Class distinctions likewise influence the disposal of the dead. In some American tribes cremation seems to be reserved for persons of higher rank.[97] Among the pagans of Obubura Hill district in Southern Nigeria “the bodies of ordinary people are buried in the bush, sometimes being merely thrown on the ground, but those of chiefs and important men and women are buried in their huts or in the adjoining verandah.”[98] The Masai throw away the corpses of ordinary persons to be eaten by hyænas, whereas medicine-men and influential people are buried.[99] The Nandi do not bury their dead unless they have been very important persons.[100] Among the Waganda, when a chief dies, he is buried in a wooden coffin, whilst the bodies of slaves are thrown into the jungle.[101] Some other African peoples throw the corpses of slaves into a morass or the nearest pool of water.[102] The Thlinkets committed them to the tender mercies of the sea.[103] Among the Maoris a slave would not be greatly bewailed after death, nor have his bones ceremonially scraped.[104] The Roman ‘Law of the Twelve Tables’ prohibited the bodies of slaves from being embalmed.[105] Moral distinctions, also, are noticeable in the treatment of the dead. In some parts of Central America the bodies of men of high standing who had committed a crime were, like those of the common people, exposed to be devoured by wild beasts.[106] Among the Tuski the corpses of bad men were simply left to rot.[107] In Greenland the body of a dead malefactor was dismembered, and the separate limbs were thrown apart.[108] To the same class of facts belong the punishments which were inflicted upon the corpses of criminals in classical antiquity and formerly in Christian Europe.[109]
[97] Preuss, op. cit. p. 301.
[98] Partridge, Cross River Natives, p. 237.
[99] Hollis, op. cit. pp. 304, 305, 307; Eliot, ibid. p. xx.
[100] Johnston, Uganda, ii. 880.
[101] Wilson and Felkin, Uganda, i. 188.
[102] Denham and Clapperton, Travels in Northern and Central Africa, ii. 64 (natives of Kano). Pogge, Im Reiche des Muata Jamwo, p. 243 (Kalunda).
[103] Holmberg, ‘Ethnographische Skizzen über die Völker des russischen Amerika,’ in Acta Soc. Scient. Fennicæ, iv. 323. Dall, op. cit. pp. 417, 420.
[104] Colenso, op. cit. p. 30.
[105] Lex Duodecim Tabularum, x. 6.