Word: sarcophagi
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Forgotten Royalty. During the next 200 years, 37 members of the royal family were laid to rest there in hermetically sealed sarcophagi, and the tombs were untouched until the Napoleonic invasion of 1808, when French troops drove out the nuns and turned the cloister into a barracks. Later, when Wellington's troops in turn drove out the French, the nuns returned to their desecrated convent to find a ghastly spectacle: tombs torn open, their occupants (whose bodies the nuns regarded as sacred) sitting up or falling out haphazardly, valuables gone. The shocked nuns hastily replaced the bodies as best...
Withered Roses. When the stone lids of the sarcophagi were slid off and the pinewood caskets opened, the assembled scientists made an astonishing discovery: 24 of the bodies were completely mummified and in an excellent state of preservation; other bodies, although skeletons, were still held together by their ligaments. How were the bodies preserved? The experts disagreed. Some attributed the mummification to the climate, others to some unknown process of embalming, probably of Moorish or perhaps even Egyptian origin. The nuns had a simpler explanation. Said Sister Blanca: "They were all saints. Their bodies could not decay...
There were other revelations, said the enthusiastic Spaniards. Bobbin lace, formerly thought to have been unknown before the 16th Century, was found in the tombs, as was cloth from China. Until the opening of the Las Huelgas sarcophagi, Spanish historians had not been absolutely sure whether Enrique I of Castile died from a blow on the head at Palencia in 1217, or from natural causes. Enrique's skull, found in the tomb, confirmed the theory of violent death; it also showed what archeologists interpreted as advanced techniques of trepanation, demonstrating a medieval knowledge of surgery hitherto unsuspected...
Dukes. This was a radical notion. "In all earlier sepulchral monuments," De Tolnay says, "the images of the dead were represented as outstretched on the sarcophagi...