For David Koch, the earth is his funeral pyre
Source: Maclean’s
In the early 920s AD Ahmad ibn-Fadlan, a chronicler and theologian in the employ of the Abassid Caliphate, was dispatched to Vulga Bulgaria to explain the contours of Islam to a newly converted people. In his manuscripts, ibn-Fadlan described an encounter near the Volga river with a tribe he named the “Rūs” (thought to be a Scandinavian tribe travelling along the trade route), as they conducted a funeral for a departed noble. To complete the ritual, a young enslaved woman was taken by the noble’s family and sacrificed in brutal fashion. Once the sacrifice was completed, the bodies of the slave woman and the dead noble were placed in the boat together, piled with flaming wood, and before long, “wood, girl, and master were no more than ashes and dust.”