The migrations of early culture / A study of the significance of the geographical distribution of the practice of mummification as evidence of the migrations of peoples and the spread of certain customs and beliefs

by Grafton Elliot Smith

What has still to be elucidated is the manner and the place in which the complex fabric of the “heliolithic” culture was woven, the precise epoch in which it began to be spread abroad and the identity of its carriers, the influences to which it was subjected on the way, and the additions, subtractions and modifications which it underwent as the result.

Although I have now collected many of the data for the elucidation of these points, the limited space at my disposal compels me to defer for the present the consideration of the most interesting aspect of the whole problem, the identity of the early mariners who were the distributors of so strange a cargo. It was this aspect of the question which first led me into the controversy; but I shall be able to deal with it more conveniently when the ethnological case has been stated. The enormous bulk of the data that have accumulated compels me to omit a large mass of corroborative evidence of an ethnological nature; but no doubt there will be many opportunities in the near future for using up this reserve of ammunition.

Before setting out for the meeting of the British Association in Australia last year I submitted the following abstract of a communication ([96]) to be made to the Section of Anthropology:—

“After dealing with the evidence from the resemblances in the physical characteristics of widely separated populations—such, for instance, as certain of the ancient inhabitants of Western Asia on the one hand, and certain Polynesians on the other—suggesting far-reaching prehistoric migrations, the distribution of certain peculiarly distinctive practices, such as mummification and the building of megalithic monuments, is made use of to confirm the reality of such wanderings of peoples.

“I have already (at the Portsmouth, Dundee, and Birmingham meetings) dealt with the problem as it affects the Mediterranean littoral and Western Europe. On the present occasion I propose to direct attention mainly to the question of the spread of culture from the centres of the ancient civilisations along the Southern Asiatic coast and from there out into the Pacific. From the examination of the evidence supplied by megalithic monuments and distinctive burial customs, studied in the light of the historical information relating to the influence exerted by Arabia and India in the Far East, one can argue by analogy as to the nature of migrations in the even more remote past to explain the distribution of the earliest peoples dwelling on the shores of the Pacific.

“Practices such as mummification and megalith-building present so many peculiar and distinctive features that no hypothesis of independent evolution can seriously be entertained in explanation of their geographical distribution. They must be regarded as evidence of the diffusion of information, and the migrations of bearers of it, from somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Eastern Mediterranean, step by step out into Polynesia, and even perhaps beyond the Pacific to the American littoral.”

At that time it was my intention further to develop the arguments from megalithic monuments which I had laid before the Association at the three preceding meetings and elsewhere ([90]; [91]; [92]; [93]; and especially [94]); and endeavour to prove that the structure and the geographical distribution of these curious memorials pointed to the spread of a distinctive type of culture along the Southern Asiatic littoral, through Indonesia and Oceania to the American Continent. The geographical distribution of the practice of mummification was to have been used merely as a means of corroboration of what I then imagined to be the more complete megalithic record, and of emphasizing the fact that Egypt had played some part at least in originating these curiously linked customs.

But when I examined the mummy from Torres Straits in the Macleay Museum (University of Sydney), and studied the literature relating to the methods employed by the embalmers in that region ([1]; [19]; [25]; and [27]), I was convinced, from my knowledge of the technical details used in mummification in ancient Egypt (see especially [78]; [86] and [87]), that these Papuan mummies supplied us with the most positive demonstration of the Egyptian origin of the methods employed. Moreover, as they revealed a series of very curious procedures, such as were not invented in Egypt until the time of the New Empire, and some of them not until the XXIst Dynasty, it was evident that the cultural wave which carried the knowledge of these things to the Torres Straits could not have started on its long course from Egypt before the ninth century B.C., at the earliest.

The incision for eviscerating the body was made in the flank, right or left, or in the perineum ([19]; [25])—the two sites selected for making the embalming incision in Egypt ([78]); the flank incision was made in the precise situation (between costal margin and iliac crest) which was distinctive of XXIst and XXIInd Dynasty methods in Egypt ([86]); and the wound was stitched up in accordance with the method employed in the case of the cheaper kinds of embalming at that period ([78]). When the flank incision was not employed an opening was made in the perineum, as was done in Egypt—the second method mentioned by Herodotus—in the case of less wealthy people ([56], p. 46).

The viscera, after removal, were thrown into the sea, as, according to Porphyry and Plutarch, it was the practice in Egypt at one time ([56], pp. 57 and 58) to cast them into the Nile.