting the dead adrift on full-sized canoes occurs in Samoa, Fiji, Niue, and the Chatham Islands (all in the Pacific) and was formerly done in Hawai‘i, Tahiti, and New Zealand, though primarily for chieftains—commoners were simply thrown into the sea, sometimes with weights. In either case, the purpose appears to have been the same: to send the soul “back” to its homeland across the sea. Whether this was a real homeland that these various peoples had migrated from, as maintained by Rosalind Moss, or perhaps just another version of the global belief in a land of the dead to the west (or both), is hard to say.

It is certainly no accident that ship burials take place predominantly among people whose culture revolves around the ocean (such as the Scandinavians), rivers (such as ancient Egyptians on the Nile), or whose “domain” comprises islands (like the people of Indonesia, Polynesia, and Oceania). But the symbolism of the ship burial makes it unlikely that the boat or canoe was merely a convenient coffin—the burial of entire ships beneath the ground is too labor-intensive for mere practicality. Rather, the ship appears to serve the same function for water dwellers as the chariot or horse does for the people of the plains and steppe—it is at once the symbol of the afterlife destination and the means to get there. Richard P. Taylor.

FURTHER READING:Davidson, H. R. Ellis. 1993. The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe. London: Routledge.
Davis v. Bandemer. 478 U.S. 109 (1986).
Edwards, I. E. S. 1961. The Pyramids of Egypt. New York: Pitman Pub. Corp.

Ellis, Hilda Roderick. 1943. The Road to Hell: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Guerber, Helene Adeline. 1992. Myths of the Norsemen from the Eddas and Sagas. New York: Dover.

Hamilton-Paterson, James and Carol Andrews. 1978. Mummies: Death and Life in Ancient Egypt. London: William Collins Sons.
Kirkby, Michael Hasloch. 1977. The Vikings. Oxford: Phaidon Press.