For over 1,500 years, the above-pictured Roman-era skeletal couple have been holding hands--or to be more precise, bones, they've been holding bones, digits, carpals, joints--defying the unassailable wrath of time and decay in tiny but no less significant ways, through the only measure we small human animals can: through symbols, through metaphor, and through sheer obduracy. To read the full story of the archeology dig, check it out here. Of course the full story is not, is never, cannot even tap into the full story. The people who buried these two thought, at the time, that it was important, for whatever symbolic or metaphysical reason, to arrange them as such, to signify to others at the time that while death may have its way with everyone at some point, while it may obliterate and decimate everything substantial in this world as we conceive of it, the honoring and placement of these two is meant to signify that there was and still is, long after they've ceased to exist and disappear into sheer nothingness, long after submitting to the influence of time, something remarkable and brave about the way they lived and they way they died, i.e. together, in union, a force of two individuals pitted against the eroding shoreline of the world, staring oblivion directly in the face, hand-in-hand, shoulder-to-shoulder. The woman, wearing a bronze ring, is set with her eyes staring at her male companion while her partner, whose head was once turned in the direction of the woman, has since rolled and lolled over to the opposite direction. But originally, they were positioned so that they were staring at each other from behind dead eyes. In these times--times of disease, plague, antiquated times where health was a complete and utter crapshoot--it wasn't uncommon for couples or family members to die at proximal, similar, or even at the exact same time. This finding occurs five years after another couple, this time 5-6,000 years old, found in Mantua, the site on which the old bard's Romeo et Juliette is set, also locked in a similar if not even more loving and intense embrace.
This burial, much, much older than the one with which this post began, was plenty more rare and intriguing, at least at the time, as double burials in the neolithic period were considered rare. The caveat here is one of those "as far as we know" sort of deals, where our knowledge on neolithic burials is based on an embarrassingly thin lot and, for all we know, double burials were as frequent as ever. Nevertheless, pace Voltaire, doubt is preferred to certainty (with which I agree) and those speciations of humans who existed 5,000 years ago couldn't possibly have known the cultivated, advanced, and sophisticated forms of love, ardor, intimacy, obsession, and romance in which we dabble now in our cosmopolitan epochs, and they couldn't have possibly with all their primal, tribal, prehistoric characteristics found any use with passionately developed relationships and sustained feeling, they couldn't have possibly felt like we feel about our loved ones and the need to symbolically concretize those feelings long after death, the emotions they felt couldn't have been as complicated and nuanced as my own (with which I virulently disagree). It's embarrassing, egocentric, and insensate to think others could not have loved as hard and as longingly as you, could not have been as afraid as you, and could not have needed the hand, the torso, the shoulder, or the body of another to pad the abrasive pain we must endure in our regular per-diem lives, even if those people happen to be from millennia ago. It is, in fact, that kind of arrogance, a denunciation of all that from which we come and a gross example of ingratitude at the wonderful examples of simple living done by those whom came before and paved such exemplary paths, that ensures our futures will be more difficult than they need to be and situates a yawning, negligent distance between us and our historical antecedents, from whom we can learn much.
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