Reverence for empty tombs of unknown soldiers is a uniquely modern nationalist practice

Evidence

No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no true precedents in earlier times. To feel the force of this modernity one has only to imagine the general reaction to the busy-body who ‘discovered’ the Unknown Soldier’s name or insisted on filling the cenotaph with some real bones. Sacrilege of a strange, contemporary kind! Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 55

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ article — the empty, anonymous tomb is the flip side of the human sacrifice: grief without a named body.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — that modernity would find it sacrilegious to identify the dead — condenses an entire theory of nationalist imagination into a single arresting image.

Related

• Tombs of unknown soldiers show nationalism’s affinity with religious imagining (similarity 0.88)