Part 8
“Heads and bodies prepared in a similar way” are found in many museums, and afford an interesting illustration of the old Egyptian practice of paying special attention to the head. This is all the more instructive in view of the fact that it was common in certain regions, especially Mallicolo in the New Hebrides, to restore the features by means of clay and resinous paste, usually making use of the skull as a basis, but occasionally modelling the whole body,[17] the model including parts of the deceased’s skeleton (see Henry Balfour’s article, “Memorial Heads in the Pitt Rivers Museum,” _Man_, Vol. I., 1901, p. 65). These modelling-practices and especially the fact that they usually deal with the head (or even face) only afford an interesting confirmation of the Egyptian origin of these customs (_vide supra_, etc., =40=).
In the 6th volume of the reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, C. S. Myers and Haddon (=25=, pp. 129 and 135) give a detailed account of the funeral ceremonies from which I quote certain points. “As soon as death had occurred the women of the village started wailing. The corpse was placed on the ground on a mat in front of the house; the arms were placed close to the side; the great toes were tied together by a string; the hair of the head and face was cut off and thrown away; the length of the nose was then measured with a piece of wax, which was preserved by a female relative for subsequent use in making a wax mask for the prepared skull. The dead man’s bow and arrow and his stone-headed club were laid beside him” (p. 129). The Egyptian analogies in all of these procedures is quite obvious.
“Five men wearing masks performed a series of manœuvres ending up with flexion of the arms and a bending of the head. This movement was said to indicate the rising and setting of the sun and to be symbolic of the life and death of man.
“Mourners then took the body and placed it upon a wooden framework, which stood upon four wooden supports at a little distance from the house of the deceased. The relatives then took large yams and placed them beside the body on the framework; they also hung large bunches of bananas upon the bamboos around. This was regarded as nourishment for the ghost, which was supposed to eat it at night-time (p. 135).
“In two or three days when the skin of the body had become loose the framework was taken up to the reef in a small canoe; the epidermis was then rubbed off and by means of a sharp shell a small incision was made in the side of the abdomen (in the right side, at least, in the case of women), whence the viscera were extracted.
“The perineum was incised in the males.”
From a study of all the literature regarding this custom, as well as the actual specimens now in Sydney and Brisbane, it is clear that the incision may be made either in the left or right flank or in the perineum, and that sex does not determine the site.
“The abdominal cavity was then filled up with pieces of Nipa palm; the viscera were thrown into the sea and the incision closed by means of fine fish line. An arrow was used to remove the brain, partly by way of the foramen magnum and partly through a small slit which was made in the back of the neck. The ‘strong skin’ of the brain (the dura mater) was first cut and then the ‘soft skin’ was pulled out.
“The body was then brought back to the island and was placed in a sitting position upon a stone; the entire body was then painted with a mixture of red earth and sea water. The head, body and limbs were then lashed to the framework with string and a small stick was affixed to the lower jaw to keep it from drooping. The framework, with its burden, was fastened vertically to two posts set up in the rear of the house, and it was protected from public view by a screen of coconut leaves. The body was then gently rubbed down and holes were made with the point of an arrow so that the juices might escape. A fire was always kept alight beneath the body, ‘by-n-by meat swell up’ (p. 136).
“D’Albertis (=1=) saw in Darnley Island the mummy of a man, who had been dead over a year, standing in the middle of the widow’s house attached to a kind of upright ladder of poles. They tint him from time to time with red chalk (ochre) and keep his skin soft by anointing it with coconut oil” (p. 137).
In the Berlin Museum für Volkerkunde there are mummies of two children, photographs of which, obtained from Professor von Luschan, are reproduced by Dr. Haddon. They were given to Dr. Bastian by the Rev. James Chamlers in 1880, having been obtained at Stephen’s Island. One of them is a small girl a few days old. The body is painted red all over, except the scalp and eyebrows, which are blackened. The other one was a small girl two or three years of age treated in a similar way; the incision for embalming is on the _left_ side and has been sewn up.
“In 1845 Jukes saw on the lap of a woman of Darnley Island the body of a child a few months old which seemed to have been dead for some time. It was stretched on a framework of sticks and smeared over with a thick red pigment, which dressing she was engaged in renewing. (“Voyage of the ‘Fly,’” Vol. I., 1847, p. 246)” (p. 138).
“Macgillivray (“Voyage of the ‘Rattlesnake,’” Vol. II., 1852, p. 48) also refers to a mummy of a child in Darnley Island. Sketches of the two Miriam mummies in the Brisbane Museum will be found on Plate 94 of Edge Partington and Heape’s Ethnographical Album of the Pacific Islands, third series. [Compare also Plate 2, Figure 4, in Brockett’s “Voyage to Torres Straits,” Sydney, 1836]” (p. 137).
“On about the tenth day after death, when the hands and feet have become partially dried, the relatives, using a bamboo knife, remove the skin of the palms and soles, together with the nails, and then cut out the tongue, which is put into a bamboo clamp so that it may be kept straight while drying. These were presented to the widow, who henceforth wore them” (p. 138).
A great deal of further information in regard to this practice is given by Haddon and Myers in their important monograph. Among other things they call attention once more to the custom of preserving the skull in the Torres Straits Islands where mummification is practised. The use of masks and ceremonial dances to assist the performers so as the more realistically to play the part of the deceased is welcome confirmation of the conclusion drawn from geographical distribution that such practices were intimately related to mummification and form part of the ritual genetically linked to it.
Dr. Hamlyn-Harris, the Director of the Queensland Museum, gives an account (=27=) of the two mummies from the Torres Straits, which are now in Brisbane; and he adds further interesting information which he obtained from Mr. J. S. Bruce, of Murray Island, who was also one of Dr. Haddon’s informants. During my recent visit to Australia Dr. Hamlyn-Harris very kindly gave me every facility for examining these two mummies (as well as the Australian mummies in the Queensland Museum); and I also examined another specimen in the Macleay Museum of the University of Sydney. I am preparing a full report on all of these interesting specimens.
From the Torres Straits the practice of mummification spread to Australia, as Flower (=19=), Frazer (=22=), Howitt (see Hertz, =33=), Roth (=71=) and Hamlyn-Harris (=28=), among others, have described. Roth says “Desiccation is a form of disposal of the dead practised only in the case of very distinguished men. After being disembowelled and dried by fire the corpse is tied up and carried about for months.” (=71=, p. 393). The mummy was painted with red ochre (Fraser, =22=).
In Roth’s photographs, as well as in the mummies which I have had the opportunity of examining, the embalming-incision was made in the characteristically Egyptian situation in the left flank. In one of the mummies in the Brisbane Museum (see =28=, plate 6) the head is severely damaged. Examination of the specimen indicates that incisions had been deliberately made. Perhaps it was an attempt to remove the brain, which ended in destruction of the cranium.
A curious feature of Australian embalming is that the body was always flexed, and not extended as in the Torres Straits. At first I was inclined to believe that this may be due to the influence of the Early Egyptian (Second Dynasty) procedure (=89=), but a fuller consideration of the evidence leads me to the conclusion that the adoption of the flexed position is due to syncretism with local burial customs, which were being observed when the bringers of the “heliolithic” culture reached Australia. It is probable that the boomerang came from Egypt, _viâ_ East Africa, India (=12=) and Indonesia at the same time.
Several curious burial customs which may be regarded as degradations of the practice of mummification occur in Australia, but the consideration of these I must defer for the present.
In the discussion on Flower’s memoir (=19=), Hyde Clarke justly emphasized “the importance of the demonstrations in reference to their bearings on the connection of the Australian populations with those of the main continents, and in the influence exerted in Australasia at a former time by a more highly cultivated race. This, to his mind, was the explanation of the relations of the higher culture, whether with regard to language, marriage and kindred, weapon names, or modes of culture, such as the mummies now described, the modes of incision, and form of burial. He did not consider these institutions, as some great authorities did, indigenous in Australia” (=19=, p. 394).
Corroborative evidence is now accumulating (=70=), which will definitely establish the reality of the influence thus adumbrated by Clarke 37 years ago.
Frazer (=22=, p. 80) says the burial (in Australia) on a raised stage reminds him of the “towers of silence,” and adds:—“This novelty of a raised stage can scarcely be a thing which our blacks have invented for themselves since they came to Australia; and if it is a custom which some portion of their ancestors brought with them into this country, I would argue from it that these ancestors were once in contact with, or rather formed part of, a race which had beliefs similar to those of the Persians; such beliefs are not readily adopted by strangers; they belong to a race.” Frazer proceeds to contrast this practice with the other Australian custom of desiccation, which, he says, “corresponds to the Egyptian practice of mummification” (p. 81): but, as Hertz (=33= _et supra_) has pointed out, they were inspired by the same fundamental idea, however much the present practitioners of the two methods may fail to realize this in their beliefs and traditions. The interesting suggestion emerges from these considerations that the peculiar Persian burial customs may be essentially a degraded and profoundly modified form of the ancient Egyptian funerary rites.
In his “Polynesian Researches” William Ellis (=15=) gives an interesting, though unfortunately too brief, account of the Tahitian practice of embalming. Among the poor and middle classes “methods of preservation were too expensive” to be used, but the body was “placed upon a sort of bier covered with the best native cloth” while awaiting burial (p. 399).
“The bodies of the dead, among the chiefs, were, however, in general preserved above ground: a temporary house or shed was erected for them, and they were placed on a kind of bier ... sometimes the moisture of the body was removed by pressing the different parts, drying it in the sun, and anointing it with fragrant oils. At other times, the intestines, brains, etcetera were removed: all moisture was extracted from the body, which was fixed in a sitting position during the day, and exposed to the sun, and, when placed horizontally at night was frequently turned over, that it might not remain long on the same side. The inside was then filled with cloth saturated with perfumed oils, which were also injected into other parts of the body, and carefully rubbed over the outside every day” (pp. 400 and 401).
“It was then clothed, and fixed in a sitting posture; a small altar was erected before it, and offerings of fruit, food and flowers, were daily presented by the relatives, or the priests appointed to attend the body. In this state it was preserved several months, and when it decayed, the skull was carefully kept by the family, while the other bones etc. were buried within the precincts of the family temple” (p. 401).
Ellis makes the significant comment:—“It is singular that the practice of preserving the bodies of their dead by the process of embalming, which has been thought to indicate a high degree of civilization, and which was carried to such perfection by one of the most celebrated nations of antiquity, some thousand years ago, should be found to prevail among this people.” The whole of the circumstances attending the practice of this custom, and the curious ritual and the behaviour of the mourners, as described by Ellis, no less than the details of the process, in fact afford the most positive evidence of its derivation from Egypt.
Ellis says “it is also practiced by other distant nations of the Pacific, and on some of the coasts washed by its waters.” “In some of the islands they dried the bodies, and, wrapping them in numerous folds of cloth, suspended them from the roofs of their dwelling-houses” (p. 406).
Ellis notes the remarkable points of identity between the Tahitian account of the deluge and not only the Hebrew but also those of the Mexicans and Peruvians and many other peoples (p. 394).
In Glaumont’s summary (=24=, p. 517) five modes of burial are described as being practised in New Caledonia. The first is burial in the flexed position; 2nd, extended burial in caves; 3rd, exposure of the body in trees or on the mountains; 4th, mummification; 5th, the body erect or reposing in a dug-out canoe. With regard to the method of embalming, this is practised only in the case of a chief. The body of a chief soon after death was covered with pricks into which were introduced the juices of certain plants with the object of preventing decomposition of the tissues. Afterwards the body was suitably dried or smoked, then it was dressed in its best clothes, its face painted red and black, and then the body was preserved indefinitely. A hole was made at the top of the hut, and by means of this they haul up the mummy. After it has been exposed in this way for a certain time, the body was withdrawn from the hole into the house, which was then carefully shut up and became taboo with all that it contained. Analogous customs are found in New Zealand and elsewhere in Oceania. A singularly strange custom is now in use in the New Hebrides and in the Solomon Islands. The father and son, for example, or the husband and wife, having just died, they smoke the head alone as in New Zealand, but they make (with bamboo covered with cloth) a mannikin, having roughly the human form; then they tattoo the whole of the surface; fastened upon each shoulder—and this is the strange part of it—is a piece of bamboo, to one of which they attach the father’s head and the other that of his son. [The account is not altogether intelligible here.] The heads are painted white and black. With reference to the placing of the body in a canoe, this is reserved for chiefs only. When a chief dies, messengers go in all directions, repeating “The sun is set.” This expression springs from the idea that the chief is a god, the supreme Sun-god.
These procedures afford a remarkably complete series of links with the “heliolithic” cult as practised elsewhere in the west and east. The account of the curious attachment of the heads to the shoulders of the dummy figure throw some light upon the custom (to which I have referred elsewhere in this communication) in Mallicolo (=61=, p. 138) and in America of representing human faces on the shoulders of such models. It is a remarkable fact that in certain of the Mallicolo figures the phallus is fixed to the girdle in a very curious manner, exactly analogous to that recently described and figured by Blackman from an Egyptian tomb of the Middle Kingdom at Meir.
Embalming was a method rarely employed in New Zealand.
“After the extraction of the softer parts, oil or salt was rubbed into the flesh, and the body was dried in the sun or over a fire; then the mummy was wrapped in cloth and hidden away.”
“In some parts of New Zealand the skeletons of mummified bodies are found in the crouching or sitting posture” (Macmillan Brown, =7=, p. 70).
In Schmidt’s _Jahrbücher der gesammten Medicin_, 1890, Bd. 226, p. 175, there is an abstract of an article on Samoa by P. Burzen in which, among other things, the three Egyptian operations of circumcision, massage and mummification are described as being practiced.
The embalming is done by women. After removing the viscera, which are buried or burnt, the eviscerated corpse is then soaked for two months in coconut oil, mixed with vegetable juices. When the body is fully treated and no more fluid escapes from it, the hair which had previously been cut off, is stuck on again with a resinous paste. The body cavity is packed with cloth soaked in vegetable oil and resinous materials: then the mummy is wrapped up with bandages, the head and hands being left exposed.
The body so prepared is put in a special place where it is preserved indefinitely.
“In Pitcairn Island 1,400 miles due west of Easter Island carved stone pillars or images of a somewhat similar character to those of Easter Island” are found (Enoch, =16=, p. 274).
“Another 1,400 miles to the north-west takes us to Tahiti. The natives of Tahiti buried their chiefs in temples; their embalmed bodies, after being exposed, were interred in a couching position. Mention is made of a pyramidal stone structure, on which were the actual altars, which stood at the farther end of one of the squares.”
“There are many close analogies between the sacrificial practices and those of Mexico” (p. 275).
In their extensive migrations the carriers of the “heliolithic” culture took with them the custom of circumcision, and introduced it into most of the regions where their influence spread. In some of the areas affected by the “heliolithic” leaven the more primitive operation of “incision” is found. This consists not of removing the prepuce, but merely slitting up its dorsal aspect (=69=, p. 432). It was the method employed in Egypt in pre-dynastic times, when it was the custom to hide the phallus in a leather sheath suspended from a rope tied round the body. The practice of “incision” and the use of the pudendal sheath persists in some parts of Africa until the present day (see _Journ. Roy. Anthropol. Instit._ 1913, p. 120).
Rivers claims that “the practice of incision arose in Oceania as a modification of circumcision” (=69=, p. 436): but I think the possibility of it having been introduced from the west along with or before the practice of circumcision needs to be considered.
Another remarkable practice which probably formed part of the equipment of the heliolithic wanderers was massage. It was employed by the Egyptians as early as the Sixth Dynasty, as we know from the representations of the operations in a Sakkara _mastaba_ (Capart, =11=). Piorry (=57=) has given an account of the wide range of the practice of massage, from Egypt to India, China and Tahiti, and the high state of efficiency attained in its use in ancient times in India and China. The Chinese manuscript _Kong-Fau_ contained detailed accounts of the operation. Piorry remarks, “it is clear that for us its development did not originate from the practices described in the books of Cong-tzée or the compilation of Susrata.”
From Rivers’ interesting account of massage in Melanesia (=67=) it is evident that the method must have an origin common to it and the modern European practice, and that it could not have arisen amongst a barbarous people like the Melanesians, who have the most extraordinary conceptions as to why and how it serves a therapeutic purpose. Although we have no evidence to prove that massage spread along with the heliolithic culture, the fact that it has a similar geographical distribution, and certainly was extensively practised in Egypt long before the great migration began, suggests that it may represent another Egyptian element of that remarkable culture-complex.
In his masterly analysis of the cultures of Oceania (=69=) Rivers has given a useful summary of the evidence relating to the practice of preserving the body, and has drawn certain inferences from these and other burial practices, which I propose to examine. “In some cases, as in Tikopia, interment takes place either in the house or within a structure representing a house, while in Tonga and Samoa the bodies of chiefs are interred in vaults built of stone. Often the body is buried in a canoe or in a hollowed log of wood, which represents a canoe” (=69=, p. 269). From the evidence to which reference has been made in the course of the present memoir it is unnecessary to insist at any length on the importance and obvious significance of these facts. But I question the inference Rivers draws (p. 270) from the burial in boats. He says “the practice can be regarded as a result of the fact of migration, and does not show that the use of a canoe was the practice of the immigrants in their original home.” The practice is so widespread, however, and in Egypt and elsewhere had such a deep-rooted significance that it is difficult to believe this custom was not brought by the immigrants with them. I am willing to admit that the special circumstances of the people of Oceania naturally emphasized what may be called the “boat-element” in the funerary ritual; but the association of the use of boats with burial is so curious and constant a feature of the “heliolithic” culture where-ever it manifests itself (_vide supra_) as hardly to have arisen independently in different parts of the area of distribution.
“A second mode of treatment is preservation of the body, either in the house or on a stage often covered with a roof. Some kind of mummification is usually practised in these cases, by continual rubbing with oil, drying by means of a fire, and puncture of the body to hasten the disappearance of the products of decomposition.”
“In some parts of Samoa there is a definite process of embalming in which the viscera are removed and buried. A body thus treated lies on a platform resting upon a double canoe, and in many other places a canoe is used as a receptacle for the body while it is undergoing the process of mummification” (p. 269). This association of the use of a canoe with a method of preservation obviously Egyptian in origin naturally provokes comparison with the use of boats in the Egyptian funeral ceremonies. An instance is the boat found in the tomb of Amenophis II. (=81=). The platform is probably a type of bed found elsewhere in the region under consideration (see, for instance, Roth’s account of the Queensland sleeping-platform) and represents the bier found so often elsewhere (_vide supra_). This is in no way inconsistent with Rivers’ view that “exposure of the dead on platforms is only a survival of preservation in a house” (p. 273).