PUBLICATIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER.
The Migrations of Early Culture.
Published by the University of Manchester at
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The
Migrations of Early Culture
A study of the Significance of the Geographical
Distribution of the Practice of Mummification
as Evidence of the Migrations of Peoples and
the Spread of certain Customs and Beliefs
BY
GRAFTON ELLIOT SMITH, M.A., M.D., F.R.S.,
Professor of Anatomy in the University
MANCHESTER
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
12, LIME GROVE, OXFORD ROAD
LONGMANS, GREEN & CO.
London, New York, Bombay, etc.
1915
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER PUBLICATIONS
No. CII.
PREFACE.
When these pages were crudely flung together no fate was contemplated for them other than that of publication in the proceedings of a scientific society, as an appeal to ethnologists to recognise the error of their ways and repent. They were intended merely as a mass of evidence to force scientific men to recognise and admit that in former ages knowledge and culture spread in much the same way as they are known to be diffused to-day. The only difference is that the pace of migration has become accelerated.
The re-publication in book form was suggested by the Secretary of the Manchester University Press, who thought that the matters discussed in these pages would appeal to a much wider circle of readers than those who are given to reading scientific journals.
The argument is compounded largely of extracts from the writings of recognised authorities, and the author does not agree with all the statements in the various extracts he has quoted: this mode of presenting the case has been adopted deliberately, with the object of demonstrating that the generally admitted facts are capable of a more natural and convincing explanation than that put forth ex cathedra by the majority of modern anthropologists, one in fact more in accord with all that our own experience and the facts of history teach us of the effects of the contact of peoples and the spread of knowledge.
Such a method of stating the argument necessarily involves a considerable amount of repetition of statements and phrases, which is apt to irritate the reader and offend his sense of literary style. In extenuation of this admitted defect it must be remembered that the brochure was intended as a protest against the accusation of artificiality and improbability so often launched against the explanation suggested here: the cumulative effect of corroboration was deliberately aimed at, by showing that many investigators employing the most varied kinds of data had independently arrived at identical conclusions and often expressed them in similar phrases.
Only a very small fraction of the evidence is set forth in the present work. Much of the most illuminating information has only come to the author’s knowledge since this memoir was in the press; and a vast amount of the data, especially that relating to Europe, India and China, is too intimately intertwined with the effects of other cultures to be discussed and dissociated from them in so limited a space as this.
Nor has any attempt been made to discuss the times of the journeys, the duration of the intercourse, or the details of the goings and the comings of the ancient mariners who distributed so curious an assortment of varied cargoes to the coast-lines of the whole world—literally “from China to Peru.” They exerted an influence upon the history of civilization and achieved marvels of maritime daring that must be reckoned of greater account, as they were so many ages earlier, than those of the more notorious mediæval European adventurers and buccaneers who, impelled by similar motives, raided the Spanish Main and the East Indies.
As the pages show, this book is reprinted from volume 59, part 2, of the “Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society,” session 1914-15; and I am indebted to the Council of that body for their kind permission to re-issue it in its present form.
G. Elliot Smith.
The University, Manchester, July, 1915.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
[Map 1.] A rough chart of the geographical distribution of certain customs, practices and traditions
[Map 2.] An attempt to represent roughly the areas more directly affected by the “heliolithic” culture-complex, with arrows to indicate the hypothetical routes taken in the migration of the culture-bearers who were responsible for its diffusion
Manchester Memoirs, Vol. lix. (1915), No. 10.
X. On the Significance of the Geographical Distribution of the Practice of Mummification.—A Study of the Migrations of Peoples and the Spread of certain Customs and Beliefs.
By Professor G. Elliot Smith, M.A., M.D., F.R.S.
(Read February 23rd, 1915. Received for publication April 6th, 1915.)
In entering upon the discussion of the geographical distribution of the practice of mummification I am concerned not so much with the origin and technical procedures of this remarkable custom. This aspect of the problem I have already considered in a series of memoirs ([75] to [89][1]). I have chosen mummification rather as the most peculiar, and therefore the most distinctive and obtrusive, element of a very intimately interwoven series of strange customs, which became fortuitously linked one with the other to form a definite culture-complex nearly thirty centuries ago, and spread along the coast-lines of a great part of the world, stirring into new and distinctive activity the sluggish uncultured peoples which in turn were subjected to this exotic leaven.
If one looks into the journals of anthropology and ethnology, there will be found amongst the vast collections of information relating to man’s activities a most suggestive series of facts concerning the migrations of past ages and the spread of peculiar customs and beliefs.
Map 1.—A rough chart of the geographical distribution of certain customs, practices and traditions. [None of these areas of distribution is complete. The map shows merely the data referred to in this memoir or in the literature quoted in it.]
If a map of the world is taken and one plots out ([Map I.]) the geographical distribution of such remarkable customs as the building of megalithic monuments (see for example Lane Fox’s [Pitt Rivers’] map, [20]), the worship of the sun and the serpent ([51]; [103]), the custom of piercing the ears (see Park Harrison, [29]), tattooing (see Miss Buckland, [10]), the practice of circumcision, the curious custom known as couvade, the practice of massage, the complex story of the creation, the deluge, the petrifaction of human beings, the divine origin of kings and a chosen people sprung from an incestuous union (W. J. Perry), the use of the swastika-symbol (see Wilson’s map, [105]), the practice of cranial deformation, to mention only a few of the many that might be enumerated, it will be found that in most respects the areas in which this extraordinary assortment of bizarre customs and beliefs is found coincide one with the other. In some of the series gaps occur, which probably are more often due to lack of information on our part than to real absence of the practice; in other places one or other of the elements of this complex culture-mixture has overflowed the common channel and broken into new territory. But considered in conjunction these data enable us definitely and precisely to map out the route taken by this peculiarly distinctive group of eccentricities of the human mind. If each of them is considered alone there are many breaks in the chain and many uncertainties as to the precise course: but when taken together all of these gaps are bridged. Moreover, in most areas there are traditions of culture-heroes, who brought in some or all of these customs at one and the same time and also introduced a knowledge of agriculture and weaving.
So far as I am aware no one hitherto has called attention to the fact that the practice of mummification has a geographical distribution exactly corresponding to the area occupied by the curious assortment of other practices just enumerated. Not only so, but in addition it is abundantly clear that the coincidence is not merely accidental. It is due to the fact that in most regions the people who introduced the habit of megalithic building and sun-worship (a combination for which it is convenient to use Professor Brockwell’s distinctive term “heliolithic culture”) also brought with them the practice of mummification at the same time.
The custom of embalming the dead is in fact an integral part of the “heliolithic culture,” and perhaps, as I shall endeavour to demonstrate, its most important component. For this practice and the beliefs which grew up in association with it were responsible for the development of some of the chief elements of this culture-complex, and incidentally of the bond of union with other factors not so intimately connected, in the genetic sense, with it.
Before plunging into the discussion of the evidence provided by the practice of mummification, it will be useful to consider for a moment the geographical distribution of the other components of the “heliolithic culture.” I need not say much about megalithic monuments, for I have already considered their significance elsewhere ([90] to [96]); but I should like once more specifically to call the attention of those who are obsessed by theories of the independent evolution of such monuments, and who scoff at Fergusson ([17]), to the memoirs of Lane Fox ([20]) and Meadows Taylor ([100]). The latter emphasises in a striking manner the remarkable identity of structure, not only as concerns the variety and the general conception of such monuments, but also as regards trivial and apparently unessential details. With reference to “the opinion of many,” which has “been advanced as an hypothesis, that the common instincts of humanity have suggested common methods of sepulture,” he justly remarks, “I own this kind of vague generalisation does not satisfy me, in the face of such exact points of similitude.... Such can hardly have been the result of accident, or any common human instinct” (p. 173).
But it is not merely the identity of structure and the geographical distribution (in most cases along continuous coast-lines or related islands) that proves the common origin of megalithic monuments. It is further strongly corroborated by a remarkable series of beliefs, traditions and practices, many of them quite meaningless and unintelligible to us, which are associated with such structures wherever they are found. Stories of dwarfs and giants ([13]), the belief in the indwelling of gods or great men in the stones, the use of these structures in a particular manner for certain special councils ([20], pp. 64 and 65), and the curious, and, to us, meaningless, practice of hanging rags on trees in association with such monuments ([20], pp. 63 and 64). In reference to the last of these associated practices, Lane Fox remarks, “it is impossible to believe that so singular a custom as this could have arisen independently in all these countries.”
In an important article on “Facts suggestive of prehistoric intercourse between East and West” (Journ. Anthr. Inst., Vol. 14, 1884, p. 227), Miss Buckland calls attention to a remarkable series of identities of customs and beliefs, and amongst them certain legends concerning the petrification of dance maidens associated with stone circles as far apart as Cornwall and Peru.
Taking all of these facts into consideration, it is to me altogether inconceivable how any serious enquirer who familiarises himself with the evidence can honestly refuse to admit that the case for the spread of the inspiration to erect megalithic monuments from one centre has been proved by an overwhelming mass of precise and irrefutable data. But this evidence does not stand alone. It is linked with scores of other peculiar customs and beliefs, the testimony of each of which, however imperfect and unconvincing some scholars may consider it individually, strengthens the whole case by cumulation; and when due consideration is given to the enormous complexity and artificiality of the cultural structure compounded of such fantastic elements, these are bound to compel assent to their significance, as soon as the present generation of ethnologists can learn to forget the meaningless fetish to which at present it bends the knee.
But suppose, for the sake of argument, we shut our ears to the voice of common sense, and allow ourselves to be hypnotised into the belief that some complex and highly specialised instinct (i.e. precisely the type of instinct which real psychologists—not the ethnological variety—deny to mankind) impelled groups of men scattered as far apart as Ireland, India and Peru independently the one of the other to build mausolea of the same type, to acquire similar beliefs regarding the petrifaction of human beings, and many other extraordinary things connected with such monuments, how is this “psychological explanation” going to help us to explain why the wives of the builders of these monuments, whether in Africa, Asia or America, should have their chins pricked and rubbed with charcoal, or why they should circumcise their boys, or why they should have a tradition of the deluge? Does any theory of evolution help in explaining these associations? They are clearly fortuitous associations of customs and beliefs, which have no inherent relationship one to the other. They became connected purely by chance in one definite locality, and the fact that such incongruous customs reappear in association in distant parts of the globe is proof of the most positive kind that the wanderings of peoples must have brought this peculiar combination of freakish practices from the centre where chance linked them together.
Because it was the fashion among a particular group of megalith-builders to tattoo the chins of their womenkind, the wanderers who carried abroad the one custom also took the other: but there is no genetic or inherent connection between megalith-building and chin-tattooing.
Such evidence is infinitely stronger and more convincing than that afforded by one custom considered by itself, because in the former case we are dealing with an association which is definitely and obviously due to pure chance, such as the so-called psychological method, however casuistical, is impotent to explain.
But the study of such a custom as tattooing, even when considered alone, affords evidence that ought to convince most reasonable people of the impossibility of it having independently arisen in different, widely scattered, localities. The data have been carefully collected and discussed with clear insight and common sense by Miss Buckland ([10]) in an admirable memoir, which I should like to commend to all who still hold to the meaningless dogma “of the similarity of the working of the human mind” as an explanation of the identity of customs. Tattooing is practised throughout the great “heliolithic” track. [Striking as Miss Buckland’s map of distribution is as a demonstration of this, if completed in the light of our present information, it would be even more convincing, for she has omitted Libya, which so far as we know at present may possibly have been the centre of origin of the curious practice.]
Tattooing of the chin in women is practised in localities as far apart as Egypt, India, Japan, New Guinea, New Zealand, Easter Island and North and South America.
Miss Buckland rightly draws the conclusion that “the wide distribution of this peculiar custom is of considerable significance, especially as it follows so nearly in the line” which she had “indicated in two previous papers ([8] and [9]) as suggestive of a prehistoric intercourse between the two hemispheres.... When we find in India, Japan, Egypt, New Guinea, New Zealand, Alaska, Greenland and America, the custom of tattooing carried out in precisely the same manner and for the same ends, and when in addition to this we find a similarity in other ornaments, in weapons, in games, in modes of burial, and many other customs, we think it may fairly be assumed that they all derived these customs from a common source, or that at some unknown period, some intercourse existed” (p. 326).
In the first of her memoirs ([8]) Miss Buckland calls attention to “the curious connection between early worship of the serpent and a knowledge of metals,” which is of peculiar interest in this discussion, because the Proto-Egyptians, who were serpent-worshippers (see Sethe, [74]), had a knowledge of metals at a period when, so far as our present knowledge goes, no other people had yet acquired it. Referring to the ancient Indian Indra, the Chaldean Ea and the Mexican Quetzalcoatl, among other gods, Miss Buckland remarks:—“The deities, kings and heroes who are symbolised by the serpent are commonly described as the pioneers of civilisation and the instructors of mankind in the arts of agriculture and mining.”
Further, in an interesting article on “Stimulants in Use among Savages and among the Ancients” ([9]), she tells us that “among aboriginal races in a line across the Pacific, from Formosa on the West to Peru and Bolivia on the East, a peculiar, and what would appear to civilised races a disgusting mode of preparing fermented drinks, prevails, the women being in all cases the chief manufacturers; the material employed varying according to the state of agriculture in the different localities, but the mode of preparation remaining virtually the same” ([9], p. 213).
If space permitted I should have liked to make extensive quotations from Park Harrison’s most conclusive independent demonstration of the spread of culture along the same great route, at which he arrived from the study of the geographical distribution of the peculiar custom of artificially distending the lobe of the ear ([29]). This practice was not infrequent in Egypt ([79]) in the times of the new Empire, a fact which Harrison seems to have overlooked: but he records it amongst the Greeks, Hebrews, Etruscans, Persians, in Bœotia, Zanzibar, Natal, Southern India, Ceylon, Assam, Aracan, Burma, Laos, Nicobar Islands, Nias, Borneo, China, Solomon Islands, Admiralty Islands, New Hebrides, New Caledonia, Pelew Islands, Navigators Island, Fiji, Friendly Islands, Penrhyn, Society Islands, Easter Island, Peru, Palenque, Mexico, Brazil and Paraguay. This is an excellent and remarkably complete [if he had used the data now available it might have been made even more complete] mapping out of the great “heliolithic” track.
The identity of geographical distribution is no mere fortuitous coincidence.
It is of peculiar interest that Harrison is able to demonstrate a linked association between this custom and sun-worship in most of the localities enumerated. In the figures illustrating his memoir other obvious associations can be detected intimately binding it by manifold threads into the very texture of the “heliolithic culture.” If to this we add the fact that in many localities the design tattooed on the skin was the sun, we further strengthen the woof of the closely woven fabric that is gradually taking shape.
To these forty-year-old demonstrations let me add Wilson’s interesting recent monograph on the swastika ([105]), which independently tells the same story and blazens the same great track around the world (see his map). He further calls attention to the close geographical association between the distribution of the swastika and the spindle-whorl. By attributing the introduction of weaving and the swastika into most localities where they occur by the same culture-heroes he thereby adds the swastika to the “heliolithic” outfit, for weaving already belongs to it.
To these practices one might add a large series of others of a character no less remarkable, such, for example, as circumcision, the practice of massage ([57], [67] and [11]), the curious custom known as couvade, all of which are distributed along the great “heliolithic” pathway and belong to the great culture-complex which travelled by it.
But there are several interesting bits of corroborative evidence that I cannot refrain from mentioning.
One of the most carefully-investigated bonds of cultural connection between the Eastern Mediterranean in Phœnician times and pre-Columbian America (Tehuantepec) has recently been put on record by Zelia Nuttall in her memoir on “a curious survival in Mexico of the use of the Purpura shell-fish for dyeing” ([50]). After a very thorough and critical analysis of all the facts of this truly remarkable case of transmission of an extraordinary custom, Mrs. Nuttall justly concludes that “it seems almost easier to believe that certain elements of an ancient European culture were at one time, and perhaps once only, actually transmitted by the traditional small band of ... Mediterranean seafarers, than to explain how, under totally different conditions of race and climate, the identical ideas and customs should have arisen” (pp. 383 and 384). Nor does she leave us in any doubt as to the route taken by the carriers of this practice. Found in association with it, both in the Old and the New World, was the use of conch-shell trumpets and pearls. The antiquity of these usages is proved by their representation in pre-Columbian pictures or, in the case of the pearls, the finding of actual specimens in graves.
In Phœnician Greek, and later times these shell-trumpets were extensively used in the Mediterranean: “European travellers have found them in actual use in East India, Japan and, by the Alfurs, in Ceram, the Papuans of New Guinea, as well as in the South Sea islands as far as New Zealand,” and in many places in America (p. 378). “In the Old and the New World alike, are found, in the same close association, (1) the purple industry and skill in weaving; (2) the use of pearls and conch-shell trumpets; (3) the mining, working and trafficking in copper, silver and gold; (4) the tetrarchial form of government; (5) the conception of ‘Four Elements’; (6) the cyclical form of calendar. Those scholars who assert that all of the foregoing must have been developed independently will ever be confronted by the persistent and unassailable fact that, throughout America, the aborigines unanimously disclaim all share in their production and assign their introduction to strangers of superior-culture from distant and unknown parts” (p. 383).
Many other equally definite proofs might be cited of the transmission of customs from the Old to the New World, of which the instance reported by Tylor ([102]) is the classical example[2]; but I know of no other which has been so critically studied and so fully recorded as Mrs. Nuttall’s case.
But the difficulty may be raised—as in fact invariably happens when these subjects come up for discussion—as to the means of transmission. Rivers has explained what does actually happen in the contact of peoples ([68]) and how a small group of wanderers bringing the elements of a higher culture can exert a profound and far-reaching influence upon a large uncultured population ([64] to [70]).
Lane-Fox’s [Pitt Rivers’] memoir “on Early Modes of Navigation” ([21]) not only affords in itself an admirable summary of the definite evidence for the spread of culture; but is also doubly valuable to us, because incidentally it illustrates also the actual means by which the migrations of the culture-bearers took place. The survival into modern times, upon the Hooghly and other Indian rivers, of boats provided with the fantastic steering arrangement used by the Ancient Egyptians 2000 years B.C., is in itself a proof of ancient Egyptian influence in India; and the contemporary practice of representing eyes upon the bow of the ship enables us to demonstrate a still wider extension of that influence, for in modern times that custom has been recorded as far apart as Malta, India, China, Oceania and the North-West American coast.
But there is no difficulty about the question of the transmission of such customs. Most scholars who have mastered the early history of some particular area, in many cases those who most resolutely deny even the possibility of the wider spread of culture, frankly admit—because it would stultify their own localised researches to deny it—the intercourse of the particular people in which they are interested and its neighbours. Merely by using these links, forged by the reluctant hands of hostile witnesses, it is possible to construct the whole chain needed for such migrations as I postulate (see [Map II].)
No one who reads the evidence collected by such writers as Ellis ([15]), de Quatrefages ([60]) and Percy Smith ([98])[3] can doubt the fact of the extensive prehistoric migrations throughout the Pacific Ocean along definitely known routes. Even Joyce (whose otherwise excellent summaries of the facts relating to American archæology have been emasculated by his refusal to admit the influence of the Old World upon American culture) states that migrations from India extended to Indonesia (and Madagascar) and all the islands of the Pacific; and even that “it is likely that the coast of America was reached” ([61], p. 119).[4]
There is no doubt as to the reality of the close maritime intercourse between the Persian Gulf and India from the eighth century B.C. ([13]; [14]; [51]; and [101]); and of course it is a historical fact that the Mediterranean littoral and Egypt had been in intimate connexion with Babylonia for some centuries before, and especially after, that time.
Map 2.—An attempt to represent roughly the areas more directly affected by the “heliolithic” culture-complex, with arrows to indicate the hypothetical routes taken in the migrations of the culture-bearers who were responsible for its diffusion.
In the face of this overwhelming mass of definite evidence of the reality not only of the spread of culture and its carriers, but also of the ways and the means by which it travelled, it will naturally be asked how it has come to pass that there is even the shadow of a doubt as to the migrations which distributed this “heliolithic” culture-complex so widely in the world. It cannot be explained by lack of knowledge, for most of the facts that I have enumerated are taken bodily from the anthropological journals of forty or more years ago.
The explanation is to be found, I believe, in a curious psychological process incidental to the intensive study of an intricate problem. As knowledge increased and various scholars attempted to define the means by (and the time at) which the contacts of various peoples took place, difficulties were revealed which, though really trivial, were magnified into insuperable obstacles. All of these real difficulties were created by mistaken ideas of the relative chronology of the appearance of civilisation in various centres, and especially by the failure to realise that useful arts were often lost. For example, if on a certain mainland A two practices, a and b—one of them, a, a useful practice, say the making of pottery; the other, b, a useless custom, say the preservation of the corpse—were developed, and a was at least as old, or preferably definitely older than b, it seemed altogether inconceivable to the ethnologist if an island B was influenced by the culture of the mainland A, at some time after the practices a and b were in vogue, that it might, under any conceivable circumstances, fail to preserve the useful art a, even though it might allow the utterly useless practice b to lapse. Therefore it was argued that, if the later inhabitants of B mummified their dead, but did not make pottery, this was clear evidence that they could not have come under the influence of A.
But the whole of the formidable series of obstacles raised by this kind of argument has been entirely swept away by Dr. Rivers, who has demonstrated how often it has happened that a population has completely lost some useful art which it once had, and even more often clung to some useless practice ([65]).
The remarkable feature of the present state of the discussion is that, in spite of Rivers’ complete demolition of these difficulties ([65]), most ethnologists do not seem to realise that there is now a free scope for taking a clear and common-sense view of the truth, unhindered by any obstructions. It is characteristic of the history of scientific, no less than of theological argument, that the immediate effect of the destruction of the foundations of cherished beliefs is to make their more fanatical votaries shout their creed all the louder and more dogmatically, and hurl anathemas at those who dissent.
This is the only explanation I can offer of the remarkable presidential address delivered by Fewkes to the Anthropological Society of Washington in 1912 ([18]), Keane’s incoherent recklessness[5] ([41], pp. 140, 218, 219, and 367 to 370), and the amazing criticisms which during the last four years I have had annually to meet. There is no attempt at argument, but mere dogmatic and often irrelevant assertions. The constant appeal to the meaningless phrase “the similarity of the working of the human mind”[6] ([18]), as though it were a magical incantation against logical induction, and harping on the so-called “psychological argument” ([41]), which is directly opposed to the teaching of psychology, are the only excuses one can obtain from the “orthodox” ethnologist for this obstinate refusal to face the issue. Of course it is a historical fact that the discussions of the theory of evolution inclined ethnologists during the last century the more readily to accept the laisser faire attitude, and put an end to all their difficulties by the pretence that most cultures developed independently in situ. It is all the more surprising that Huxley took some small part in encouraging this lapse into superficiality and abuse of the evolution conception, when it is recalled that, as Sir Michael Foster tells us, the then President of the Ethnological Society “made himself felt in many ways, not the least by the severity with which he repressed the pretensions of shallow persons who, taking advantage of the glamour of the Darwinian doctrine, talked nonsense in the name of anthropological science” (“Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley,” Vol. I., p. 263).
It is a singular commentary on the attitude of the “orthodox” school of ethnologists that, when pressed to accept the obvious teaching of ethnological evidence, they should desert the strong intrenchments which the difficulties of full and adequate explanation have afforded them in the past, and take refuge behind the straw barricades of imaginary psychological and biological analogies, which they have hastily constructed for their own purposes, and in flagrant defiance of all that the psychologist understands by the phrase “working of the human mind,” if perchance he is ever driven to employ this expression, or the meaning attached by the biologist to “evolution.”
It is not sufficient proof of my thesis, however, merely to expose the hollowness of the pretensions of one’s opponents, nor even to show the identity of geographical distribution and the linking up of customs to form the “heliolithic” culture-complex. Many writers have dimly realised that some such spread of culture took place, but by misunderstanding the nature of the factors that came into play or the chronology of the movements they were discussing (see especially Macmillan Brown’s ([7]) and Enoch’s ([16]) books, to mention the latest, but by no means the worst offenders), have brought discredit upon the thesis I am endeavouring to demonstrate.
Another danger has arisen out of the revulsion against Bastian’s old idea of independent evolution by his fellow-countrymen Frobenius, Graebner, Ankermann, Foy and others, with the co-operation of the Austrian philologist, Schmidt, and the Swiss ethnologist, Montandon (who has summarised the views of the new school in the first part of the new journal, Archives suisses d’Anthropologie générale, May, 1914, p. 113); for they have rushed to the other extreme, and, relying mainly upon objects of “material culture,” have put forward a method of analysis and postulated a series of migrations for which the evidence is very doubtful. Rivers ([64]) has pointed out the unreliability of such inferences when unchecked by the consideration of elements of culture which are not so easily bartered or borrowed as bows and spears. He has insisted upon the fundamental importance of the study of social organisation as supplying the most stable and trustworthy data for the analysis of a culture-complex and an index of racial admixture. The study of such a practice as mummification, the influence of which is deep-rooted in the innermost beliefs of the people who resort to it, affords data almost as reliable as Rivers’ method; for the subsequent account will make it abundantly clear that the practice of embalming leaves its impress upon the burial customs of a people long ages after other methods of disposal of their dead have been adopted.
I have been led into this digression by attempting to make it clear that the mere demonstration of the identity of geographical distribution and the linking together of a series of cultural elements by no means represents the solution of the main problem.
What has still to be elucidated is the manner and the place in which the complex fabric of the “heliolithic” culture was woven, the precise epoch in which it began to be spread abroad and the identity of its carriers, the influences to which it was subjected on the way, and the additions, subtractions and modifications which it underwent as the result.
Although I have now collected many of the data for the elucidation of these points, the limited space at my disposal compels me to defer for the present the consideration of the most interesting aspect of the whole problem, the identity of the early mariners who were the distributors of so strange a cargo. It was this aspect of the question which first led me into the controversy; but I shall be able to deal with it more conveniently when the ethnological case has been stated. The enormous bulk of the data that have accumulated compels me to omit a large mass of corroborative evidence of an ethnological nature; but no doubt there will be many opportunities in the near future for using up this reserve of ammunition.
Before setting out for the meeting of the British Association in Australia last year I submitted the following abstract of a communication ([96]) to be made to the Section of Anthropology:—
“After dealing with the evidence from the resemblances in the physical characteristics of widely separated populations—such, for instance, as certain of the ancient inhabitants of Western Asia on the one hand, and certain Polynesians on the other—suggesting far-reaching prehistoric migrations, the distribution of certain peculiarly distinctive practices, such as mummification and the building of megalithic monuments, is made use of to confirm the reality of such wanderings of peoples.
“I have already (at the Portsmouth, Dundee, and Birmingham meetings) dealt with the problem as it affects the Mediterranean littoral and Western Europe. On the present occasion I propose to direct attention mainly to the question of the spread of culture from the centres of the ancient civilisations along the Southern Asiatic coast and from there out into the Pacific. From the examination of the evidence supplied by megalithic monuments and distinctive burial customs, studied in the light of the historical information relating to the influence exerted by Arabia and India in the Far East, one can argue by analogy as to the nature of migrations in the even more remote past to explain the distribution of the earliest peoples dwelling on the shores of the Pacific.
“Practices such as mummification and megalith-building present so many peculiar and distinctive features that no hypothesis of independent evolution can seriously be entertained in explanation of their geographical distribution. They must be regarded as evidence of the diffusion of information, and the migrations of bearers of it, from somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Eastern Mediterranean, step by step out into Polynesia, and even perhaps beyond the Pacific to the American littoral.”
At that time it was my intention further to develop the arguments from megalithic monuments which I had laid before the Association at the three preceding meetings and elsewhere ([90]; [91]; [92]; [93]; and especially [94]); and endeavour to prove that the structure and the geographical distribution of these curious memorials pointed to the spread of a distinctive type of culture along the Southern Asiatic littoral, through Indonesia and Oceania to the American Continent. The geographical distribution of the practice of mummification was to have been used merely as a means of corroboration of what I then imagined to be the more complete megalithic record, and of emphasizing the fact that Egypt had played some part at least in originating these curiously linked customs.
But when I examined the mummy from Torres Straits in the Macleay Museum (University of Sydney), and studied the literature relating to the methods employed by the embalmers in that region ([1]; [19]; [25]; and [27]), I was convinced, from my knowledge of the technical details used in mummification in ancient Egypt (see especially [78]; [86] and [87]), that these Papuan mummies supplied us with the most positive demonstration of the Egyptian origin of the methods employed. Moreover, as they revealed a series of very curious procedures, such as were not invented in Egypt until the time of the New Empire, and some of them not until the XXIst Dynasty, it was evident that the cultural wave which carried the knowledge of these things to the Torres Straits could not have started on its long course from Egypt before the ninth century B.C., at the earliest.
The incision for eviscerating the body was made in the flank, right or left, or in the perineum ([19]; [25])—the two sites selected for making the embalming incision in Egypt ([78]); the flank incision was made in the precise situation (between costal margin and iliac crest) which was distinctive of XXIst and XXIInd Dynasty methods in Egypt ([86]); and the wound was stitched up in accordance with the method employed in the case of the cheaper kinds of embalming at that period ([78]). When the flank incision was not employed an opening was made in the perineum, as was done in Egypt—the second method mentioned by Herodotus—in the case of less wealthy people ([56], p. 46).
The viscera, after removal, were thrown into the sea, as, according to Porphyry and Plutarch, it was the practice in Egypt at one time ([56], pp. 57 and 58) to cast them into the Nile.
The body was painted with a mixture containing red-ochre, the scalp was painted black, and artificial eyes were inserted. These procedures were first adopted (in their entirety) in Egypt during the XXIst Dynasty, although the experiments leading up to the adoption of these methods began in the XIXth.
But most remarkable of all, the curiously inexplicable Egyptian procedure for removing the brain, which in Egypt was not attempted until the XVIIIth Dynasty—i.e., until its embalmers had had seventeen centuries experience of their remarkable craft ([78])—was also followed by the savages of the Torres Straits ([25]; [27])!
Surely it is inconceivable that such people could have originated the idea or devised the means for practising an operation so devoid of meaning and so technically difficult as this! The interest of their technique is that the Torres Straits operators followed the method originally employed in Egypt (in the case of the mummy of the Pharaoh Ahmes I. [[86], p. 16]), which is one requiring considerable skill and dexterity, and not the simpler operation through the nostrils which was devised later ([78]).
The Darnley Islanders also made a circular incision through the skin of each finger and toe, and having scraped off the epidermis from the rest of the body, they carefully peeled off these thimbles of skin, and presented them to the deceased’s widow ([25]; [27]).
This practice is peculiarly interesting as an illustration of the adoption of an ancient Egyptian custom in complete ignorance of the purpose it was intended to serve. The ancient Egyptian embalmers (and, again, those of the XXIst Dynasty) made similar circular incisions around fingers and toes, and also scraped off the rest of the epidermis: but the aim of this strange procedure was to prevent the general epidermis, as it was shed (which occurred when the body was steeped for weeks in the preservative brine bath), from carrying the finger- and toe-nails with it ([78]). A thimble of skin was left on each finger and toe to keep the nail in situ; and to make it doubly secure, it was tied on with string ([78]) or fixed with a ring of gold or a silver glove ([84]).
In the Torres Straits method of embalming the brine bath was not used; so the scraping off of the epidermis was wholly unnecessary. In addition, after following precisely the preliminary steps of this aimless proceeding, by deliberately and intentionally removing the skin-thimbles and nails they defeated the very objects which the Egyptians had in view when they invented this operation!
An elaborate technical operation such as this which serves no useful purpose and is wholly misunderstood by its practitioners cannot have been invented by them. It is another certain proof of the Egyptian origin of the practice.
There is another feature of these Papuan mummies which may or may not be explicable as the adoption of Egyptian practices put to a modified, if not a wholly different, use. Among the new methods introduced in Egypt in the XXIst Dynasty was a curious device for restoring to the mummy something of the fulness of form and outline it had lost during the process of preservation. Through various incisions (which incidentally no doubt allowed the liquid products of decomposition to escape) foreign materials were packed under the skin of the mummy ([78]; [87]). These incisions were made between the toes, sometimes at the knees, in the region of the shoulders, and sometimes in other situations ([78]). In the Papuan method of mummification “cuts were made on the knee-caps and between the fingers and toes; then holes were pierced in the cuts with an arrow so as to allow the liquids to drip from them” (Hamlyn-Harris, [27], p. 3). In one of the mummies in the Brisbane museum there seem to be incisions also in the shoulders. The situation of these openings suggests the view that the idea of making them may (and I do not wish to put it any more definitely) have been suggested by the Egyptian XXIst Dynastic practice. For, although the incisions were made, in the latter case, for the purpose of packing the limbs, incidentally they served for drainage purposes.
But it was not only the mere method of embalming, convincing and definite as it is, that establishes the derivation of the Papuan from the Egyptian procedure; but also all the other funerary practices, and the beliefs associated with them, that help to clinch the proof. The special treatment of the head, the use of masks, the making of stone idols, these and scores of other curious customs (which have been described in detail in Haddon’s and Myers’ admirable account [[25]]) might be cited.
When I called the attention of the Anthropological Section to these facts and my interpretation of them at the meeting of the British Association in Melbourne, Professor J. L. Myres opened the discussion by adopting a line of argument which, even after four years’ experience of controversies of the megalith-problem, utterly amazed me. “What more natural than that people should want to preserve their dead? Or that in doing so they should remove the more putrescible parts? Would not the flank be the natural place to choose for the purpose? Is it not a common practice for people to paint their dead with red-ochre?” It is difficult to believe that such questions were meant to be taken seriously. The claim that it is quite a natural thing on the death of a near relative for the survivors instinctively to remove his viscera, dry the corpse over a fire, scrape off his epidermis, remove his brain through a hole in the back of his neck, and then paint the corpse red is a sample of casuistry not unworthy of a mediæval theologian. Yet this is the gratuitous claim made at a scientific meeting! If Professor Myres had known anything of the history of Anatomy he would have realized that the problem of preserving the body was one of extreme difficulty which for long ages had exercised the most civilized peoples, not only in antiquity, but also in modern times. In Egypt, where the natural conditions favouring the successful issue of attempts to preserve the body were largely responsible for the possibility of such embalming, it took more than seventeen centuries of constant practice and experimentation to reach the stage and to acquire the methods exemplified in the Torres Straits mummies. In Egypt also a curious combination of natural circumstances and racial customs was responsible for the suggestion of the desirability and the possibility artificially to preserve the corpse. How did the people of the Torres Straits acquire the knowledge even of the possibility of such an attainment, not to mention the absence of any inherent suggestion of its desirability? For in the hot, damp atmosphere of such places as Darnley Island the corpse would never have been preserved by natural means, so that the suggestion which stimulated the Egyptians to embark upon their experimentation was lacking in the case of the Papuans. But even if for some mysterious reasons these people had been prompted to attempt to preserve their dead, during the experimental stage they would have had to combat these same unfavourable conditions. Is it at all probable or even possible to conceive that under such exceptionally difficult, not to say discouraging, circumstances they would have persisted for long periods in their gruesome experiments; or have attained a more rapid success than the more cultured peoples of Egypt and Europe, operating under more favourable climatic conditions, and with the help of a knowledge of chemistry and physics, were able to achieve? The suggestion is too preposterous to call for serious consideration.
But if for the moment we assume that the Darnley Islander instinctively arrived at the conclusion that it was possible to preserve the dead, that he would rather like to try it, and that by some mysterious inspiration the technical means of attaining this object was vouchsafed him, why, when the whole ventral surface of the body was temptingly inviting him to operate by the simplest and most direct means, did he restrict his choice to the two most difficult sites for his incision? We know why the Egyptian made the opening in the left flank and in other cases in the perineum; but is it likely the Papuan, once he had decided to cut the body, would have had such a respect for the preservation of the integrity of the front of the body as to impel him to choose a means of procedure which added greatly to the technical difficulty of the operation? We have the most positive evidence that the Papuan had no such design, for it was his usual procedure to cut the head off the trunk and pay little further attention to the latter. Myres’ contention will not stand a moment’s examination.
As to the use of red-ochre, which Myres rightly claimed to be so widespread, no hint was given of the possibility that it might be so extensively practised simply because the Egyptian custom had spread far and wide.
It is important to remember that the practice of painting stone statues with red-ochre (obviously to make them more life-like) was in vogue in Egypt before 3000 B.C.; and throughout the whole “heliolithic” area, wherever the conception of human beings dwelling in stones, whether carved or not, was adopted, the Egyptian practice of applying red paint also came into vogue. But it was not until more than twenty centuries later—i.e. when, for quite definite reasons in the XXIst Dynasty, the Egyptians conceived the idea of converting the mummy itself into a statue—that they introduced the procedure of painting the mummy (the actual body), simply because it was regarded as the statue ([78]).
After Professor Myres, Dr. Haddon offered two criticisms. Firstly, the incisions in the feet and knees were not suggested by Egyptian practices, but were made for the strictly utilitarian purpose of draining the fluids from the body. I have dealt with this point already (vide supra). His second objection was that there were no links between Egypt and Papua to indicate that the custom had spread. The present communication is intended to dispose of that objection by demonstrating not only the route by which, but also how, the practice reached the Torres Straits after the long journey from Egypt.
It will be noticed that this criticism leaves my main arguments from the mummies quite untouched. Moreover, the fact that originally I made use of the testimony of the mummies merely in support of evidence of other kinds (the physical characters of the peoples and the distribution of megalithic monuments) was completely ignored by my critics.
But, as I have already remarked, it is not merely the remarkable identity of so many of the peculiar features of Papuan and Egyptian embalming that affords definite evidence of the derivation of one from the other; but in addition, many of the ceremonies and practices, as well as the traditions relating to the people who introduced the custom of mummification, corroborate the fact that immigrants from the west introduced these elements of culture. In addition, they also suggest their affinities.
“A hero-cult, with masked performers and elaborate dances, spread from the mainland of New Guinea to the adjacent islands: part of this movement seems to have been associated with a funeral ritual that emphasised a life after death.... Most of the funeral ceremonies and many sacred songs admittedly came from the west” (Haddon, [25], p. 45).
“Certain culture-heroes severally established themselves on certain islands, and they or their followers introduced a new cult which considerably modified the antecedent totemism,” and taught “improved methods of cultivation and fishing” (p. 44).
“An interesting parallel to these hero-cults of Torres Straits occurred also in Fiji. The people of Viti-Levu trace their descent from [culture-heroes] who drifted across the Big Ocean and taught to the people the cult associated with the large stone enclosures” (p. 45).
In these islands the people were expert at carving stone idols and they had legends concerning certain “stones that once were men” (p. 11). It is also significant that at the bier of a near relative, boys and girls, who had arrived at the age of puberty, had their ears pierced and their skin tattooed (p. 154).
Thus Haddon himself supplies so many precise tokens of the “heliolithic” nature of the culture of the Torres Straits.
These hints of migrations and the coming of strangers bringing from the west curious practices and beliefs may seem at first sight to add little to the evidence afforded by the technique of the embalming process; but the subsequent discussion will make it plain that the association of these particular procedures with mummification serves to clinch the demonstration of the source from which that practice was derived.
It is doubly interesting to obtain all this corroborative evidence from the writings of Dr. Haddon, in view of the fact, to which I have already referred, that he vigorously protested against my contention that the embalmers of the Torres Straits acquired their art, directly or indirectly, from Egypt. For, in his graphic account of a burial ceremony at Murray Islands, his confession that, as he watched the funerary boat and the wailing women, his “mind wandered back thousands of years, and called up ancient Egypt carrying its dead in boats across the sacred Nile” has a much deeper and more real significance than he intended. The analogy which at once sprang to his mind was not merely a chance resemblance, but the expression of a definite survival amongst these simple people in the Far East of customs their remote ancestors had acquired, through many intermediaries no doubt, from the Egyptians of the ninth century B.C.
At the time when Dr. Haddon asked for the evidence for the connection between Egypt and Papua, I was aware only of the Burmese practices (vide infra) in the intervening area, and the problem of establishing the means by which the Egyptian custom actually spread seemed to be a very formidable task.
But soon after my return from Australia all the links in the cultural chain came to light. Mr. W. J. Perry, who had been engaged in analysing the complex mixture of cultures in Indonesia, kindly permitted me to read the manuscript of the book he had written upon the subject. With remarkable perspicuity he had unravelled the apparently hopeless tangle into which the social organisation of this ethnological cockpit has been involved by the mixture of peoples and the conflict of diverse beliefs and customs. His convincing demonstration of the fact that there had been an immigration into Indonesia (from the West) of a people who introduced megalithic ideas, sun-worship and phallism, and many other distinctive practices and traditions, not only gave me precisely the information I needed, but also directed my attention to the fact that the culture (for which, so he informed me, Professor Brockwell, of Montreal, had suggested the distinctive term “heliolithic”) included also the practice of mummification. In the course of continuous discussions with him during the last four months a clear view of the whole problem and the means of solving most of its difficulties emerged.
For Perry’s work in this field, no less than for my own, Rivers’ illuminating and truly epoch-making researches ([64] to [70]) have cleared the ground. Not only has he removed from the path of investigators the apparently insuperable obstacles to the demonstration of the spread of cultures by showing how useful arts can be lost ([65]); but he has analysed the social organisation of Oceania in such a way that the various waves of immigration into the Pacific can be identified and with certainty be referred back to Indonesia ([69]). Many other scholars in the past have produced evidence (for example [2]; [60]; [61] and [98]) to demonstrate that the Polynesians came from Indonesia; but Rivers analysed and defined the characteristic features of several streams of culture which flowed from Indonesia into the Pacific. Perry undertook the task of tracing these peoples through the Indonesian maze and pushing back their origins to India. In the present communication I shall attempt to sketch in broad outline the process of the gradual accumulation in Egypt and the neighbourhood of the cultural outfit of these great wanderers, and to follow them in their migrations west, south and east from the place where their curious assortment of customs and accomplishments became fortuitously associated one with the other ([Map II.]).
I cannot claim that my colleagues in this campaign against what seems to us to be the utterly mistaken precepts of modern ethnology see altogether eye to eye with me. They have been dealing exclusively with more primitive peoples amongst whom every new attainment, in arts and crafts, in beliefs and social organisation, in everything in fact that we regard as an element of civilization, has been introduced from without by more cultured races, or fashioned in the conflict between races of different traditions and ideals.
My investigations, on the contrary, have been concerned mainly with the actual invention of the elements of civilization and with the people who created practically all of its ingredients—the ideas, the implements and methods of the arts and crafts which give expression to it. Though superficially my attitude may seem to clash with theirs, in that I am attempting to explain the primary origin of some of the things, with which they are dealing only as ready-made customs and beliefs that were handed on from people to people, there is no real antagonism between us.
It is obvious that there must be a limit to the application of the borrowing-explanation; and when we are forced to consider the people who really invented things, it is necessary to frame some working hypothesis in explanation of such achievements, unless we feebly confess that it is useless to attempt such enquiries.
In previous works ([82] and [85]) I have explained why it must be something more than a mere coincidence that in Egypt, where the operation of natural forces leads to the preservation of the corpse when buried in the hot dry sand, it should have become a cardinal tenet in the beliefs of the people to strive after the preservation of the body as the essential means of continuing an existence after death. When death occurred the only difference that could be detected between the corpse and the living body was the absence of the vital spirit from the former. [For the interpretation of the Egyptians’ peculiar ideas concerning death, see Alan Gardiner’s, important article ([23]).] It was in a condition in some sense analogous to sleep; and the corpse, therefore, was placed in its “dwelling” in the soil lying in the attitude naturally assumed, by primitive people when sleeping. Its vital spirit or ka was liberated from the body, but hovered round the corpse so long as its tissues were preserved. It needed food and all the other things that ministered to the welfare and comfort of the living, not omitting the luxuries and personal adornments which helped to make life pleasant. Hence at all times graves became the objects of plunder on the part of unscrupulous contemporaries; and so incidentally the knowledge was forthcoming from time to time of the fate of the body in the grave.
The burial customs of the Proto-Egyptians, starting from those common to the whole group of the Brown Race in the Neolithic phase, first became differentiated from the rest when special importance came to be attached to the preservation of the actual tissues of the body.
It was this development, no doubt, that prompted, their more careful arrangements for the protection of the corpse, and gradually led to the aggrandisement of the tomb, the more abundant provision of food offerings and funerary equipment in general.
Even in the earliest known Pre-dynastic period the Proto-Egyptians were in the habit of loosely wrapping their dead in linen—for the art of the weaver goes back to that remote time in Egypt—and then protecting the wrapped corpse from contact with the soil by an additional wrapping of goat-skin or matting.
Then, as the tomb became larger, to accommodate the more abundant offerings, almost every conceivable device was tried to protect the body from such contact. Instead of the goat-skin or matting, in many cases the same result was obtained by lining the grave with series of sticks, with slabs of wood, with pieces of unhewn stone, or by lining the grave with mud-bricks. In other cases, again, large pottery coffins, of an oblong, elliptical, or circular form, were used. Later on, when metal implements were invented ([90]), and the skill to use them created the crafts of the carpenter and stonemason, coffins of wood or stone came into vogue. It is quite certain that the coffin and sarcophagus were Egyptian inventions. The mere fact of this extraordinary variety of means and materials employed in Egypt, when in other countries one definite method was adopted, is proof of the most positive kind that these measures for lining the grave were actually invented in Egypt. For the inventor tries experiments: the borrower imitates one definite thing. During this process of gradual evolution, which occupied the whole of the Pre- and Proto-dynastic periods, the practice of inhumation (in the strict sense of the term) changed step by step into one of burial in a tomb. In other words, instead of burial in the soil, the body came to be lodged in a carefully constructed subterranean chamber, which no longer was filled up with earth. The further stages in this process of evolution of tomb construction, the way in which the rock-cut tomb came into existence, and the gradual development of the stone superstructure and temple of offerings—all of these matters have been summarised in some detail in my article on the evolution of megalithic monuments ([94]).
What especially I want to emphasize here is that in Egypt is preserved every stage in the gradual transformation of the burial customs from simple inhumation into that associated with the fully-developed rock-cut tomb and the stone temple. There can be no question that the craft of the stonemason and the practice of building megalithic monuments originated in Egypt. In addition, I want to make it quite clear that there is the most intimate genetic relationship between the development of these megalithic practices and the origin of the art of mummification.
For in course of time the early Egyptians came to learn, no doubt again from the discoveries of their tomb-robbers, that the fate of the corpse, after remaining for some time in a roomy rock-cut tomb or stone coffin, was vastly different from that which befell the body when simply buried in the hot, dry, desiccating sand. In respect of the former they acquired the idea which the Greeks many centuries later embalmed in the word “sarcophagus” under the simple belief that the disappearance of the flesh was due to the stone in some mysterious way devouring it.[7] [Certain modern archæologists within recent years have entertained an equally child-like, though even less informed, view when they claimed the absence of any trace of the flesh in certain stone sarcophagi as evidence in favour of a fantastic belief that the Neolithic people of the Mediterranean area were addicted to the supposed practice which Italian archæologists call scarnitura.]
But by the time the discovery was made that bodies placed in more sumptuous tombs were no longer preserved as they were apt to be when buried in the sand, the idea of the necessity for the preservation of the body as the essential condition for the attainment of a future existence had become fixed in the minds of the people and established by several centuries of belief as the cardinal tenet of their faith. Thus the very measures they had taken the more surely to guard and preserve the sacred remains of their dead had led to a result the reverse of what had been intended.
The elaborate ritual that had grown up and the imposing architectural traditions were not abandoned when this discovery was made. Even in these modern enlightened days human nature does not react in that way. The cherished beliefs held by centuries of ancestors are not renounced for any discovery of science. The ethnologist has not given up his objections to the idea of the spread of culture, now that all the difficulties that militated against the acceptance of the common-sense view have been removed! Nor did the Egyptians of the Proto-dynastic period revert to the practices of their early ancestors and take to sand-burial again. They adopted the only other alternative open to a people who retained implicitly the belief in the necessity of preserving the body, i.e., they set about attempting to attain by art what nature unaided no longer secured, so long as they clung to their custom of burying in large tombs. They endeavoured artificially to preserve the bodies of their dead.
This explains what I meant to imply when I said that the megalithic idea and the incentive to mummify the dead are genetically related, the one to the other. The stone-tomb came into existence as a direct result of the importance attached to the corpse. This development defeated the very object that inspired it. The invention of the art of embalming was the logical outcome of the attempt to remedy this unexpected result.
As in the history of every similar happening elsewhere, necessity, or what these simple-minded people believed to be a necessity, was the “mother of invention.”
In the course of the following discussion it will be seen that the practice of mummification became linked up in another way with what may be called the megalithic traditions. The crudely-preserved body no longer retained any likeness to the person as his friends knew him when alive. A life-like stone statue was therefore made to represent him. Magical means (p. 42) were adopted to give life to the statue. Thus originated the belief that a stone might become the dwelling of a living person; and that a person when dead may become converted into stone. So insistent did this belief become that among more uncultured people, who borrowed Egyptian practices but were unable to make portrait statues, a rudely-shaped or even unhewn pillar of stone came to be regarded as the dwelling of the deceased.
Thus from being the mere device for the identification of the deceased the stone statue degenerated among less cultured people into an object even less like the dead man than his own crudely-made mummy. But the fundamental idea remained and became the starting point for that rich crop of petrifaction-myths and beliefs concerning men and animals living in stones.
Thus arose in Egypt, somewhere about 3000 B.C., the nucleus of the “heliolithic” culture-complex—mummification, megalithic architecture, and the making of idols, three practices most intimately and genetically linked one with the other. But it was the merest accident that the people amongst whom these customs developed, should also have been weavers of linen, workers in copper, worshippers of the sun and serpent, and practitioners of massage and circumcision.
But it was not for another fifteen centuries that the characteristic “heliolithic” culture-complex was completed by the addition of numerous other trivial customs, like ear-piercing, tattooing and the use of the swastika, none of which originated in Egypt, but happened to have become “tacked on” to that distinctive culture before its great world tour began.
The earliest unquestionable evidence ([89]) of an attempt artificially to preserve the body was found in a rock-cut tomb of the Second Dynasty, at Sakkara. It is important to note that the body was lying in a flexed position upon the left side, and was contained in a short wooden coffin, modelled like a house. The limbs were wrapped separately and large quantities of fine linen bandages had been applied around all parts of the body, so as to mould the wrapped mummy to a life-like form.
Thus in the earliest mummy—or, to be strictly accurate, in the remains which exhibit the earliest evidence of the attempt at embalming—we find exemplified the two objects that the Ancient Egyptian embalmer aimed at throughout the whole history of his craft, viz., to preserve the actual tissues of the body, as well as the form and likeness of the deceased as he was when alive.
From the first the embalmer realised the limitations of his craftsmanship, i.e., that he was unable to make the body itself life-like. Hence he strove to preserve its tissues and then to make use of its wrappings for the purpose of fashioning a model or statue of the dead man. At first this was done while the body was flexed in the traditional manner. But soon the flexed position was gradually abandoned. Perhaps this change was brought about because it was easier to model the superficial form of a wrapped body when extended; and the greater success of the results so obtained may have been sufficiently important to have outweighed the restraining influence of tradition. The change may have occurred all the more readily at this time as beds were coming into use, and the idea of placing the “sleeping” body on a bed may have helped towards the process of extension.
But whatever view is taken of the explanation of the change of the attitude of the body, it is certain that it began soon after the first attempts at mummification were made. The evidence of extended burials, referred to the First Dynasty, which were found by Flinders Petrie at Tarkhan ([54]), may seem to contradict this: but there are reasons for believing that attempts at embalming were being made even at that time ([85]). It seems to be definitely proved that this change was not due to any foreign influence ([45]). At the time that it occurred there was a very considerable alien element in the population of Egypt; but the admixture took place long before the change in the position of the body was manifested. Perhaps the presence of a large foreign element may have weakened the sway of Egyptian tradition; but the evidence seems definitely opposed to the inference that it played any active part in the change of custom. For the history of the gradual way in which the change was slowly effected is certain proof of the causal factors at work. There was no sudden adoption of the fully extended position, but a slow and very gradual straightening of the limbs—a process which it took centuries to complete. The analysis of the evidence by Mace is quite conclusive on this point ([45]).
I am strongly of the opinion that there is a causal relationship between this gradual extension of the body and the measures for the reconstruction of a life-like model of the deceased, with the help of the mummy’s wrappings. In other words, the adoption of the extended position was a direct result of the introduction of mummification.
At an early stage in the history of these changes it seems to have been realised that the likeness of the deceased which could be made of the wrapped mummy lacked the exactness and precision demanded of a portrait Perhaps also there may have been some doubt as to the durability of a statue made of linen.
A number of interesting developments occurred at about this time to overcome these defects. In one case ([85]), found at Mêdum by Flinders Petrie, the superficial bandages were saturated with a paste of resin and soda, and the same material was applied to the surface of the wrappings, which, while still in a plastic condition, was very skilfully moulded to form a life-like statue. The resinous carapace thus built up set to form a covering of stony hardness. Special care was devoted to the modelling of the head (sometimes the face only) and the genitalia, no doubt to serve as the means of identifying the individual and indicating the sex respectively.
The hair (or, perhaps, it would be more correct to say, the wig) and the moustache were painted with a dark brown or black resinous mixture, and the pupils, eyelids and eyebrows were represented by painting with a mixture of malachite powder and resinous paste. In other cases, recently described by Junker ([40]), plaster was used for the same purpose as the resinous paste in Petrie’s mummy. In two of the four instances of this practice found by Junker, only the head was modelled.
The special importance assigned to the head is one of the outstanding features of ancient Egyptian statuary. It was exemplified in another way in the tombs of the early part of the Old Kingdom, as Junker has recalled in his memoir, by the construction of stone portrait-statues of the head only, which were made life-size and placed in the burial chamber alongside the mummy. It seems to me that Junker overlooks an essential, if not the, chief, reason for the special importance assigned to the head when he attributes it to the fact that the head contained the organs of sight, smell, hearing and taste. There can be no doubt that the head was modelled because it affords the chief means of recognising an individual. This portrayal of the features enabled any one, including the deceased’s own ka, to identify the owner. Every circumstance of the making and the use of these heads bears out this interpretation, and no one has explained these facts more lucidly than Junker himself.
[Since the foregoing paragraphs have been put into print a preliminary report has come to hand from Professor Reisner, to whom I am indebted for most of my information regarding these portrait heads—Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin, Boston, April, 1915.]
At a somewhat later period in the Old Kingdom the making of these so-called “substitution-heads” was discontinued, and it became the practice to make a statue of the whole man (of woman), which was placed above-ground in the megalithic serdab within the mastaba (see [94]). But even when the complete statue was made for the serdab the head alone was the part that was modelled with any approach to realism. In other words, the importance of the head as the chief means of identification was still recognised. Moreover, this idea manifested itself throughout the whole history of Egyptian mummification, for as late as the first century of the Christian era a portrait of the deceased was placed in front of the face of the mummy.
Thus in course of time the original idea of converting the wrapped body itself into a portrait-statue of the deceased was temporarily[8] abandoned and the mummy was stowed away in the burial chamber at the bottom of a deep shaft, the better to protect it from desecration, while the portrait-statue was placed above ground, in a strong chamber (serdab), hidden in the mastaba ([94]).
A certain magical value soon came to be attached to the statue in the serdab. It provided the body in which the ka could become reincarnated, and the deceased, thus reconstituted by magical means, could pass through the small hole in the serdab to enter the chapel of offerings and enjoy the food and the society of his friends there.
Dr. Alan Gardiner has kindly given me the following note in reference to this matter: “That statues in Egypt were meant to be efficient animate substitutes for the person or creature they portrayed has not been sufficiently emphasised hitherto. Over every statue or image were performed the rites of ‘opening the mouth’—magical passes made with a kind of metal chisel in front of the mouth. Besides the up-ro ‘mouth opening,’ other words testify to the prevalence of the same idea; the word for ‘to fashion’ a statue (ms) is to all appearances identical with ms ‘to give birth,’ and the term for the sculptor was saʿnkh, ‘he who causes to live.’”
As Blackman ([5]) has pointed out, the Pyramid Texts make it clear that libations were poured out and incense burnt before the statue or the mummy with the specific object of restoring to it the moisture and the odour respectively which the body had during life.
I have already indicated how, out of the conception of the possibility of bringing to life the stone portrait-statue, a series of curious customs were developed. Among peoples on a lower cultural plane, who were less skilled than the Egyptians in stone-carving, the making of a life-like statue was beyond their powers. Sometimes they made the attempt to represent the human form; in other cases crude representations of the breasts or suggestions of the genitalia were the only signs on a stone pillar to indicate that it was meant to represent a human statue: in many cases a simple uncarved block of stone was set up. But the idea that such a pillar, whether carved or not, was the dwelling of some deceased person, seized the imagination and spread far and wide. It is seen in the Pygmalion and Galatea story, and its converse in the tragic history of Lot’s wife. It is found throughout the Mediterranean area, the whole littoral of Southern Asia, Indonesia, the Pacific Islands and America, and can be regarded as definite evidence of the influence of the cult that developed in association with the practice of mummification.
It is necessary to emphasise that the making of portrait-statues was an outcome of the practice of mummification and an integral part of the cult associated with that burial custom. Hartland falls into grave error when he writes “where other peoples set up images of the deceased, those who practised desiccation or embalmment were enabled to keep the bodies themselves” ([32], p. 418). It was precisely the people who embalmed or preserved the bodies of their dead who also made statues of them.
As these stones, according to such beliefs, could be made to hear and speak ([23]), they naturally became oracles. People were able to commune with and get advice and instruction from the kings and wise men who dwelt within these stone pillars. Thus it became the custom in many lands for meetings of special solemnity, such as those where important decisions had to be made, to be held at stone circles, where the members of the convention sat on the stones and communed with their ancestors, former rulers or wise men, who dwelt in the stones (or the grave) in the centre of the circle.
“Chardin, in his account of the stone circles he saw in Persia, mentions a tradition that they were used as places of assembly, each member of the council being seated on a stone; Homer, in his description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, speaks of the elders sitting in the place of justice upon stones in a circle; Plot, in his account of the Rollrich stones in Oxfordshire, says that Olaus Wormius, Saxo Grammaticus, Meursius, and many other early historians, concur in stating that it was the practice of the ancient Danes to elect their kings in stone circles, each member of the council being seated upon a stone; the tradition arising out of this custom, that these stones represent petrified giants, is widely spread in all countries where they occur, and Col. Forbes Leslie has shown that within the historic period, these circles were used in Scotland as places of justice” (Lane Fox, ([20]), p. 64). Is not our king crowned seated upon the Lia-fail, which is now in the coronation chair at Westminster? Such customs and beliefs are widespread also in India, Indonesia, and beyond, as W. J. Perry has pointed out. The practices still observed in the Khasia Hills in modern times clearly indicate the significance of this use of stone seats; and the custom can be found from the Canary Islands in the West ([26]) to Costa Rica in the East, encircling the whole globe (compare “Man,” May, 1915, p. 79).
I shall enter more fully into the consideration of the origin of the ideas associated with stone seats when Perry has published his important analysis of the significance of so curious a practice.
The converse of the belief in the bringing to life of stone statues—or perhaps it would be more correct to say, the complementary view that, if a stone can be converted into a living creature, the latter can also be transformed into stone—is found also wherever the parent belief is known to exist. As a rule it forms part of a complexly interwoven series of traditions concerning the creation, the deluge, the destruction of the “sons of men” by petrifaction, and the repeopling the earth by the incestuous intercourse of the “children of the gods.”
Perry, who has made a study of the geographical distribution and associations of these curiously-linked traditions, has clearly demonstrated that they form an integral part of the cultural equipment of the sun-worshipping, stone-using peoples.
In the foregoing statement I have endeavoured to indicate also their genetic connection with the ideas that sprang from the early practice of mummification in Egypt.
There are many other curious features of the early Egyptian practices which might have served as straws to indicate how the cultural current had flowed, if much more substantial proofs had not been available of the reality of the movement. The diffusion of such a distinctive object as the Egyptian head-rest, which used to be buried with mummies of the Pyramid Age, is an example. It occurs widely spread in Africa, Southern Asia, Indonesia and the Pacific.
But the use of beds as funerary biers is a much more distinctive custom. The believers in theories of the independent evolution of customs may say “is it not natural to expect that people who regarded death as a kind of sleep should have placed head-rests and beds in the graves of their dead?” But how would such ethnologists explain the use of a funerary bier on the part of people (such as many of the less cultured people who adopted this Egyptian custom) who do not themselves use beds?
The evidence afforded by the use of biers is, in fact, a most definite demonstration of the diffusion of customs. Although it is a familiar scene in ancient Egyptian pictures to find the mummy borne upon a bed—a custom which we know from Egyptian literature, no less than that of the Jews, Phœnicians, Greeks and Romans to have been actually observed—only one Egyptian cemetery, so far as I am aware—a proto-dynastic site, excavated by Flinders Petrie ([54]) at Tarkhan—has revealed corpses lying upon beds. But in a cemetery, some sixteen centuries later, excavated by Reisner in the Soudan ([62]), a similar practice was demonstrated. Garstang has recorded the observance of a similar custom further South (Meroe) at a later date.
These form useful connecting links with the region around the head-waters of the Nile, where even in modern times this practice has survived, and the mummified corpse of the king is placed upon a rough bier. I shall have occasion to point out later on that this curious practice spread from East Africa along the Asiatic littoral to Indonesia, Melanesia and Polynesia, thence to the American continent; and in most places was definitely associated with attempts at preservation of the corpse.
In many places along the whole course of the same great track, instead of a bed, a boat of some sort, usually a rough dug-out, was used. This practice also was observed in Egypt, where its symbolic purpose is clearly apparent.
Another distinctive feature of the burial customs in the same area was the idea that the grave represented the house in which the deceased was sleeping. How definitely this view was held by the proto-Egyptians is seen in their coffins, subterranean burial chambers, and the superstructures of their tombs, all three of which were originally represented as dwelling houses (see my memoir, [94]).
The Pyramid texts clearly explain the precise significance and origin of the hitherto mysterious and widespread custom of burning incense at the statue. For, as Blackman ([5]) has pointed out, the aim was by burning aromatic woods and resins thereby magically to restore to the “body” the odours of the living person.
It was therefore intimately related to the practice of mummification and genetically connected with it. It was part of the magical procedure for making the portrait-statue of the deceased (or later, in the time of the New Empire, the mummy itself) “an efficient animate substitute for the person” (Alan Gardiner).
A careful investigation of the geographical distribution of the custom of burning incense before the corpse and of the circumstances related to such a practice has convinced me that wherever it is found, even where no attempt is made to preserve the body, it can be regarded as an indication of the influence of the Egyptian custom of mummification. For apart from such an influence incense-burning is inexplicable. The attempt on the part of certain writers to explain the use of incense merely as a means of disguising the odours of putrefaction will not bear examination. It is an example of that kind of so-called psychological explanation which is opposed by all the ascertainable facts.
Beyond the borders of Egypt peoples who for a time adopted the custom of embalming and then for some reason, such as the failure to attain successful results or the adoption of conflicting beliefs or customs, allowed the practice to lapse, the simpler parts of the Egyptian funerary ritual often continued to be observed. The body was anointed with oil, perhaps packed in salt and aromatic plants, wrapped in linen or fine clothes, had incense burned before it, and was laid on a bed or special bier. All of these practices originated in Egypt and observance of any or all of them is to be regarded as a sure sign of the influence of the Egyptian custom of mummification. Among the more immediate neighbours of the Egyptians, such as the Jews, Greeks and Romans, the evidence for this is clear. Occasionally the full process of embalming was followed, even if it were only a temporary procedure preliminary to the observance of some other burial custom, such as cremation, perhaps inspired by ideas wholly foreign to those which prompted mummification. I need not enumerate instances of this curious syncretism of burial customs, numerous examples of which will be found in Reutter ([63], pp. 144-147) and in Hastings’ Dictionary ([32]), as well as in the following pages.
At the very earliest period in Egypt from which historical records have come down to us (the time of the First Dynasty, 3200 B.C., or even earlier) “the king’s favourite title was ‘Horus,’ by which he identified himself as the successor of the great god [the hawk sun-god] who had once ruled over the kingdom ... [other symbols often appeared] side by side with Buto, the serpent-goddess of the northern capital. As [the king] felt himself still as primarily king of Upper Egypt, it was not until later that he wore the serpent of the North, the sacred uraeus, upon his forehead.” (Breasted, [6], p. 38). “The sun-disc, with the outspread wings of the hawk, became the commonest symbol of their religion” (p. 54). But in the time of the Fourth Dynasty “the priests of Heliopolis now demanded that [the king, who had always been represented as the successor of the sun-god and had borne the title ‘Horus’] be the bodily son of Ré, who henceforth would appear on earth to become the father of the Pharaoh” (p. 122).
Now, when the Pharaoh thus became identified with the great sun-god Ré, his Pyramid-temple became the place of worship of the sun-god. Megalithic architecture thus became indissolubly connected with sun-worship, simply from the accident of the invention of the art of building in stone—of erecting stone tombs, which were also temples of offerings—by a people who happened to be sun-worshippers and whose ruler’s tomb became the shrine of the sun-god. I have already explained the close genetic connection between the practice of mummification and megalithic building.
The fact that the dominance of the sun-god Ré was attained in the northern capital, which was also the seat of serpent-worship, led to the association of the sun and the serpent.[9] From this purely fortuitous blending of the sun’s disc with the uraeus, often combined, especially in later times, with the wings of the Horus-hawk, a symbolism came into being which was destined to spread until it encircled the world, from Ireland to America. For an excellent example of this composite symbolism from America see Bancroft, ([3]), Vol. IV., p. 351. A more striking illustration of the completeness of the transference of a complex and wholly artificial design from Ancient Egypt to America could not be imagined. [For the full discussion of the original association of the sun and the serpent see Sethe’s important Memoir ([74]).]
The chance circumstances which led to the linking together of all these incongruous elements—mummification, megalithic architecture, the idea of the king as son of the sun, sun and serpent worship and its curious symbolism—were created in Egypt, so that, wherever these peculiar customs or traditions make their appearance elsewhere in association the one with the other, it can confidently be regarded as a sure token of Egyptian influence, exerted directly or indirectly.
When certain modern ethnologists argue that it is the most natural thing in the world for primitive peoples to worship the sun as the obvious source of warmth and fertility, and therefore such worship can have no value as an indication of the contact of peoples, on general principles one might be prepared to admit the validity of the claim. But when it is realised that sun-worship, wherever it is found, is invariably associated with part (or the whole) of a large series of curiously incongruous customs and beliefs, it is no longer possible to regard the worship of the sun as having originated independently in several centres. Why should the sun-worshipper also worship the serpent and use a winged symbol, build megalithic monuments, mummify his dead, and practise a large series of fantastic tricks to which other peoples are not addicted? There is no inherent reason why a man who worships the sun should also tattoo his face, perforate his ears, practise circumcision, and make use of massage. In fact, until the time of the New Empire, the sun-worshipping Egyptian did not practise ear-piercing and tattooing, thereby illustrating the fact that originally these practices were not part of the cult, and that their eventual association with it was purely accidental. This only serves more definitely to confirm the view that it was the fortuitous association of a curious series of customs in Egypt at the time of the New Empire which supplied the cultural outfit of the “heliolithic” wanderers for their great migration.
In accordance with Egyptian beliefs “the sun was born every morning and sailed across the sky in a celestial barque, to arrive in the west and descend as an old man tottering into the grave” (Breasted, ([6]), p. 54).
The deceased might reach the west by being borne across in the sun-god’s barque: friendly spirits, the four sons of Horus, might bring him a craft on which he might float over: but by far the majority depended upon the services of a ferryman called “Turnface” (Breasted, p. 65).
In later times (Middle Kingdom) a model boat, fully equipped, was usually put in the tomb, “in order that the deceased might have no difficulty in crossing the waters to the happy isles.” “By the pyramid of Sesostris III., in the sands of the desert, there were even buried five large Nile boats, intended to carry the king and his house across these waters” (Breasted, p. 176).
At a later period “the triumph of a Theban family brought with it the supremacy of Amon.... His essential character and individuality had already been obliterated by the solar theology of the Middle Kingdom, when he had become Amon-Re, and with some attributes borrowed from his ithyphallic neighbour, Min of Coptos, he now rose to a unique and supreme position of unprecedented splendour” ([6], p. 248). Thus there was added to this “heliolithic” complex of ideas the definitely phallic element: but one must confess that this aspect of the culture did not become obtrusive until it was planted in alien lands, where among the Phœnicians and the peoples of India the phallic aspect became more strongly emphasised. From time to time various writers have striven to demonstrate a phallic motive in almost every element of the culture now under consideration. What I want to make clear is that it was a late addition, which was relatively insignificant in the original home of the culture.
After this digression I must now return to the further consideration of the mummies themselves.
Direct examination of the mummified bodies does not, of course, afford any certain evidence of the application of oil or fat to the surface of the body. Large quantities of fatty material were often found in the mouth and the body cavity ([78]; [81] and [86]); and the surface of the body was often greasy; but, of course, the fatty materials in the skin itself might have afforded a sufficient explanation of this. Dr. Alan Gardiner, however, tells me that ancient Egyptian literature contains repeated references to the process of anointing the body with “oil of cedar,”[10] and great stress is laid upon this procedure as an essential element of the technique of embalming.[11]
Thus in the time of the decadence of the New Empire an Egyptian writer laments the loosening of Egypt’s hold on the Lebanons, because if no “oil of cedar” were obtainable it might become impossible any longer to embalm the dead.
Diodorus Siculus, writing many centuries later, says the body was “anointed with oil of cedar and other things for thirty days, and afterwards with myrrh, cinnamon, and other such like matters” (Pettigrew, [56], p. 62). Thus there can be little doubt that it was an essential part of the Ancient Egyptian technique to anoint the body with oil.
Pettigrew ([56], p. 62, and also p. 242) adduces cogent reasons in proof of the fact that the Egyptians (and in modern times the Capuchins, at Palermo) made use of heat to desiccate the body, probably in a stove.
It is quite clear, therefore, that the Ancient Egyptians realised the importance of desiccation as an essential element in the preservation of the body. Moreover, they were familiar with a number of different means of ensuring this end:—(1) by burial in dry sand; (2) by exposure to the sun’s rays; (3) by removing all the softer and more putrescible parts of the body; (4) possibly by massaging and squeezing out the juices from the body; (5) by the free use of alcohol (palm wine) and large quantities of powdered wood; and (6) by the aid of fire.
Dr. Alan Gardiner tells me that the most ancient Egyptian writings, such, for example, as the Pyramid texts, afford positive evidence that the Egyptians recognised the fact of the desiccation of the body in the process of embalming, for their scribes tell us, in the most definite manner, that the aim of the ceremony of offering libations was magically to restore to the body (as represented by the statue above ground) the fluids it had lost during embalming (Blackman, [5]).
If then the Egyptians of the Pyramid Age recognised the importance of restoring the fluids to reanimate the mummy or its statue, it is quite clear they must have appreciated the physical fact that their process of preservation was largely a matter of desiccation.
It is a point of some interest and importance to note in this connection that the essential processes of mummification—(1) salting, (2) evisceration, (3) drying, and (4) smoking (or even cooking)—are identical with those adopted for the preservation of meat, and (5) the use of honey is analogous to the means taken to preserve fruit. In fact, the term used by Herodotus for the first stage of the Egyptian process of mummification is the term used for salting fish. It would be instructive to enquire in what measure these two needs of primitive man in North-East Africa mutually influenced one another, and led to an acquisition of knowledge useful to them for the preservation both of their food and their dead relatives!
To the constituent elements of the “heliolithic” culture may now be added the practices of anointing with oil or unguents, the burning of incense and the offering of libations, all derived from the ritual of embalming.
In considering the southern extension of Egyptian influence it must be remembered that as early “as 2600 B.C. the Egyptian had already begun the exploitation of the Upper Nile and had been led in military force as far as the present Province of Dongola” ([62], p. 23). For several centuries Nubia and the Soudan were left very much to themselves. Then during the time of the Middle Kingdom Egypt once more exerted a powerful influence to the South. At the close of that period Egypt was overrun by the Hyksos.
At Kerma, near the Third Cataract, Reisner has recently unearthed a cemetery which he refers to the Hyksos Period ([62], p. 23). “The burial customs are revolting in their barbarity. On a carved bed in the middle of a big circular pit the chief personage lies on his right side with his head east. Under his head is a wooden pillow: between his legs a sword or dagger. Around the bed lie a varying number of bodies, male and female, all contracted on the right side, head east. Among them are the pots and pans, the cosmetic jars, the stools, and other objects. Over the whole burial is spread a great ox-hide. It is clear they were all buried at once. The men and women round about must have been sacrificed so that their spirits might accompany the chief to the other world.... I could not escape the belief that they had been buried alive” ([62]). These funerary practices supply a most important link in the chain which I am endeavouring to forge. I would especially call attention (1) to the fact of the sacrifice of the chief’s (? wives and) servants and (2) to the burial of the chief himself on a bed.
We know that the Egyptian practice of mummification spread south into Nubia ([39]) and the Soudan.
According to Herodotus the ancient Macrobioi preserved the bodies of their dead by drying: then they covered them with plaster, painted them to look like living men, and set them up in their houses for a year. For a fuller account of this practice and much more instructive information for comparison see Ridgeway’s “Early Age of Greece,” Vol. I., p. 483 et seq.
Numerous references in the classical writers lead us to believe that a similar custom of keeping the mummy in the house of the relatives for a longer or shorter period may have been in vogue in Egypt. Throughout the widespread area in which mummification was practised—from Africa to America—a precisely similar practice is found among many peoples.
The custom of covering the mummies with plaster[12] is an interesting survival of the practice described by Junker in Egypt (vide supra), which seems to supply the explanation of the curious measures adopted for modelling the face in Melanesia.
Even at the present day, centuries after the art of the embalmer disappeared from Egypt, mummification is being attempted by certain people dwelling in the neighbourhood of the head-waters of the Nile.
In his article in Hastings’ Dictionary ([32], p. 418) Hartland states that the practice of mummification is found “more or less throughout the west of Africa: among the Niamniam of the Upper Nile basin the bodies of chiefs, and among the Baganda the kings, are preserved, and the custom is found also among the Warundi in German East Africa (Frobenius); and in British Central Africa the corpse is rubbed with boiled maize (Werner).”
Roscoe ([72], p. 105), in his book on the Baganda, describes the process of embalming the king’s body. As in Egypt, the body was disembowelled; and the bowels were washed in beer, just as the Egyptians, according to Herodotus and Diodorus, are said to have done with palm-wine. The viscera were spread out in the sun to dry and were then returned to the body, as was done in Egypt at the time of the XXIst Dynasty. The body was then dried and washed with beer.
So far as we are aware, the Egyptians never sacrificed any human beings at their funerals, although they often placed in the serdab of the mastaba statues of the deceased’s wife, family and servants, to ensure him their presence and the comforts of a home in his new form of existence.
In the quotations from Reisner’s report, it has just been seen that he found some burials made about 1800 B.C., in which servants appear to have been sacrificed.
In the case of the Baganda, Roscoe describes the killing of the king’s wives and attendants at his funeral.
Roscoe further describes (in his book) the body of the chief as being laid on a bed or framework of plantain trees (p. 117).
At the end of five months the head was removed from the mummy and the jaw-bone was removed, cleaned, and then buried, and a large conical thatched temple was built over the jaw. [In the islands of the Torres Straits the same curious custom of rescuing the head after about six months is also found; but it was the tongue and not the jaw which received special attention ([25] and [27])].
In Egypt, where the practice of mummification was most successful, special treatment of the head was not necessary, except occasionally in Ptolemaic times ([39]), when carelessness on the part of the embalmer led to disastrous results and it became necessary to “fake” a body for attachment to the separated head. But as the Baganda were unable to make a mummy which would last, they adopted these special measures with regard to the skull. Originally special importance was attached to the head, primarily (vide supra) as a means of identifying the deceased. But when the practice of preservation spread to uncultured people, whose efforts at embalming were ineffectual, the idea was transferred to the skull, the reason for the special treatment of the head probably being forgotten. Why such peculiar honour should be devoted to the jaw can only be surmised from our knowledge of the belief that the deceased was supposed to be able to talk and communicate with the living ([21]).
In his article in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute ([72], p. 44) Roscoe give some further particulars. Four men and four women were clubbed to death at the funeral ceremony of the king.
The body was wrapped in strips of bark cloth and each finger and toe was wrapped separately.
In L’Anthropologie (T. 21, 1910, p. 53) Poutrin says of the burial customs of the M’Baka people of French Congo “le corps, préalablement embaumé avec des herbes sécher et de la cendre est couché sur un lit.”
Weeks ([104], pp. 450 and 451) gives an account of the burial customs of the Bangala of the Upper Congo. “They took out the entrails and buried them, placed the corpse on a frame, lit a fire under it, and thoroughly smoke-dried it.” “The dried body was tied in a mat, put in a roughly made hut.” “Coffins were often made out of old canoes.” “Poorer folk were rubbed with oil and red camwood powder, bound round with cloth and tied up in a mat.”
One of the most remarkable instances of the survival of burial practices strangely reminiscent of those of ancient Egypt has been described by Mr. Amaury Talbot ([99]). Among the Ibibio people living in the extreme south-west corner of Nigeria, bordering on the Gulf of Guinea, he found that both the Ibibios and a neighbouring tribe, the Ibos, had burial rites which “recall those of ancient Egypt.” For instance, “among Ibos embalming is still practised.” Two methods of mummification, in which the evisceration of the corpse takes place, are practised.
For the grave “a wide-mouthed pit” was dug and “from the bottom of this an underground passage, sometimes thirty feet long, led into a square chamber with no other outlet. In this the dead body was laid, and, after the bearers had returned to the light of day, stones were set over the pit mouth and earth strewn over all.” Further, in the case of the Ibibios, “in some prominent spot near the town arbour-like erections are raised as memorials, and furnished with the favourite property of the dead man. At the back or side of these is placed what we always called a little ‘Ka’ house, with window or door, into the central chamber, provided, as in ancient Egypt, for the abode of the dead man’s Ka or double. Figures of the Chief, with favourite wives and slaves, may also be seen—counterparts of the Ushabtiu.”
From the photographs illustrating Mr. Talbot’s article many other remarkable points of resemblance to ancient Egyptian practices are to be noted.
The snake and the sun constitute the obtrusive features of the crude design painted in the funeral shrine. The fact that so many features of the Egyptian burial practices should have been retained (and in association with many other elements of the “heliolithic” culture) in this distant spot, on the other side of the continent, raises the question whether or not its proximity to the Atlantic littoral may not be a contributory factor in the survival. They may have been spared by the remoteness of the retreat and the relative freedom from disturbance, to which nearer localities in the heart of the continent may have been subjected. But, on the other hand, there is the possibility that the spread of culture around the coast may have brought these Egyptian practices to Old Calabar. In the next few pages it will be seen that such a possibility is not so unlikely as it may appear at first sight.
But the fact that it was the custom among the Ibibio to bury the wives of the king with his mummy suggests a truly African, as distinct from purely Egyptian, influence, and makes it probable that the custom spread across the continent. This view is further supported by the traditions of the people themselves, no less than by the physical features of their crania (see Report British Association, 1912, p. 613).
As the people of the Ivory Coast (vide infra) practice a method of embalming which is clearly Egyptian and untainted by these African influences, it is clear that the two streams of Nilotic culture, one across the continent viâ Kordofan and Lake Chad and the other around the coasts of the Mediterranean and Atlantic, after reaching the West Coast must have met somewhere between the mouth of the Niger and the Ivory Coast.
[Since writing the above paragraphs, in which inferences as to racial movements across Africa were based solely upon the distribution and methods of mummification, I have become acquainted with remarkable confirmation of these views from two different sources. Frobenius, in his book “The Voice of Africa,” 1913 (see especially the map on p. 449, Vol. II.), makes an identical delimitation of the two spheres of influence from the east, trans- and circum-African (i.e., viâ the Mediterranean) respectively.
Sir Harry Johnston (“A Survey of the Ethnography of Africa,” Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst., 1913, p. 384) supplies even more precise and definite confirmation of the route taken by the Egyptian culture-migration across Kordofan to Lake Chad, thence to the Niger basin and “all parts of West Africa.”
He adds further (pp. 412 and 413):—“Stone worship and the use of stone in building and sepulture extend from North Africa southwards across the desert region to Senegambia (sporadically) and the northern parts of the Sudan, and to Somaliland. The superstitious use of stone in connection with religion, burial and after-death memorial, reappears again in Yoruba, in the North-West Cameroons and adjoining Calabar region (Ekir-land).”]
For the purpose of embalming the bodies of their dead “the Baoule of the Ivory Coast remove the intestines, wash them with palm wine or European alcohol, introduce alcohol and salt into the body cavity, afterwards replacing the intestines and stitching up the opening.” (Clozel and Villamur, quoted by Hartland, ([32]), p. 418.)
Scattered around the western shores of the African continent there are numerous ethnological features to suggest that it has been subjected to the influence of the megalithic culture spreading from the Mediterranean. But there is no spot in which this influence and its Egyptian derivation is more definitely and surely demonstrated than in the Canary Islands.
For the art of embalming was practised there in the truly Egyptian fashion; and it became a matter of some interest to discover whether or not the Nigerian customs were influenced in any way by the Guanche practices.
There can be little doubt that the practices on the Ivory Coast, to which reference has just been made, were either inspired by the Guanches or by the same influence which started embalming in the Canary Islands.
The information we possess in reference to the Canary Islands was collected by Bory de Saint Vincent (“Les Îles Fortunées,” 1811, p. 54) and has been summarized by many writers, especially Pettigrew, Haigh and Reutter.
From Miss Haigh’s account ([26], p. 112) I make the following extracts:—
“When any person died they preserved the body in this manner; first, they carried it to a cave and stretched it on a flat stone, opened it and took out the bowels; then twice a day they washed the porous parts of the body with salt and water; afterwards they anointed it with a composition of sheep’s butter mixed with a powder made from the dust of decayed pine trees, and a sort of brushwood called “Bressos,” together with powdered pumice stone, and then dried it in the sun for fifteen days....
“When the body was thoroughly dried, and had become very light, it was wrapped in sheep skins or goat skins, girded tight with long leather thongs, and carried to one of the sepulchral grottoes, usually situated in the most inaccessible parts of the island.
“The bodies were either upright against the sides of the cavern, or side by side upon a kind of scaffolding made of branches of juniper, mocan, or other incorruptible wood.
“The knives for opening the body were made of sharp pieces of obsidian.
“In the grotto of Tacoronté was the mummy of an old woman dried in the sitting posture like that of the Peruvian corpses.”
The mummies were wrapped in reddish goat skin, just as the shroud of Egyptian mummies was often of red linen.
From the same article, in which, as the above quotation states, the body was placed upon a stone for the purpose of the embalmer’s operations, I should like to call attention to the following statement of a curious custom which is found in the most diverse parts of the world, in most cases in association with the practice of mummification.
Tradition says that at his installation the new Mencey (or chief of a principality) is required to seat himself on a stone, cut in the form of a chair and covered with skins: one of his nearest relatives presents him with a sacred relic—the bone of the right arm of the chief of the reigning family (p. 107). I have already (supra) indicated the significance of this characteristic feature of the “heliolithic” culture.
Reutter ([63]) gives some additional information in reference to Guanche embalming. The incision was made in the lower part of the abdomen (in the flank). After the body had been treated with a saturated salt solution, the viscera were returned to the body. The orifices of the nose, mouth and eyes were “stopped with bitumen as was the Egyptian practice.” After packing the cavities of the body with aromatic plants the body was exposed either to the sun, or in a stove, to desiccate it.
During this operation, other embalmers repeatedly smeared the body with a kind of ointment, prepared by mixing certain fats, with powdered odoriferous plants, resin, pumice stone and absorbent substances (p. 139).
As in Egypt, according to Herodotus and Diodorus,—and my own observations have verified their account, at any rate so far as its chief feature is concerned—there was another method of embalming in which no abdominal incision was made, unless it was per rectum.
When this cheaper method was employed the corpse was dried in the sun and some corrosive liquid, called “cedria” in the case of the Egyptians, but in that of the Guanches supposed by Dr. Parcelly to be Euphorbia juice, was injected for the purpose of dissolving the intestines and thus facilitating the process of preservation by removing the chief seat of decomposition.
[It is important to recall the fact, to which I have already referred in this account, that in the islands of the Torres Straits also the same two alternative methods of evisceration, either through a flank incision or per rectum were in use.]
Most mummies, wrapped in goat skins, were buried in caves. But those of kings and princes were placed in coffins cut out of a solid log, and buried (head north) in the open, a monument of pyramidal form being erected above them.
It is important to bear in mind that both in East and West Africa and in the Canary Islands the technical procedures in the practice of mummification are those which were not adopted in Egypt until the time of the XXIst Dynasty. I have already called attention to this fact in my references to the Torres Straits mummies (vide supra), and to the inference that these extensive migrations of Egyptian influence could not have begun before the ninth century B.C.
(For more complete bibliographical references, see Pettigrew, ([56]), p. 233.)
The large series of identical procedures makes it absolutely certain that the method of embalming practised in the Canary Islands was derived from Egypt, and not earlier than 900 B.C.
Reutter states ([63], p. 137) that “the Carthaginians, as the result of long-continued commercial intercourse with Egypt, assimilated its civilization even to the extent of worshipping certain of the Egyptian gods and of accepting many of her ideas and beliefs as to a future life.”
“These reasons impelled them to practise the art of embalming and to represent the features of the dead upon their sarcophagi to enable the soul to refind its double.”
“Their burial chambers, for the most part not built up, but carved out of the rock, communicated with the exterior by a staircase. Above them were built mastabas or monuments to be utilised, as amongst the Egyptians, as offering-places” (p. 138).
“Even the inscriptions in the mortuary chambers were written in hieroglyphics, and their sarcophagi contained scarabs inscribed with invocations to the Egyptian gods, Ptah, Bes and Ra, &c.”
This reference is sufficient to indicate how the later (certainly not earlier than 900 B.C. and probably some centuries later) Egyptian practices spread around the Mediterranean.
I do not propose (in the present communication) to discuss the influence and the manner of spread of the practice of mummification in Europe. Reutter gives certain information in reference to this subject. It will suffice to say that there is no evidence to show that mummification was widely adopted until comparatively late times (New Empire and later) in the Mediterranean area, although certain effects of the Egyptian practice, such for example as “extended burial,” spread abroad many centuries earlier, appearing in most regions during the Eneolithic phase.
The procedures revealed in the Canary Islands bear no trace of the influence of Negro Africa to which I have called attention (supra) in the Soudan, Uganda, the Congo and the Niger. The details of the technique suggests the method employed in the XXIst Dynasty; and other features seem to point to the conclusion that the practice must have reached the Canary Islands from the Western Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar, not improbably through Phœnician channels.
[For a full critical discussion of all the literature relating to Egyptian influence in West Africa see Dahse, “Ein zweites Goldland Salomos,” Zeitsch. f. Ethn., 1911, p. 1. The mass of evidence collected in this memoir is entirely corroborative of the conclusions at which I have arrived from the study of mummification.]
With reference to Babylonia Langdon ([32]) states:—“Traces of embalming have not been found, but Herodotus says that the Babylonians preserved in honey. But a text has been discovered which mentions embalming with cedar oil (cited by Meissner, Wiener Zeitsch. f. Kunde des Morgenlandes, xii, 1898, p. 61). At any rate embalming is not characteristic of Babylonian burials and the custom may be due to Egyptian influence.”
There can, I think, be no doubt whatever as to the Egyptian origin of these instances of embalming in Babylonia. The mere fact of its sporadic occurrence in a country of which it is not characteristic clearly points to this conclusion, which is confirmed by the emphasis laid upon the use of oil of cedar—a definite indication of the Egyptian practice. The reference of Herodotus to the use of honey in Babylonia is also of peculiar interest, for it provides us with a connecting link between the Mediterranean area and India and Burma.
The extensive use of honey for the preservation of the body among the Greeks, Romans, Jews, and possibly also the Egyptians, is indicated by the frequent references to the practice in the classics, which have been summarised, with numerous quotations, by Pettigrew ([56], pp. 85-87).
The employment of honey suggests the spread of Egyptian influence to Babylonia viâ the Mediterranean and Syria, seeing that, so far as is known, such a method was used only on the Mediterranean littoral of Egypt, in Phœnicia and the Ægean.
Concerning the use of wax in the process of embalming, of which ancient Egyptian mummies, especially of the new Empire ([86]), afford numerous instances, Pettigrew (p. 87) remarks:—“The body of King Agesilaus was enveloped in wax and thus conveyed to Lacedæmon. This is confirmed by Cornelius Nepos, and also by Plutarch, who ascribe the adoption of wax to the want of honey for this purpose. Cicero reports the use of it by the Persians.”
In his account of the methods employed by the Scythians (living north of Thrace) for mummifying their kings, Herodotus tells us that the body was coated with wax, the abdomen opened, cleaned out and then filled with pounded stems, with perfumes, aniseed and wild celery seed and then stitched up. The important bearing of the practices described in the Black Sea littoral upon Indian and Burmese customs (vide infra) I must reserve for discussion at some later time.
It will be seen in the subsequent account that honey was in use for embalming in modern times in Burma.
In an article on Persian burial customs ([32], p. 505) Dr. Louis H. Gray says: “Unfortunately our sole information on this subject [Ancient Persian rites] must thus far be gleaned from the meagre statements of the classics. If we may judge from the tombs of the Achæmenians, their bodies were not exposed as Zoroastrianism dictated; but it is by no means impossible that they were coated with wax, or even, as Jackson[13] also suggests (“Persia, Past and Present,” p. 235), ‘perhaps embalmed after the manner of the Egyptians.’”
In later times the Persians seem to have been influenced by the practices in vogue in Early Christian times in Egypt, before the coming of Islâm. Thus in Moll’s History ([46], p. 545), the statement is made in reference to the Moslem burial customs in Persia; “if it [the corpse] is to be buried a great way off, it is put into a wooden coffin filled up with salt, lime and perfumes to preserve it; for they embalm their dead bodies no otherwise in Persia, nor do they ever embowel them, as with us.” That this is merely a degraded form of the Egyptian embalmer’s practice is shown by the fact that it is identical with the method used by the Copts in Egypt until the seventh, or perhaps even as late as the ninth century A.D., and in their case we know that it is a development from, or degradation of, the ancient practice.
This method seems also to have spread to India: for Mr. Crooke tells me that even at the present day several of the ascetic orders bury their dead in salt.
In Moll’s book the following curious statement also occurs, p. 474:—“Mummy, which is human flesh embalm’d that has lain in dry earth several ages, and become hard as horn, is frequently found in the sands of Chorassan, or the ancient Bactria, and some of the bodies are so little alter’d, ’tis said, that the features may be plainly distinguish’d.”
In studying the easterly migration of the custom of mummification it is quite certain that the main stream of the wanderers who carried the knowledge to the east must have set out from the East African coast, because a whole series of modifications of the Egyptian method which were introduced in the Soudan and further south are also found in Indonesia, Polynesia and America. A curious feature of Egyptian embalming in the XIXth and especially the XXIst Dynasties ([78] and [86]) was the use of butter for packing the mummy. Among the Baganda, according to Roscoe, special importance came to be attached to this practice. Mr. Crooke has given me references from Indian literature (see especially Journ. Anthr. Soc. Bombay, Vol. I., 1886, p. 39) to bodies being “skilfully embalmed with heavenly drugs and ghee” [clarified butter].
The ancient Aryans used to disembowel the corpse and fill the cavity with ghee (Mitra, “Indo-Aryans,” London, 1881, Vol. I., p. 135), as was done in the case of the mummy of the famous Pharaoh Meneptah ([86]).
The peculiarly Mediterranean modifications also spread east and it seems most likely that in this case the route from Syria down the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf was taken.
[Since this has been in print further investigation has elucidated with remarkable precision the ways and means of, as well as the impelling motives for, the great migration to the East. This calls for some modification of the foregoing (as well as many of the subsequent) paragraphs. It has been seen that the great wave of culture carried east and west from Egypt the distinctive method of embalming that came into full use somewhere about 900 B.C.; hence it is probable the eighth century B.C. witnessed the commencement of the series of expeditions, which probably extended over many centuries. It can be no mere chance that the period indicated coincides with the time when the Phœnicians were embarking upon maritime enterprises on a much greater and more daring scale than the world had known until then, in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, in the Red Sea and beyond. In the course of their trading expeditions to the Bab-el-Mandeb these Levantine mariners brought to that region a fuller knowledge of the customs and practices of Egypt and of the whole Phœnician world in the Mediterranean. It was probably in this way and not by the Euphrates route that the culture of the Levant reached the Persian Gulf and India.
The easterly migration of culture which set out from the region of the Bab-el-Mandeb conveyed not only the Ethiopian modifications of Egyptian practices, but also the Egyptian and Mediterranean contributions which the Phœnicians had brought to Ethiopia. On some future occasion I shall discuss the important part played by the Phœnicians in these expeditions to the Far East.]
It is unfortunate that practically nothing is known of the practice of mummification on the Southern coast of Arabia. Bent tells us that the Southern Arabians preserved their dead. Moreover, as the Egyptians obtained from Sabæa much of the materials used for embalming, it is not unlikely that the Arabs may also have learned the use of these preservatives.
In support of this suggestion I might refer to the evidence from Madagascar. It is well known that this island was colonised in ancient times by people from the neighbourhood of the Bab-el-Mandeb, probably Galla-people from the Somali coast as well as Sabæans from the Arabian coast, possibly ferried along the African shore by expert mariners from Oman and the Persian Gulf, either the Phœnicians themselves or their kinsmen. A more numerous element came from the distant Malay Archipelago. Either or both of these racial elements may have introduced the practice of mummification into Madagascar.
In his “History on Madagascar” (1838, Vol. I, p, 243) Ellis says there “was no regular embalming,” but the “body was preserved for a time by the use of large quantities of gum benzoin, or other powdered aromatic gums.” This method is strongly suggestive of South Arabian influence.
Hartland says “the Betsileo [and other Madagascar tribes] dry the corpse in the air, the fluids being assisted to escape” ([32], p. 418).
Grandidier, however, gives us more precise information on this subject (“La Mort et les Funerailles à Madagascar,” L’Anthropologie, T. 23, 1912, p. 329). According to him the Betsileo open the body of the dead and remove all the viscera, which they throw into a lake: among the Merina the entrails are removed only in the cases of their sovereigns or members of the royal family.
The practice of mummification amongst the Betsileo is of peculiar interest because the embalmed bodies are buried in stone tombs obviously inspired by Egyptian models. The subterranean megalithic burial chamber in association with an oblong mastaba-like superstructure at once recalls the distinctive features of the Egyptian tomb. But there is a curious feature suggestive of Babylonian influence, namely, the situation of the temple of offerings on the top of the mastaba. In some respects this type of grave recalls those found in the Bahrein Islands by Bent ([4]), which he compares with the Early Phœnician tombs at Arvad ([55]). There can be no question that the latter were copied from Theban tombs of the New Empire (vide supra).
This seems to point quite clearly to the fact that the Betsileo burial practices were inspired by Egyptian models, possibly modified by Southern Arabian influences.
In Hall’s “Great Zimbabwe” (1905, pp. 94 and 95), it is stated that “the Baduma, who live in Gutu’s country, and also the Barotse, still embalm, or, rather, dry the bodies of their chiefs, and also the dead of certain families, though generally the bodies are buried lengthways on their right side, facing the sun. The body is placed in the hut on a bier made of poles near a large fire, and continually turned until the body is dry. Then it is wrapped up in a blanket and hung from the roof” [as is done in the Doré Bay region in New Guinea].
There has been considerable controversy as to the origin of the vast stone monuments in this region. The writer from whom I have just quoted, with many others, believed the Zimbabwe ruins to be the work of Early Sabæan or Phœnician immigrants, who were attracted by the Rhodesian gold-fields. Randall-MacIver believed that he found Chinese and Persian relics (no earlier than the 14th or at earliest 13th century) under the foundations; and recklessly jumped to the conclusion that the local Negroes had conceived and built these vast monuments! The idea of any savage people, and especially Negroes, planning such structures and undertaking the enormous labour of their construction is surely too ludicrous to be considered seriously. Even if these monuments were built no earlier than five or six centuries ago, that does not invalidate the hypothesis that they were inspired by the models of some old civilization. Is it necessary to expound the whole theory of survivals to make this point clear? The whole of this memoir is concerned with the persistence in outlying corners of the world of strange practices whose inventors passed away twenty-eight centuries and more ago, and whose country has forgotten them and their works for more than a thousand years. [My friend, W. J. Perry, is collecting other evidence which proves quite definitely that the Zimbabwe culture was “heliolithic.”]
In Moll’s History ([46]) the following passage occurs in an account of the customs of Ceylon, p. 430, “when a person of condition dies his corps is laid out and wash’d, and being cover’d with a linnen-cloath, is carried out upon a bier to some high place and burnt: but if he was an officer who belong’d to the court, the corps is not burnt till the king gives orders for it, which is sometimes a great while after. In this case his friends hollow the body of a tree, and having bowell’d and embalm’d the corps, they put it in, filling the hollow up with pepper, and having made it as close as possible, they bury the corpse in some room of the house till the king orders it to be burnt.”
“As for the poorer people, they usually wrap them up in mats and bury them.”
This traveller’s tale would not call for serious attention if it were not confirmed by modern accounts of an analogous practice in Burma and the neighbourhood.
In his “Himalayan Journal” Sir Joseph Hooker described how the Khasias temporarily embalm their dead in honey before cremating them.
Pettigrew ([56], p. 245) quotes Captain Coke’s account of the embalming of a Burman priest. The body, as witnessed by him, was lying exposed to public view upon a stage constructed of bamboos. This is the bier which is so invariably associated with mummification.
“The entrails of the deceased (who had been dead upwards of a month) had been taken out a few hours after death by means of an incision in the stomach, and the vacuum being filled with honey and spices the opening was sewed up. The whole body was then covered over with a slight coating of resinous substance called dhamma, and wax, to preserve it from the air, after which it was richly overlaid with gold leaf, thus giving the body the appearance of one of the finely moulded images so common in the temples of the worshippers of Boodh.”
Then it was cremated.
This is a curious instance of the blending of the custom of mummification with the later practice of cremation, which was inspired by entirely different ideals. Throughout the whole area in which Egyptian methods of embalming were adopted there are found numerous instances of such syncretism with a variety of burial customs.
“Another method which I have known to be practised, but not as common as the one above detailed, of embalming bodies in the Burman country, is by forcing two hollow bamboos through the soles of the feet, up the legs and into the body of the deceased; then by dint of pressing and squeezing the fluid is carried off through the bamboos into the ground.”
This practice is an important link between the Egyptian and the Indonesian methods.