Part 3

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.