Turtle-back tombs

Okay kiddo, imagine you’re playing with some sand and you make a little hill with a smooth top. You decide to bury something important in the top of your hill. Now, imagine a much bigger hill made of rocks, soil and sand that grown-ups have made. Some of these big hills have important people buried in them – this is called a tomb. But some tombs have a very special shape – they look like a turtle’s back!

Turtles have a hard, bumpy shell on their backs, right? Well, some people a long time ago thought it would be cool to build big tombs that looked like that. They put rocks on top of each other in a certain way to make the curved shape. The bumps and curves of the rocks made it look like a turtle when viewed from above.

But why would they do this? They believed that the turtle represented a long life cycle, and it was a symbol of immortality. So, they wanted important people who had died to have a resting place that was like the turtle, to show they were important and would be remembered forever.

Today, people can still see turtle-back tombs in some countries. It’s fascinating to look at them and think about the people that were buried in them a long time ago.