In an article on Persian burial customs ([32], p. 505) Dr. Louis H. Gray says: “Unfortunately our sole information on this subject [Ancient Persian rites] must thus far be gleaned from the meagre statements of the classics. If we may judge from the tombs of the Achæmenians, their bodies were not exposed as Zoroastrianism dictated; but it is by no means impossible that they were coated with wax, or even, as Jackson[13] also suggests (“Persia, Past and Present,” p. 235), ‘perhaps embalmed after the manner of the Egyptians.’”
In later times the Persians seem to have been influenced by the practices in vogue in Early Christian times in Egypt, before the coming of Islâm. Thus in Moll’s History ([46], p. 545), the statement is made in reference to the Moslem burial customs in Persia; “if it [the corpse] is to be buried a great way off, it is put into a wooden coffin filled up with salt, lime and perfumes to preserve it; for they embalm their dead bodies no otherwise in Persia, nor do they ever embowel them, as with us.” That this is merely a degraded form of the Egyptian embalmer’s practice is shown by the fact that it is identical with the method used by the Copts in Egypt until the seventh, or perhaps even as late as the ninth century A.D., and in their case we know that it is a development from, or degradation of, the ancient practice.
This method seems also to have spread to India: for Mr. Crooke tells me that even at the present day several of the ascetic orders bury their dead in salt.
In Moll’s book the following curious statement also occurs, p. 474:—“Mummy, which is human flesh embalm’d that has lain in dry earth several ages, and become hard as horn, is frequently found in the sands of Chorassan, or the ancient Bactria, and some of the bodies are so little alter’d, ’tis said, that the features may be plainly distinguish’d.”
In studying the easterly migration of the custom of mummification it is quite certain that the main stream of the wanderers who carried the knowledge to the east must have set out from the East African coast, because a whole series of modifications of the Egyptian method which were introduced in the Soudan and further south are also found in Indonesia, Polynesia and America. A curious feature of Egyptian embalming in the XIXth and especially the XXIst Dynasties ([78] and [86]) was the use of butter for packing the mummy. Among the Baganda, according to Roscoe, special importance came to be attached to this practice. Mr. Crooke has given me references from Indian literature (see especially Journ. Anthr. Soc. Bombay, Vol. I., 1886, p. 39) to bodies being “skilfully embalmed with heavenly drugs and ghee” [clarified butter].
The ancient Aryans used to disembowel the corpse and fill the cavity with ghee (Mitra, “Indo-Aryans,” London, 1881, Vol. I., p. 135), as was done in the case of the mummy of the famous Pharaoh Meneptah ([86]).
The peculiarly Mediterranean modifications also spread east and it seems most likely that in this case the route from Syria down the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf was taken.
[Since this has been in print further investigation has elucidated with remarkable precision the ways and means of, as well as the impelling motives for, the great migration to the East. This calls for some modification of the foregoing (as well as many of the subsequent) paragraphs. It has been seen that the great wave of culture carried east and west from Egypt the distinctive method of embalming that came into full use somewhere about 900 B.C.; hence it is probable the eighth century B.C. witnessed the commencement of the series of expeditions, which probably extended over many centuries. It can be no mere chance that the period indicated coincides with the time when the Phœnicians were embarking upon maritime enterprises on a much greater and more daring scale than the world had known until then, in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, in the Red Sea and beyond. In the course of their trading expeditions to the Bab-el-Mandeb these Levantine mariners brought to that region a fuller knowledge of the customs and practices of Egypt and of the whole Phœnician world in the Mediterranean. It was probably in this way and not by the Euphrates route that the culture of the Levant reached the Persian Gulf and India.
The easterly migration of culture which set out from the region of the Bab-el-Mandeb conveyed not only the Ethiopian modifications of Egyptian practices, but also the Egyptian and Mediterranean contributions which the Phœnicians had brought to Ethiopia. On some future occasion I shall discuss the important part played by the Phœnicians in these expeditions to the Far East.]