Grave Robbers

"These were real sacrifices of livestock, horses and even human beings, which we know from recent excavations were still being practised on the confines of the Christian world in the tenth century. In pagan rites a great many of these offerings would go to the dead, whom we therefore have to regard as an important category of consumers in an economic system that broadened out into the supernatural... To be sure, these expropriations involved mainly luxury items, the personal treasures that every human being, no matter how poor, would keep about him. But they also drew upon tools, especially metal ones, with which contemporary society seems to have been so badly provided. These indeed were assets so tempting that certain individuals were prepared to brave the terrifying vengeance of departed souls to steal them, as the harshness of penalties against despoiling tombs goes to show. But grave-robbers were never common, and the majority of the goods offered to the dead were not put back into circulation. No form of investment could have been more unproductive than this, yet it was the only one to be widely practised by this infinitely penurious society."

Georges Duby, The Early Growth of European Economy (1969).

[Translated by Howard B. Clarke.]