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When you first step into Japan's Kyushu tombs, the first thing you notice is nothing at all. "When you enter, you're engulfed by darkness; you can smell earth and stone, and you have the sensation of being enclosed …," said Claudia Zancan, a Ph.D. candidate who examined these sixth to seventh-century tombs. "Without a torch, you can't move at all."
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But with light, the tombs reveal their painted walls, decorated with spiral circles, horses, and boats. Tucked away in their margins are stick-like people, almost hidden, and completely unassuming. For decades, the purpose of these small figures has been debated; now, Zancan's new study, published in Antiquity, argues that they were never meant to be portraits of the dead. Instead, they were anonymous stand-ins symbolizing the dead's journey.
The hierarchy of images
Kyushu is Japan's southernmost island and a natural bridge to the Korean Peninsula. Its landscape is home to over half of Japan's decorated tombs. These tombs emerged in the Late Kofun period, when elite burials shifted from sealed pits to horizontal stone chambers that could be reopened and reused for generations, the study said.
These tombs were once filled with colorful imagery, much like those in neighboring Korea, where Koguryŏ tombs painted people as larger-than-life, detailed personas looming over servants and animals alike; a visual symbol of their status and power.
But this imagery was lost in Kyushu's tombs. Zancan noticed a consistent pattern: human figures in tombs were smaller than the objects around them, often lacked faces, and never dominated the scenes they were in. And strikingly, not a single individual had an identifiable sex.
One particular tomb stood out; at Ōzuka, five horses and six riders parade around the burial's entrance. The horses are depicted in exquisite detail with large eyes, decorated harnesses, and elegantly curved backs; even their sex is depicted. The riders, by contrast, are faceless, simple stick figures. One is even four times smaller than the horse it's riding.
"When I began cataloging the iconography for each tomb, I realized that this precision was both an anomaly and, at the same time, something extraordinary," Zancan said.
The absence of human detail does not seem to have been a matter of skill; after all, the same artists made the detailed horses. To try and make sense of the patterns she saw, Zancan used a system built for Iberian rock art and applied it to the Japanese tombs, grouping people into different types.
They were all ancestors
She noted that figures clustered in three spots. On the outsides of rock-cut tombs, they stood guard with weapons at hand, facing anyone who approached. They were the only ones who had faces.
The second set stood within the entrances, marking the threshold where the world of the living met the world of the dead. In Japanese myth, this is where the god Izanagi goes looking for his deceased wife and finds her changed.
And finally, the smallest depictions appeared on the rear walls, where the body would be laid to rest and become an ancestor.
While our instinct may be to seek the individual in the tomb, looking for rank, sex, and deeds, Kyushu's tombs were not monuments to particular individuals, the study said. Rather, the images show the journey any given person would take to become an ancestor and transition into the collective world of the dead.
The human figures were just one piece of the artistic puzzle, not the focus, and Zancan wonders whether the same pattern holds for tombs elsewhere in Japan.
But her research will be a race against time, as many tombs have long fallen into disrepair. "There's a real risk of losing a great deal—if not all—of some tombs," Zancan said.
"Sadly, for some it's already too late, and within a few decades they will be lost forever."
Written for you by our author Sandee Oster,edited by Sadie Harley, and fact-checked and reviewed by Robert Egan—thisarticle is the result of careful human work. We rely on readers like you to keep independent science journalism alive.If this reporting matters to you,please consider a donation (especially monthly).
More information: Claudia Zancan, The anonymous protagonist? Agency and abstraction in Kyushu decorated tombs of the Japanese Late Kofun period, Antiquity (2026). DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2026.10377
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This story was originally published on Phys.org.
