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 monuments to which I have just been referring were not, in my opinion, directly inspired by Egypt, but indirectly. The North Syrian and the adjoining territories adopted the Egyptian burial customs at an earlier period and the finished type of holed dolmen was probably developed and survived in that region long after its Egyptian prototype had become a thing of the past. The real types that have come down to our times are found in the Caucasus, between the Black Sea and the Caspian. The Indian dolmens were certainly imitations of these models. But in respect of other buildings the Indians directly adopted Babylonian and Egyptian types. I have already referred to the former. Many of the Dravidian temples are so precisely modelled on the plan of the Theban temples of the New Empire that to question the source of the inspiration of the former is impossible.

“Fergusson first called attention to the striking similarity in general arrangement and conception between the great South Indian temples and those of ancient Egypt.... The gopurams or gate-towers, which in the later more ornate examples are decorated from the base to the summit with sculptures of the Hindu Pantheon, increase in size with the size of the walled quadrangles, the outer ones becoming imposing landmarks, which are visible for miles around, and are strikingly similar to the pylons of Egyptian temples” (Thurston, [101], pp. 158 and 161). Thus in the matter of its early buildings India has clearly been influenced by Egypt, Phœnicia and Chaldea; and this great cultural wave impinged upon the Indian peninsula not before the close of the eighth century B.C.

It is important also to remember that it reached India just (perhaps not more than a century) before another wave of a very different culture poured down from the north, and introduced, among other things, the practice of cremation.

For our immediate purpose this is unfortunate, because that practice is inspired by ideas utterly opposed to those underlying the custom of embalming, and naturally destroyed most, though by no means all, traces of the latter. That the practice of embalming did actually reach India from the west is known not merely because evidence of unmistakably Egyptian technique is found further east, but also because in India and Ceylon there are definite traces of the custom, to which reference has already been made in the foregoing pages. Cases from Persia, Ceylon, India, Burma and Thibet were cited in proof of the survival of elements of the embalming process or ritual, even when the Brahmanical and Buddhist burial practices had been adopted.

From the foregoing account there can be no doubt that the people of India did at one time practice mummification, at any rate in the case of their chiefs. They also acquired a knowledge of the arts and crafts, as the result of the influence exerted by the rich stream of culture which brought the attainments of the great western civilizations to India before the Ayran immigration. The bringers of this new culture mingled their blood with the aboriginal pre-Dravidian population and the result was the Dravidians. It is not at all improbable that the resultant Dravidian civilization had reached a higher plane than that of the Aryas, who entered the country after them.

In Oldham’s interesting and suggestive brochure ([51], pp. 53-55), which, in spite of Crooke’s drastic criticism, seems to me to be a valuable contribution to a knowledge of the questions under discussion, the following passages occur:—

“The Asuras, Dasyus, or Nagas, with whom the Aryas came into contact, on approaching the borders of India, were no savage aboriginal tribes, but a civilized people who had cities and castles. Some of these are said in the Veda to have been built of stone.

“It would seem, indeed, as if the Asuras had reached a higher degree of civilization than their Aryan rivals. Some of their cities were places of considerable importance. And, in addition to this, wealth and luxury, the use of magic, superior architectural skill, and ability to restore the dead to life, were ascribed to the Asuras by Brahmanical writers.”

The “ability to restore the dead to life” is probably a reference to the Egyptian ritual of “the opening of the mouth,” which of course is an integral part of the funerary procedure incidental to the practice of mummification.