In the Atharva Veda mention is made of a coffin, but none is noticed here.

Hillebrandt (loc. cit. xl. 711) has made it probable that the eighth verse belongs to a still older ritual, according to which this verse is one for human sacrifice, which is here ignored, though the text is kept.[36] ’Just so the later ritual keeps all this text, but twists it into a crematory rite.  For in the later period only young children are buried.  Of burial there was nothing for adults but the collection of bones and ashes.  At this time too the ritual consists of three parts, cremation, collection of ashes, expiation.  How are these to be reconciled with this hymn?  Very simply.  The rite is described and verses from the hymn are injected into it without the slightest logical connection.  That is the essence of all the Brahmanic ritualism.  The later rite is as follows:  Three altars are erected, northwest, southwest, and southeast of a mound of earth.  In the fourth corner is the corpse; at whose feet, the widow.  The brother of the dead man, or an old servant, takes the widow’s hand and causes her to rise while the priest says “Raise thyself, woman, to the world of the living.”  Then follows the removal of the bow; or the breaking of it, in the case of a slave.  The body is now burned, while the priest says “These living ones are separated from the dead”; and the mourners depart without looking around, and must at once perform their ablutions of lustration.  After a time the collection of bones is made with the verse “Go thou now to Mother Earth” and “Open, O earth.”  Dust is flung on the bones with the words “Roomy and firm be the earth”; and the skull is laid on top with the verse “I make firm the earth about thee.”  In other words the original hymn is fitted to the ritual only by displacement of verses from their proper order and by a forced application of the words.  After all this comes the ceremony of expiation with the use of the verse “I set up a wall” without application of any sort.  Further ceremonies, with further senseless use of other verses, follow in course of time.  These are all explained minutely in the essay of Roth, whose clear demonstration of the modernness of the ritual, as compared with the antiquity of the hymn should be read complete.

The seventh verse (above) has a special literature of its own, since the words “let them, to begin with, mount the altar,” have been changed by the advocates of suttee, widow-burning, to mean ’to the place of fire’; which change, however, is quite recent.  The burning of widows begins rather late in India, and probably was confined at first to the pet wife of royal persons.  It was then claimed as an honor by the first wife, and eventually without real authority, and in fact against early law, became the rule and sign of a devoted wife.  The practice was abolished by the English in 1829; but, considering the widow’s present horrible existence, it is questionable whether it would not be a mercy to her and to her family to restore the right of dying and the hope of heaven, in the place of the living death and actual hell on earth in which she is entombed to-day.