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

In the foregoing statement I have endeavoured to indicate also their genetic connection with the ideas that sprang from the early practice of mummification in Egypt.

There are many other curious features of the early Egyptian practices which might have served as straws to indicate how the cultural current had flowed, if much more substantial proofs had not been available of the reality of the movement. The diffusion of such a distinctive object as the Egyptian head-rest, which used to be buried with mummies of the Pyramid Age, is an example. It occurs widely spread in Africa, Southern Asia, Indonesia and the Pacific.

But the use of beds as funerary biers is a much more distinctive custom. The believers in theories of the independent evolution of customs may say “is it not natural to expect that people who regarded death as a kind of sleep should have placed head-rests and beds in the graves of their dead?” But how would such ethnologists explain the use of a funerary bier on the part of people (such as many of the less cultured people who adopted this Egyptian custom) who do not themselves use beds?

The evidence afforded by the use of biers is, in fact, a most definite demonstration of the diffusion of customs. Although it is a familiar scene in ancient Egyptian pictures to find the mummy borne upon a bed—a custom which we know from Egyptian literature, no less than that of the Jews, Phœnicians, Greeks and Romans to have been actually observed—only one Egyptian cemetery, so far as I am aware—a proto-dynastic site, excavated by Flinders Petrie ([54]) at Tarkhan—has revealed corpses lying upon beds. But in a cemetery, some sixteen centuries later, excavated by Reisner in the Soudan ([62]), a similar practice was demonstrated. Garstang has recorded the observance of a similar custom further South (Meroe) at a later date.

These form useful connecting links with the region around the head-waters of the Nile, where even in modern times this practice has survived, and the mummified corpse of the king is placed upon a rough bier. I shall have occasion to point out later on that this curious practice spread from East Africa along the Asiatic littoral to Indonesia, Melanesia and Polynesia, thence to the American continent; and in most places was definitely associated with attempts at preservation of the corpse.

In many places along the whole course of the same great track, instead of a bed, a boat of some sort, usually a rough dug-out, was used. This practice also was observed in Egypt, where its symbolic purpose is clearly apparent.

Another distinctive feature of the burial customs in the same area was the idea that the grave represented the house in which the deceased was sleeping. How definitely this view was held by the proto-Egyptians is seen in their coffins, subterranean burial chambers, and the superstructures of their tombs, all three of which were originally represented as dwelling houses (see my memoir, [94]).

The Pyramid texts clearly explain the precise significance and origin of the hitherto mysterious and widespread custom of burning incense at the statue. For, as Blackman ([5]) has pointed out, the aim was by burning aromatic woods and resins thereby magically to restore to the “body” the odours of the living person.

It was therefore intimately related to the practice of mummification and genetically connected with it. It was part of the magical procedure for making the portrait-statue of the deceased (or later, in the time of the New Empire, the mummy itself) “an efficient animate substitute for the person” (Alan Gardiner).

A careful investigation of the geographical distribution of the custom of burning incense before the corpse and of the circumstances related to such a practice has convinced me that wherever it is found, even where no attempt is made to preserve the body, it can be regarded as an indication of the influence of the Egyptian custom of mummification. For apart from such an influence incense-burning is inexplicable. The attempt on the part of certain writers to explain the use of incense merely as a means of disguising the odours of putrefaction will not bear examination. It is an example of that kind of so-called psychological explanation which is opposed by all the ascertainable facts.