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InterpNEWS
History of Zombies from Ancient Times to Pop Culture. Kimberly Lin
Origin of “Zombie”
The word zombie most likely derives from the West African Kimbundu word “nzambi,” the name for a snake god or any divine spirit. It later came to mean “reanimated corpse” in the voodoo tradition (Online ( Etymology Dictionary). In Haitian Creole or Haitian French, the zombie describes a monster from Haitian folklore. As per the legend, a zombie is a dead body that has been reanimated by black magic. The word first entered the English language nguage in 1819, when the poet Robert Southey wrote “History of Brazil.” Over a century later, W.B. Seabrook wrote a novel that introduced zombies to America, “The Magic Island,” which was about Haitian voodoo cults and their zombie minions. The first horro horrorr movie about zombies, “White Zombie,” came out three years later in 1932. Zombies in the Stone Age
The history of zombies may go back all the way to the Stone Age. Some scholars believe that fear of reanimated corpses may have led to the evolution of the gravestone. Originally, people would place cairns or piles of rocks over a freshly buried body to ma make ke sure it could not dig its way out. In the article, “The Surprising History Behind Gravestones,” Mica Matlack explains that the usage of gravestones was to keep the dead in their graves: In the stone age, when humans were still nomadic in nature, the dea dead d would be buried and a great stone or boulder rolled atop the grave. These stones were called gravestones and their purpose was to prevent the deceased from rising after death, a fear still prevalent in modern society. In Syria, Archaeologists found skullss from a site that they dated at 10,000 years old. Someone bashed the skulls in and completely removed them from the rest of their bodies. Apparently, this ritual was a tradition for some time in the Europe/Near East region, as archaeologists have found ot other her sites like this. Although scholars have posed many viable theories, Juan José Ibañez from the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona says that “the find may suggest that Stone Age cultures believed dead young men were a threat to the world of the living. (New New Scientist Scientist) Ancient Greek Zombies
In the 1980s, archaeologists found graves in a necropolis in Sicily, which was colonized by Greeks around 800 BC. Some of the tombs contained bodies pinned down with rocks and other heavy objects. Experts speculate that those particular sites may have belo belonged to people whom the Greeks thought were capable of rising from their graves. To prevent a revenant from getting out, the ancient Greeks would either incinerate, dismember, or restrain the individual in its grave. Dr. Carrie L. Sulosky Weaver, archaeologist archaeolo and researcher of the Passo Marinaro necropolis in Sicily explains:
