Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Sakitama Ancient Burial Mounds

Sakitama Ancient Burial Mounds
The “Kofun” megalithic tombs are the Japanese equivalent of pyramids. Constructed between the 3rd and early 7th century as burial mounds for emperors and military rulers.
Currently Imperial household Agency has designated 740 “kofun” as tombs of ancient imperial family and relatives and are not open to the public, including archeologists.

Ancient Burial Mounds
The Sakitama burial mounds consist on nine mounds, where important object where excavated, like the Inariyama Sword, an iron sword with gold inlay inscriptions excavated from the Inariyama “kofun”, that is now designated as one of the national treasures of Japan

haniwa figures
Terracotta figures “Haniwa”
“Haniwa” figures were found above and in the mounds surroundings and is believed that were set to to delimit and protect the sacred area

Spanish

2 comments:

Unknown said...

My brother in-law lived right next to the Kofun in Kansai... and whilst he's a very serious (hard-working) Japanese businessman he swears that there were some strange things happening around the Kofun (especially at night).... woooooooooh!

We went to Nara but missed out on any of the Kofun ourselves. I always thought they were better seen from the air. How was it there?

islandjp said...

Yep, this kofun have the same keyhole shape as the one in kansai, but its hard to distinguish the shape from the floor level, unfortunately there is no elevated structures in the area to appreciate the distinctive shape.