At first, each family buried their own dead in the usual ways. Soon enough, there were more bodies than places to put them. Families stuffed bodies into other people’s tombs. The local government, committed to making sure all the bodies were buried even if they had no family left to do the job, made new cemeteries on every scrap of available land. Soon there were not enough gravediggers to keep up with the enormous task. The city’s walls had towers, so that archers could stand at the top to shoot when the city was under attack. Procopius writes that the gravediggers ripped the roofs off these
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