this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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Today I Learned

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[โ€“] ohwhatfollyisman@lemmy.world 36 points 1 week ago (1 children)

6 million bodies over 1,400 years is on average almost 4,300 bodies each year, or a little less than 12 bodies each day.

[โ€“] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 22 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Astounding! And of course, that's assuming that it has been in use at the same rate the entire time.

It could be that for 20 years, almost no one lived there so there were very few burials, but at another point there was a war or a plague and they were burying 100 people a day.

Edit: I forgot to mention that it's actually more than that now.

The cemetery saw heavy fighting during the 2004 Battle of Najaf. It is estimated that during the Iraq War, about 200 to 250 corpses were buried there daily; however, in 2010 this number had decreased to less than 100.[5] Approximately 50,000 new bodies are interred in the cemetery annually from across the globe.[14] This figure is an increase on the approximately 20,000 bodies, primarily from Iran, that used to be interred annually in the early 20th century.[15] Most Iraqi and many Iranian Shi'ites have a relative buried in the cemetery.[16]