The ancient inhabitants of Yemen worshiped and canonized their ancestors.
Polyandry in Arabia, as mentioned by Strabo, was of Cushite origin, as well as the community of goods between brothers under the administration of the eldest, still practiced by the Narikas of Malabar, and the remnants of the primitive populations of ante-Aryan India. (Lenormant, Vol. II, p. 318.)
There is one custom which, practiced by the Polynesians, was opposed to Hebrew or Egyptian; viz., the feeding on swine’s flesh and rearing them for food as well as for sacrifice to the gods. (See Rawlinson’s Herodotus, II, 47, n. 5.)
In Egyptian hieroglyphics the negative sign is a pair of extended arms with the hands downward, preceding the verb. The mute but emphatic negative of the Hawaiian is expressed by turning the hand over with the palm downward.
The Egyptians were permitted to marry their sisters by the same father and mother. And in patriarchal times a man was permitted to marry a sister, the daughter of his father only. (Rawlinson, Herodotus, III, 32, n. 1.) Among Hawaiian chiefs such marriages gave additional rank and exalted position to the offspring—to the children of Keawe and Kalanikaula, for example.
The custom of sacrificing their first prisoner (in war) is ascribed by Procopius to the Thulite or Scandinavians. (Bell. Goth. II. 15; Rawlinson’s Herodotus, VII, 180, n. 4.)
An ancient Hawaiian legend runs as follows (Polynesian Race, Vol. I, p. 99): Kealii-Wahanui was the king of the country called “Honua-i-lalo.” He oppressed the Lahui Menehune. Their God Kane sent Kane Apua and Kanaloa, his elder brother, to [[350]]bring this people away from there and take them to the land which Kane had given them and which was called Ka Aina Momona a Kane, or with another name Ka One Lauena a Kane, or with still another name Ka Aina i ka Houpo a Kane. They were then told to observe the four Ku days in the beginning of the month as kapu hoano in remembrance of this, because then they arose (ku) to depart from that land. The offerings were swine and sheep. (The narrator of this legend says that there were formerly sheep without horns on the slopes of Maunaloa, Hawaii, and that they were there up to the time of Kamehameha I, and he refers to some account published by a foreigner in 1787.) The legend further says that after leaving the land of bondage, they came to the Kai Ula a Kane, were pursued by “Ke Alii Wahanui,” that Kane Apua and Kanaloa prayed to Lono, and they then waded across the sea, traveled through the desert and finally reached the Aina Lauena a Kane! This was kept as the first kapu hoano of the year.
On first receiving this legend, I was inclined to doubt its genuineness and to consider it as a paraphrase and adaptation of the Biblical account, by some semi-civilized or semi-Christianized Hawaiian after the discovery of the group by Cook. But a further and better acquaintance with Hawaiian folk-lore has shown me that, though the details of the legend, as narrated by the Christian and civilized Kamakau, may possibly in some degree, and unconsciously perhaps, have received a Biblical coloring, yet the main facts of the legend, with the identical names of places and persons, are referred to in other legends of undoubted antiquity. I am compelled therefore to class this legend among the other Chaldeo-Arabic-Hebraic mementos which the Polynesians brought with them from their ancient homesteads in the west. And it is possible that the legend was preserved in after times by the priesthood, as offering a rational explanation of the institution of the kapu days of Ku. Another feature attests the genuine antiquity of the legend, viz. that no other gods are referred to than those primordial ones of Hawaiian theogony; Kane, Ku and Lono, the latter of whom is clearly recognized as the god of the atmosphere, of air and water, the Lono-noho-i-ka-wai of the creation chants.