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

The body was painted with a mixture containing red-ochre, the scalp was painted black, and artificial eyes were inserted. These procedures were first adopted (in their entirety) in Egypt during the XXIst Dynasty, although the experiments leading up to the adoption of these methods began in the XIXth.

But most remarkable of all, the curiously inexplicable Egyptian procedure for removing the brain, which in Egypt was not attempted until the XVIIIth Dynasty—i.e., until its embalmers had had seventeen centuries experience of their remarkable craft ([78])—was also followed by the savages of the Torres Straits ([25]; [27])!

Surely it is inconceivable that such people could have originated the idea or devised the means for practising an operation so devoid of meaning and so technically difficult as this! The interest of their technique is that the Torres Straits operators followed the method originally employed in Egypt (in the case of the mummy of the Pharaoh Ahmes I. [[86], p. 16]), which is one requiring considerable skill and dexterity, and not the simpler operation through the nostrils which was devised later ([78]).

The Darnley Islanders also made a circular incision through the skin of each finger and toe, and having scraped off the epidermis from the rest of the body, they carefully peeled off these thimbles of skin, and presented them to the deceased’s widow ([25]; [27]).

This practice is peculiarly interesting as an illustration of the adoption of an ancient Egyptian custom in complete ignorance of the purpose it was intended to serve. The ancient Egyptian embalmers (and, again, those of the XXIst Dynasty) made similar circular incisions around fingers and toes, and also scraped off the rest of the epidermis: but the aim of this strange procedure was to prevent the general epidermis, as it was shed (which occurred when the body was steeped for weeks in the preservative brine bath), from carrying the finger- and toe-nails with it ([78]). A thimble of skin was left on each finger and toe to keep the nail in situ; and to make it doubly secure, it was tied on with string ([78]) or fixed with a ring of gold or a silver glove ([84]).

In the Torres Straits method of embalming the brine bath was not used; so the scraping off of the epidermis was wholly unnecessary. In addition, after following precisely the preliminary steps of this aimless proceeding, by deliberately and intentionally removing the skin-thimbles and nails they defeated the very objects which the Egyptians had in view when they invented this operation!

An elaborate technical operation such as this which serves no useful purpose and is wholly misunderstood by its practitioners cannot have been invented by them. It is another certain proof of the Egyptian origin of the practice.

There is another feature of these Papuan mummies which may or may not be explicable as the adoption of Egyptian practices put to a modified, if not a wholly different, use. Among the new methods introduced in Egypt in the XXIst Dynasty was a curious device for restoring to the mummy something of the fulness of form and outline it had lost during the process of preservation. Through various incisions (which incidentally no doubt allowed the liquid products of decomposition to escape) foreign materials were packed under the skin of the mummy ([78]; [87]). These incisions were made between the toes, sometimes at the knees, in the region of the shoulders, and sometimes in other situations ([78]). In the Papuan method of mummification “cuts were made on the knee-caps and between the fingers and toes; then holes were pierced in the cuts with an arrow so as to allow the liquids to drip from them” (Hamlyn-Harris, [27], p. 3). In one of the mummies in the Brisbane museum there seem to be incisions also in the shoulders. The situation of these openings suggests the view that the idea of making them may (and I do not wish to put it any more definitely) have been suggested by the Egyptian XXIst Dynastic practice. For, although the incisions were made, in the latter case, for the purpose of packing the limbs, incidentally they served for drainage purposes.

But it was not only the mere method of embalming, convincing and definite as it is, that establishes the derivation of the Papuan from the Egyptian procedure; but also all the other funerary practices, and the beliefs associated with them, that help to clinch the proof. The special treatment of the head, the use of masks, the making of stone idols, these and scores of other curious customs (which have been described in detail in Haddon’s and Myers’ admirable account [[25]]) might be cited.