[18] Op. cit. supra.
[19] For the earliest evidence of the cutting of stone for architectural purposes, see my statement in the Report of the British Association for 1914, p. 212.
[20] Especially in Crete, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Southern Russia, and the North African Littoral.
[21] For an account of the evidence relating to these monuments, with full bibliographical references, see Déchelette, "Manuel d'Archéologie préhistorique Celtique et Gallo-Romaine," T. 1, 1912, pp. 390 et seq.; also Sophus Müller, "Urgeschichte Europas," 1905, pp. 74 and 75; and Louis Siret, "Les Cassitérides et l'Empire Colonial des Phéniciens," L'Anthropologie, T. 20, 1909, p. 313.
[22] W. J. Perry, "The Geographical Distribution of Terraced Cultivation and Irrigation," Memoirs and Proc. Manch. Lit. and Phil. Soc., Vol. 60, 1916.
The Origin of Embalming.
I have already explained[23] how the increased importance that came to be attached to the corpse as the means of securing a continuance of existence led to the aggrandizement of the tomb. Special care was taken to protect the dead and this led to the invention of coffins, and to the making of a definite tomb, the size of which rapidly increased as more and more ample supplies of food and other offerings were made. But the very measures thus taken the more efficiently to protect and tend the dead defeated the primary object of all this care. For, when buried in such an elaborate tomb, the body no longer became desiccated and preserved by the forces of nature, as so often happened when it was placed in a simple grave directly in the hot dry sand.
It is of fundamental importance in the argument set forth here to remember that these factors came into operation before the time of the First Dynasty. They were responsible for impelling the Proto-Egyptians not only to invent the wooden coffin, the stone sarcophagus, the rock-cut tomb, and to begin building in stone, but also to devise measures for the artificial preservation of the body.
But in addition to stimulating the development of the first real architecture and the art of mummification other equally far-reaching results in the region of ideas and beliefs grew out of these practices.