Urna Mortuoria

 

The term Bura is related to a series of places centered in a vast territory located in the middle area of the Niger Valley, which crosses for several hundred kilometres, to the west of the Republic of the same name and extends over an area of 250 by 150 kilometers along the border with Burkina. The area of the necropolis Bura, to the southeast, if it places in a depression of one kilometer of diameter dominated by a whole series of promontories of about ten to twenty meters of height. This place, located about 150 kilometers north of Niamey was discovered casually in the year 1975 and excavations carried out over the years 1983 revealed some reliquaries, funeral urns that appeared in the necropolis.

According to information provided by UNESCO Bura comprises three types of deposits that are not easy to distinguish. A first site or excavation area formed mainly by necropolis, where funeral urns have been found intended to contain part of the bones of the deceased, mainly head bones, arrowheads and some of their belongings, also pottery vases topped with anthropomorphic heads, and even skeletons in the Asinda-Sikka area, in Karey-Tondi, where most of the objects found come from; a second site apparently destined for worship, as evidenced by the altars and tumules found, formed by the heaping of large blocks of stone, where small objects destined for religious ceremonies, feet of vessels, and small cylindrical fragments of ceramic painted and in third place zones with alignments of stones, undoubtedly vestiges of the houses, that they denote to have had a human presence. And, next to them, numerous remains of silica indicating that the arrowheads and spears were carved there.

The neck of many of these funerary vessels, a kind of phallic jars, is topped with heads of flat, ovoid faces with scarifications, all different, or by whole characters, even mounted on horses, most of them in fragments. The analyses carried out allow dating this culture that flourished northwest of Niamey between the centuries III as at XIIIFrom the remains found, it is known that they practiced the cult of the deceased. Several styles have been found within constants. Some of these pieces present ritual scarifications. Once they had fulfilled their function in funeral ceremonies they were buried, destroyed or recovered for domestic worship.

These urns were buried, within a liturgy of the cult of the dead, with the opening upwards so that they could collect the personal effects of the deceased and supplies to make the great journey. The urn was covered with an anthropomorphic head, a complete figure representing the deceased or according to the category of the character a knight over his caged mount. The phallic form of these sunken urns upside down is an allegory to the fertilization of the earth and an anthem to life as the dead, buried in the urn, returns to life thanks to his fertilizing capacity. It is the symbol of regeneration, life, death, and life in a continual becoming.

This magnificently preserved urn presents two rectangles juxtaposed in the middle of the body, as a scarification, whose meaning we do not know. The upper part carries a whole series of linear drawings. The rest of the urn is smooth.