Embalming was also practised in America. Recent travellers report[28] having seen in Upper Peru tombs of the shape of beehives, made of stones cemented with clay, each tomb containing one mummy or more in a crouching position (Figs. [109] and [110]). This custom was still practised for many centuries; Garcilasso de la Vega tells us that the dead Incas were seated in a temple at Cuzco, wearing their royal ornaments as if they were still alive; their hands were crossed upon their breasts, and their heads were bending slightly forward.[29]
The facts enumerated above prove that burial was long practised, though it is impossible to say when it first cattle into use. About the time of the beginning of the Bronze age, or perhaps even earlier, however, a remarkable change took place in the ideas of man, and the dead instead of being buried intact were consumed by fire on the funeral pile.
What can have been the origin of this custom? What race first practised it? It has long been supposed by many archæologists that it was the Aryans from the lofty Hindoo Koosh Mountains who first introduced into Europe a civilization more advanced than that which had hitherto obtained there, and taught the people to cremate instead of bury their dead. This theory was accepted for a considerable time without question, but of late years a new school, headed by Penka, has arisen who claim that the reformers came not from the East but from the North. The Marquis de Saporta had indeed before suggested that the primitive races who were the contemporaries of the mammoth and the rhinoceros came originally from the polar regions, where the remains of a luxuriant vegetation prove that climatic conditions prevailed in remote times of a very different character to those of the present day. The lignites of Iceland are made up of tulip, plantain, and nut-trees, even the vine sometimes occurring. In the ferruginous sandstones, associated with the carboniferous deposits of Spitzberg, the beech, the poplar, the magnolia, the plum tree, the sequoia, and numerous coniferous trees can be made out. The sturdy sailors who dare the regions of perpetual ice come across masses of fossilized wood in Banks, Grinnell, and Francis Joseph’s Lands, at 88° N. Lat. Among this fossil wood Heer made out the cypress, the silver pine, the poplar, the birch, and some dicotyledons with caducous leaves. These were not relics of wood which had drifted where it was found on floating ice, but of an actual local vegetation, as proved by trunks still erect in their original positions, buds, leaves, and flowers in every stage of growth, fruits in every stage of ripening. The very insects that had lived on honey from the flowers or on the leaves themselves could be identified. In those remote days, life, abundant life, similar to that now only found in the temperate countries farther south, flourished in those polar regions, so long supposed to have never been anything but lifeless deserts.
Figure 110.
Peruvian mummies.
All this, plausible as it is, does not, however, appear to be conclusive on the point under discussion; and though we may have to abandon the idea of the Aryans having introduced cremation, we are scarcely, I think, in a position to say that races from the North were the first to practise it. I have dwelt more fully on the question of the origin of races and the evidence which language seems to give of a common source in two papers called “Les Premiers Populations de l’Europe,” which appeared in the Correspondent for October 1 and November 25, 1889. Whatever may be the final decision on the much contested points involved in this controversy, one thing is certain that cremation, involving though it does a complete revolution in manners and customs, spread with very great rapidity. We meet with it from Greece to Scotland and Scandinavia, from Etruria to Poland and the south of Russia, in China as in Yucatan and certain parts of Central America.
In the early days of history, cremation was practised all over Europe. The Greeks attribute its inauguration to Hercules, and the funeral pile of Patrokles is described in the Iliad. The Pelasgians and the Proto-Etruscans burned their dead,[30] and we are told of the incineration of contemporaries of Jair, the third judge of Israel.
On the other hand, the earliest inhabitants of Latium buried their dead. Visitors, who probably came by way of the valley of the Danube, introduced the new custom, and for a long tune the two rites were practised side by side. At Felsina and at Marzabotto we find instances alike of inhumation and cremation, and at Vilanova only half the tombs are those of corpses that had been cremated. In 365 of the tombs excavated in the Certosa, near Bologna, only 115 show signs of cremation having been practised. At Rome, the two rites were long both performed, probably, however, by the two distinct peoples who formed the primitive population of the town of Romulus. We know that Numa Pompilius forbade the burning of his corpse; Cicero relates that Marius was buried, and that Sulla, his fortunate rival, was the first of the Cornelia gens whose body was committed to the flames. We do not know how early cremation was introduced in Gaul; we can only say that Cæsar found it generally practised when be made his triumphal march across the country.[31] The celebrated excavations of Moreau prove that inhumation and incineration were both practised among the Gallo-Romans established in the eastern provinces of France. We may even assert that the two rites were practised long before the introduction of the use of metals. One thing is certain, the custom of cremation was but slowly abandoned as Christianity spread, for Charlemagne, in an edict dated 789, ordered the punishment of death for those who dared to burn dead bodies.
What we have just said about historic times applies equally to more remote epochs. Thanks to the learned researches of Dr. Prunières[32] we are able to trace for a great length of time the modes of sepulture adopted in Lozère. The cave men of the eroded limestone districts of Les Causses took their dead to the caves in which their ancestors had been laid, and the invaders, who were probably more civilized than those they dispossessed, placed theirs beneath the dolmens which they erected in their honor. In the sepulchral caves of Rouquet and of L’Homme Mort we find inhumation; beneath the megalithic monuments dating from the end of the Neolithic period, we meet with the first traces of cremation, but so far of a very incomplete cremation; the action of the funeral fire had not been intense, and the bones were hard and resisted the heat. Noting beneath certain dolmens a few bones blackened by fire mixed with large quantities unaffected by it, one is inclined to think with the learned Doctor, that after practising cremation men had reverted to the old mode of burial. In the tumuli of the Bronze age, on the other hand, where the date can be determined with the aid of the ornaments and trinkets scatered about, the ustion was more complete; the bones are friable and porous, crumbling into dust when touched, and there is nothing to indicate that inhumation and cremation were both practised.