Author: Dan Nosowitz / Source: Atlas Obscura
Gravestone inscriptions, beyond the simple “name, date of birth, date of death” templates, are both a lasting, permanent record of a life, and also a record that the person buried under has very little control over.
They’re also a valuable and extremely under-studied corpus of linguistic data, albeit a frequently misleading and opaque one. Linguists around the world go into graveyards, dutifully record what they say, check them against historical records, and try to find out the answer to the most basic questions. Who are these people, and these communities? What was important to them?Before we get into inscriptions, I should mention that this article focuses on western Europe and North America. The traditions worldwide are just too varied to write about in one article; some of the people I talked to mentioned that entire dissertations have been written about the gravestones of a single city.
Elise Ciregna, a religious studies professor at Harvard and the president of the Association for Gravestone Studies, says that inscriptions have existed as long as people could chip letters into stone, but that the more detailed inscriptions we see today—biblical verses, poetry, descriptions of the life of the buried—date back to the 1600s. The key running theme of gravestone inscriptions is that they are for the living, and even for a more specific task: they reaffirm and reiterate membership in a group, and the beliefs that are part of the culture of that group.
This does not necessarily mean that they are particularly informative about the life of the specific deceased, but they are full of useful, sometimes subtle cues about the community the deceased belonged to, and what they valued.
Ciregna mostly studies colonial gravestones in the American northeast. There are language conventions in the 17th century that, she says, are usually associated with the Calvinist faith. They’re pretty gloomy and direct; you see a lot of stuff like “Here lyeth the body of Elisabeth the wife of William Pabodie who dyed May ye 31st 1717 and in the 94th year of her age.” But you can get some pretty decent information from that. Ciregna noted how common it was for women’s inscriptions to mention their relationship to men. “Wife of,” “consort of,” “widow of,” “daughter of.” This kind of information was, to them, the most important thing, which tells you a bit about the gender relations of the time period.
By the 19th century, you’ll see more and more elaborate inscriptions, and also a change in tone. The epitaphs become less gloomy, more celebratory. Here’s one: “She is not dead but sleepeth.” Another, written by Pearl Starr for her mother, the notorious “Bandit Queen” of the American west:
Shed not for her the bitter tear
Nor give the heart to vain regret
‘Tis but the casket that lies here—
The gem that filled it sparkles yet.
Ciregna ties that newfound optimism and cheer to the changing religion—Calvinism to various less gloomy forms of Protestantism—in the northeast. But there are other clues within the engravings; a sheaf of wheat was commonly used to mean a successful businessman. A broken tree branch or broken column means somebody was cut down too soon. A skull and crossbones, which was common at the time, didn’t mean the person was a pirate; it was a symbol that everybody dies, that death is simply a part of life. Others told of the racist views of the time; Ciregna said she saw more than once a column for a black person whose inscription carried a message…
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