So far as we are aware, the Egyptians never sacrificed any human beings at their funerals, although they often placed in the serdab of the mastaba statues of the deceased’s wife, family and servants, to ensure him their presence and the comforts of a home in his new form of existence.
In the quotations from Reisner’s report, it has just been seen that he found some burials made about 1800 B.C., in which servants appear to have been sacrificed.
In the case of the Baganda, Roscoe describes the killing of the king’s wives and attendants at his funeral.
Roscoe further describes (in his book) the body of the chief as being laid on a bed or framework of plantain trees (p. 117).
At the end of five months the head was removed from the mummy and the jaw-bone was removed, cleaned, and then buried, and a large conical thatched temple was built over the jaw. [In the islands of the Torres Straits the same curious custom of rescuing the head after about six months is also found; but it was the tongue and not the jaw which received special attention ([25] and [27])].
In Egypt, where the practice of mummification was most successful, special treatment of the head was not necessary, except occasionally in Ptolemaic times ([39]), when carelessness on the part of the embalmer led to disastrous results and it became necessary to “fake” a body for attachment to the separated head. But as the Baganda were unable to make a mummy which would last, they adopted these special measures with regard to the skull. Originally special importance was attached to the head, primarily (vide supra) as a means of identifying the deceased. But when the practice of preservation spread to uncultured people, whose efforts at embalming were ineffectual, the idea was transferred to the skull, the reason for the special treatment of the head probably being forgotten. Why such peculiar honour should be devoted to the jaw can only be surmised from our knowledge of the belief that the deceased was supposed to be able to talk and communicate with the living ([21]).
In his article in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute ([72], p. 44) Roscoe give some further particulars. Four men and four women were clubbed to death at the funeral ceremony of the king.
The body was wrapped in strips of bark cloth and each finger and toe was wrapped separately.
In L’Anthropologie (T. 21, 1910, p. 53) Poutrin says of the burial customs of the M’Baka people of French Congo “le corps, préalablement embaumé avec des herbes sécher et de la cendre est couché sur un lit.”
Weeks ([104], pp. 450 and 451) gives an account of the burial customs of the Bangala of the Upper Congo. “They took out the entrails and buried them, placed the corpse on a frame, lit a fire under it, and thoroughly smoke-dried it.” “The dried body was tied in a mat, put in a roughly made hut.” “Coffins were often made out of old canoes.” “Poorer folk were rubbed with oil and red camwood powder, bound round with cloth and tied up in a mat.”