An unusually large sarcophagus was fairly recently discovered in Egypt, and it contains not one but three mummies. Nobody has yet figured out the story behind this find, but there’s a really good story behind the word “sarcophagus.” In fact it’s pretty close to a horror story.
The word comes from Greek, and it’s made up of “sark” (flesh) and “phagos” (eating). That’s right, “sarcophagus” meant “flesh-eating,” sort of like an ancient zombie or something. The word has always referred to a special sort of coffin, originally stone. In fact, originally a particular kind of stone. The ancient Greeks believed that there was a limestone quarry near what they called Troy (the city from the Trojan Wars) that yielded limestone with a special quality: if you made a coffin out of the stuff and buried a body in it, the limestone would dissolve the body.
This story comes from the Roman Pliny the Elder, and some of his work has to be taken with a grain of salt. Among his other claims were that elephants that could write Greek and there were people with the heads of dogs. But there’s probably at least some truth in the limestone story. Limestone is porous, so if you did bury a body in a limestone box, it would let water in (and out), and the water would accelerate decay. The part about the one special quarry was either a local belief or Pliny just made it up; all limestone is porous no matter where it comes from. Of course, to find out the effects of limestone coffins, they had to go around digging up dead bodies, and nobody seems to focus on exactly why the Greeks (or anybody else, for that matter) would have been doing that.
“Sarcophagus” first appeared in English in 1601, when Philemon Holland translated Pliny the Elder’s History of the Worl”. Stone coffins were well known at the time, and had been for at least three or four thousand years. Remember that sarcophagus discovered mentioned in the first paragraph — the Egyptians were perfectly aware of stone coffins. The Egyptians, though, weren’t using limestone; their approach was quite the opposite because they wanted a sarcophagus that would remain sealed against everything, especially moisture.
The imagined property of that Trojan limestone was associated with “sarcophagus” from the moment it was first translated into English, and for a while the word was used to mean not just a stone coffin, but a creature or even a person that ate flesh. In 1864, Edward Bouverie Pusey, a clergyman in the Church of England, published Daniel the Prophet, Nine Lectures, which included this: “There are met with in asylums sarcophagi, individuals who have desired to eat..human flesh.” That usage of “sarcophagus” has completely disappeared by now, leaving only the “stone coffin” sense, and even the stone part isn’t really required any more, as you can see from this 2011 story about how Kim Jong-Il’s body is displayed in North Korea: “Kim Jong-Il’s bier was placed in the mausoleum yesterday where the embalmed body of founding father Kim II-sung is displayed in a glass sarcophagus.” You can even find “sarcophagus” used today to mean something just shaped like a coffin even if it’s made to contain something quite different — like this: “There is an open sarcophagus-shaped wine cooler beneath.”
It must have taken some courage to open that giant Egyptian sarcophagus. Sure, there was supposed to be a curse on it, but come on. These days a sarcophagus might contain virtually anything.
