Death Through the Ages: A Brief Overview - Ancient Times, The Classical Period, The Middle Ages, The Renaissance, The Eighteenth Century
Strange, is it not? That of the myriads who
Before us passed the door of Darkness through,
Not one returns to tell us of the road,
Which to discover we must travel too.
—Omar Khayyám
Death is the inevitable conclusion of life, a universal destiny that all living creatures share. Although all societies throughout history have realized that death is the certain fate of human beings, different cultures have responded to it in different ways. Through the ages, attitudes toward death and dying have changed and continue to change, shaped by religious beliefs and philosophical traditions. In modern times advances in medical science and technology further influence ideas about death and dying.
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Archaeologists have found that as early as the Paleolithic period (about 2.5 to 3 million years ago), humans held specific beliefs about death and dying. Tools and ornaments excavated at burial sites suggest that our earliest ancestors believed that some element of a person survived the dying experience. Ancient Hebrews (circa 1020–586 BCE), while acknowledging the existence of the soul, we…
Mythological beliefs among the ancient Greeks persisted into the classical age. The Greeks believed that after death the psyche, or vital essence of a person, lived on in the underworld. The Greek writer Homer (circa 800–700 BCE) greatly influenced classical Greek attitudes about death through his epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. Greek mythology was freely interpreted by writers after …
During the Middle Ages in Europe (circa 500–1485), death—with its accompanying agonies—was accepted as a destiny everyone shared, but it was still feared. As a defense against this phenomenon that could not be explained, medieval people confronted death together, as a community. Because medical practices in this era were crude and imprecise, the ill and dying person often endu…
Obsession with death did not diminish with the "rebirth" of Western culture during the mid-fourteenth century. The new self-awareness and emphasis on humans as the center of the universe further fueled the fear of dying. Rebelling against religion, people distanced themselves from the relatively comforting concept of forewarning and the communally shared experience of death. By the s…
The sensuousness that characterized the European Baroque Period (circa 1550–1750) was often mirrored in people's fascination with the juxtaposition of love with death. In what was called "macabre eroticism," much art and literature of the time flamboyantly portrayed necrophilia (sexual intercourse by the living with the dead), although no historian has ever confirmed su…
The beginning of the nineteenth century witnessed yet another shift in the attitude toward death and dying. This change was partly a holdover from late eighteenth-century Romanticism, and partly the result of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. New ideas ushered in by Enlightenment thinkers changed people's outlook about their families. People began to think less about their own deaths an…
Modern medicine has played a vital role in the way people die and, consequently, the manner in which the dying process of a loved one affects relatives and friends. With advancements in medical technology, the dying process has become depersonalized, as it has moved away from the familiar surroundings of home and family to the less familiar and sterile world of hospitals and strangers. Certainly, …
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