Most mummies, wrapped in goat skins, were buried in caves. But those of kings and princes were placed in coffins cut out of a solid log, and buried (head north) in the open, a monument of pyramidal form being erected above them.
It is important to bear in mind that both in East and West Africa and in the Canary Islands the technical procedures in the practice of mummification are those which were not adopted in Egypt until the time of the XXIst Dynasty. I have already called attention to this fact in my references to the Torres Straits mummies (vide supra), and to the inference that these extensive migrations of Egyptian influence could not have begun before the ninth century B.C.
(For more complete bibliographical references, see Pettigrew, ([56]), p. 233.)
The large series of identical procedures makes it absolutely certain that the method of embalming practised in the Canary Islands was derived from Egypt, and not earlier than 900 B.C.
Reutter states ([63], p. 137) that “the Carthaginians, as the result of long-continued commercial intercourse with Egypt, assimilated its civilization even to the extent of worshipping certain of the Egyptian gods and of accepting many of her ideas and beliefs as to a future life.”
“These reasons impelled them to practise the art of embalming and to represent the features of the dead upon their sarcophagi to enable the soul to refind its double.”
“Their burial chambers, for the most part not built up, but carved out of the rock, communicated with the exterior by a staircase. Above them were built mastabas or monuments to be utilised, as amongst the Egyptians, as offering-places” (p. 138).
“Even the inscriptions in the mortuary chambers were written in hieroglyphics, and their sarcophagi contained scarabs inscribed with invocations to the Egyptian gods, Ptah, Bes and Ra, &c.”
This reference is sufficient to indicate how the later (certainly not earlier than 900 B.C. and probably some centuries later) Egyptian practices spread around the Mediterranean.
I do not propose (in the present communication) to discuss the influence and the manner of spread of the practice of mummification in Europe. Reutter gives certain information in reference to this subject. It will suffice to say that there is no evidence to show that mummification was widely adopted until comparatively late times (New Empire and later) in the Mediterranean area, although certain effects of the Egyptian practice, such for example as “extended burial,” spread abroad many centuries earlier, appearing in most regions during the Eneolithic phase.