<P> A well - known case is that of the 10th - century AD ship burial of the Rus' described by Ibn Fadlan . Here, when a female slave had said she would be willing to die, her body was subsequently burned with her master on the pyre . </P> <P> Such rituals as widow sacrifice / widow burning have, presumably, prehistoric roots . Early 20th - century pioneering anthropologist James G. Frazer, for example, thought that the legendary Greek story of Capaneus, whose wife Evadne threw herself on his funeral pyre, might be a relic of an earlier custom of live widow - burning . The strangling of widows after their husbands' deaths are attested from as disparate cultures as the Natchez people in present - day US state Louisiana, to a number of Pacific Islander cultures . </P> <P> The Rajput practice of Jauhar, known from Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, was the collective suicide of widows who preferred death rather than being captured alive and dishonored by victorious Muslim soldiers in a war . According to Bose, jauhar practice grew in the 14th and 15th century with Hindu - Muslim wars of northwest India, where the Hindu women preferred death than slavery or rape they faced if captured . Sati - style jauhar custom was observed only during Hindu - Muslim wars in medieval India, but not during internecine Hindu - Hindu wars among the Rajputs . </P> <P> Arvind Sharma states that there was a distinction between jauhar and sati, because jauhar was principally motivated by a desire to avoid being captured by the invading Muslims, while sati was suicide of a devoted widow . John Hawley disagrees, and states there was a connection between jauhar and sati in terms of the insecurity and fears of the widow (s), and that these customs reinforced each other . </P>

In the medieval period in india the term sati meant