The fratricide story of Hābīl and Kābīl (Abel and Cain) is prominent among the Semitic religions. Similar stories of fratricide take different forms in various mythical traditions, particularly a significant one being the story of Romulus and the murder of his brother, as the initial act in the foundation of the city of Rome. The Qur'anic narrative of the fratricide takes an interesting turn that is almost absent in others: the aftermath of the murder. The story continues into the bafflement felt by Kābīl about the corpse of his brother and what to do with it. According to the story, God sends a crow to the sight of Kābīl, scratching in the ground and teaching him how to bury the corpse. The story is presented to underscore the inherent fragility of the human being - internally violent, unguided, and in need of a teacher and guide.

What interests us in this article is a different kind of question to which the Quran is not indicative: what might have become of the grave of Habil? Would Kābīl have returned to his brother's grave, haunted by memories and regretting what he had done? Would he have sat there, recalling the days of shared childhood, of brotherhood, mourning in remorse? And what of their father, mother, and other siblings? How would the grave of their son/brother might have brought differences into their life? Would they leave the site for another location in search of food and shelter, if they were living a sedentary life, as it is the most probable case? If the grave mattered for their lives, does that indicate that settling down started for the purposes of preserving the memory of the bereaved and his burial? Or in other words, was it the graves that caused settlements, the foundation of the very idea of civilisation?

Cities of Graves

What does this speculative question reveal to us about human nature and its past? One might say that such hermeneutical extensions of a religious story do not offer any justified historical narrative. Nevertheless, such counterfactual thinking is not mere speculation, but enlighten us about the new archaeological excavations. The excavation of the 9000-year-old site of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey, arguably the first city in human history, showcases a peculiar characteristic. One of the key features of Çatalhöyük, as noted by the British archaeologist Ian Hodder, is the graves inside each house, as if the houses were built to preserve the memories of the ancestors. According to some archaeologists and anthropologists, the occurrence of burials beneath each house floor of the first city and their remarkable preservation mean that the graves were the prime reason in the formation of the settled life. Graves are keys to the understanding of both early settled agricultural life and the overall process that led from settled villages to urban agglomerations.

American archaeologist Lewis Mumford's book "The City in History" (1968) argues that cemeteries and shrines precede larger human settlements. It was the ceremonial concern for the dead and burials that led to larger villages and cities: "Mid the uneasy wanderings of Palaeolithic man, the dead were the first to have a permanent dwelling: a cavern, a mound marked by a cairn, a collective barrow. These were the landmarks to which the living probably returned at intervals, to commune with or placate the ancestral spirits. Though food-gathering and hunting do not encourage the permanent occupation of a single site, the dead at least claim that privilege ... The city of the dead ante- dates the city of the living. In one sense, indeed, the city of the dead is the forerunner, almost the core, of every living city. Urban life spans the historic space between the earliest burial ground for dawn man and the final cemetery, the Necropolis, in which one civilisation after another has met its end."

In 1994, German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, after excavating the burials in Göbekli Tepe, in Eastern Turkey, retrieved Mumford's neglected thesis that ritual centres preceded larger human settlements.

In his work on the Sungir archaeological site in Russia, the author argues that: "Sungir consisted of houses, hearths, storage pits, and tool production areas. The remnants of multiple elaborate burials were also found there, including those of two young people and a sixty-year-old man. Each body was decorated with pendants, bracelets, and shell necklaces, and dressed in clothing embellished with more than four thousand ivory beads; it would have taken an artisan an hour to make a single bead. The youths were buried head to head and flanked by two mammoth tusks. By devoting such inordinate amounts of time and effort to generate these elaborate burial constructions, the inhabitants of Sungir seemed to show that the symbolic supernatural world they created took priority over more mundane, here-and- now practicalities. Moreover, the grave sites indicate a belief in an afterlife; after all, why bother getting dressed up for a journey to the void?"

Based on the current scholarship, it can be argued that before there were houses, temples, or farm fields, grave became the marker. Burial required a return to a specific site, making that site sacred, remembered, and revisitable. Among mobile foragers, this created the first locations to settle, forming what some anthropologists would call "mnemonic geography." British archaeologist Julian Thomas has shown how the burials have played a crucial role in the formation of social space. According to him, burial practices in the Neolithic were not just disposal of the dead, but acts of social world-building. Monuments such as long barrows, chambered cairns, and passage graves were not merely tombs; they were landmarks that defined social space, tied communities to the land, and allowed the living to orient themselves in relation to their ancestors.

Memory and Social Space

Memories of ancestors were not only the impetus of settlement, but also enabled social hierarchies and structures. In many early societies, political authority was derived from ancestral legitimacy. Lineages buried their ancestors in visible or ritually marked places, and control over sacred burials was translated into social power. Monumental tombs in the early cities such as Ur, Abydos, or Tell Brak indicate that cities developed around mortuary cults. Burial, might have been the first architecture, the first map, the first claim to power. Consider the Pyramids in Egypt, the most gigantic architecture in ancient world. The tomb was the central building through which Pharaohs established and legitimised their political authority. This feature is recurrent in almost all early civilisations, in the Mesopotamian, Chinese, Mycenean and else.

The symbolic meaning of the graves extends to the control of violence. One key feature of civilisation organising cities and political structure- is the question of violence, the fear of violence and the need for security. Death and violence are connected in many senses. Death has been considered by many anthropologists as the most brutal violence that man is afraid of. Some scholars posit that by housing the dead inside or in the public space, along with the most central monuments such as the temple or mosque, the consciousness of and fear of death strategically kept the violence away. It could be argued that the people of the Neolithic Near East could unconsciously maintain a consistent peace by showcasing the graves, consequently the fear of the death, in the public spaces.

"Of all the sources of religion", wrote the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, "the supreme and final crisis of life-death-is of the greatest importance." An individual's death "breaks the normal course of life" and "threatens the very cohesion and solidarity" of the community; the danger arises that the crowd of the bereft will succumb to violent emotions and engage in destructive behaviour." And here," he said, "into this play of emotional forces religion steps in." By its mortuary rites and beliefs about the afterlife, it works to counteract "the centrifugal forces of fear, dismay, demoralisation" and provides "the most powerful means of reintegration of a group's shaken solidarity." In Malinowski's imagination, death, funeral, and graves were strategies to sustain social cohesion, holding the social functions together, and that, conversely, made religion an inseparable aspect of human life.

Symbolic Nature of Graves

For anthropologists today, grave sites carry an outsized importance in tracing human uniqueness the capacity to think symbolically. Symbolic thought is what makes us humans different from other animals and species. Unlike the conventional understanding of human uniqueness, which considers intelligence, today we know that many other animals possess intelligence and sometimes far better than ours. Symbolic thought is what makes us unique; the ability to let one thing (a word, image, gesture, object, or act) stand for something else that is not physically present, such as an idea, a concept, or an object. It is what allows us to create meaning, construct culture, and develop language, religion, and art. It allows us to imagine, to create, and to alter our environment in ways that have significant consequences for the planet.

Then how can we trace the history of human uniqueness as the 'symbolic animal', to use the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer's phrase? Language represents the quintessential form of symbolic thinking, where sound symbols represent complex ideas. But it cannot be studied since language does not exist in material form until writing was invented. But burials do. A grave is not just a burial, but a symbol that carries abstract ideas such as power, authority, social space, memory and afterlife. A dead man or woman is buried not just as the material function of disposing of the unwanted. On the contrary, it reflects the human eagerness to preserve and claim what the dead embodied. Grave is, thus, a material that represents a meaning, a belief and an aspiration. Thus, when we find a burial, it tells us the abstract thoughts of the people who buried their dead; the faiths they believed, the memory of the dead they wanted to preserve and the cultural meanings of the death. A grave, then, does not represent merely the housing of a dead body, but it imparts crucial meanings to the living as well.

Two months ago, while travelling to Göbekli Tepe, one of the early human settlements, the graves caught my attention. It appeared that the graves urged the early humans to settle down, building early residential spaces. The same is true for most Neolithic human settlements, such as those in Jericho (Palestine), Tell Abu Hureyra (Syria), Mehrgarh (Pakistan) and Burzahom (Kashmir). All these settlements, unlike any other animals' living spaces, are featured with the housing of the dead; the memory of the bereaved played a crucial role in shaping their lives and the lives of those who came after. The graveyard, thus, is not a location of mere burial or social memory; it represents strong symbolic meanings that shape the civilisation itself.

This article investigated the agency of the graves in the human past: what might have been the first alteration humans made to nature? According to the Qur'anic narrative, one could argue that it was the act of burial, when Qabil interred his brother Habil. To this story, I posed a speculative extension: what transformations might the site of this first grave have brought about in the lives of early humans? While it is not possible to extend the Qur'anic narrative through speculation, archaeology allows us to explore material traces. Examining the early human settlements, this paper contended that humans began settling down to preserve the memories of the dead. Clusters of graves often predate the formation of cities of the living. It is thus plausible to argue that the graves, not palaces or temples, ought to be seen as the foundational architecture of human civilisation.