A bowl of water became the symbol of the fruitfulness of woman. Such symbolism implied that woman, or her uterus, was a receptacle into which the seminal fluid was poured and from which a new being emerged in a flood of amniotic fluid.
The burial of shells with the dead is an extremely ancient practice, for cowries have been found upon human skeletons of the so-called "Upper Palæolithic Age" of Southern Europe.
At Laugerie-Basse (Dordogne) Mediterranean cowries were found arranged in pairs upon the body; two pairs on the forehead, one near each arm, four in the region of the thighs and knees, and two upon each foot. Others were found in the Mentone caves, and are peculiarly important, because, upon the same stratum as the skeleton with which they were associated, was found part of a Cassis rufa, a shell whose habitat does not extend any nearer than the Indian Ocean.[262]
Fig. 20.—Diagrams illustrating the form of cowry-belts worn in (a) East Africa and (b) Oceania respectively.
(c) Ancient Indian girdle (from the figure of Sirima Devata on the Bharat Tope), consisting of strings of pearls and precious stones, and what seem to be (fourth row from the top) models of cowries.
(d) The Copan girdle (from Fig. 19) in which both shells and heads of deities are represented. The two objects suspended from the belt between the heads recall Hathor's sistra.
These facts are very important. In the first place they reveal the great antiquity of the practice of burying shells with the dead, presumably for the purpose of "life-giving". Secondly, they suggest the possibility that their magical value as givers of life may be more ancient than their specific use as intensifiers of the fertility of women. Thirdly, the association of these practices with the use of the shell Cassis rufa indicates a very early cultural contact between the people living upon the North-Western shores of the Mediterranean in the Reindeer Age and the dwellers on the coasts of the Indian Ocean; and the probability that these special uses of shells by the former were inspired by the latter.
This hint assumes a special significance when we first get a clear view of the more fully-developed shell-cults of the Eastern Mediterranean many centuries later.[263] For then we find definite indications that the cultural uses of shells were obviously borrowed from the Erythræan area.