6. Zoroastrians Preferred to Have Vultures Eat Their Corpses
Zoroastrians, followers of Iran’s ancient religion, have burial practices that might look quite bizarre to a Westerner. Rather than burying people under church floorboards, they placed corpses in so-called towers of silence to decompose away from the four elements: fire, water, earth, and air. Zoroastrian belief holds that these elements are sacred and should not ever be polluted; the disposal of a body in the ground through burial, in fire through cremation, or at sea in water would cause them to become polluted.
Instead, bodies were laid at the top of towers of silence so that scavengers could pick away at their insides and cause faster decomposition. These towers contained step-like features, similar to tiers, on the inside, upon which bodies were arranged in three rows: men on the outside, women in the middle, and children on the inside. Once the bodies were fully decomposed and only a skeleton remained, it was naturally bleached by the sun and thereby considered to be purified. Once purified, the bones could be laid to rest inside a well within the tower of silence, where they would naturally degrade into a white powder. Towers of silence are still used today among Zoroastrian populations, particularly in Iran and India.
