Читать книгу The migrations of early culture - Grafton Elliot Smith - Страница 4

Table of Contents

By Professor G. Elliot Smith, M.A., M.D., F.R.S.

(Read February 23rd, 1915. Received for publication April 6th, 1915.)

In entering upon the discussion of the geographical distribution of the practice of mummification I am concerned not so much with the origin and technical procedures of this remarkable custom. This aspect of the problem I have already considered in a series of memoirs (75 to 89[1]). I have chosen mummification rather as the most peculiar, and therefore the most distinctive and obtrusive, element of a very intimately interwoven series of strange customs, which became fortuitously linked one with the other to form a definite culture-complex nearly thirty centuries ago, and spread along the coast-lines of a great part of the world, stirring into new and distinctive activity the sluggish uncultured peoples which in turn were subjected to this exotic leaven.

If one looks into the journals of anthropology and ethnology, there will be found amongst the vast collections of information relating to man’s activities a most suggestive series of facts concerning the migrations of past ages and the spread of peculiar customs and beliefs.

Map 1.—A rough chart of the geographical distribution of certain customs, practices and traditions. [None of these areas of distribution is complete. The map shows merely the data referred to in this memoir or in the literature quoted in it.]

If a map of the world is taken and one plots out (Map I.) the geographical distribution of such remarkable customs as the building of megalithic monuments (see for example Lane Fox’s [Pitt Rivers’] map, 20), the worship of the sun and the serpent (51; 103), the custom of piercing the ears (see Park Harrison, 29), tattooing (see Miss Buckland, 10), the practice of circumcision, the curious custom known as couvade, the practice of massage, the complex story of the creation, the deluge, the petrifaction of human beings, the divine origin of kings and a chosen people sprung from an incestuous union (W. J. Perry), the use of the swastika-symbol (see Wilson’s map, 105), the practice of cranial deformation, to mention only a few of the many that might be enumerated, it will be found that in most respects the areas in which this extraordinary assortment of bizarre customs and beliefs is found coincide one with the other. In some of the series gaps occur, which probably are more often due to lack of information on our part than to real absence of the practice; in other places one or other of the elements of this complex culture-mixture has overflowed the common channel and broken into new territory. But considered in conjunction these data enable us definitely and precisely to map out the route taken by this peculiarly distinctive group of eccentricities of the human mind. If each of them is considered alone there are many breaks in the chain and many uncertainties as to the precise course: but when taken together all of these gaps are bridged. Moreover, in most areas there are traditions of culture-heroes, who brought in some or all of these customs at one and the same time and also introduced a knowledge of agriculture and weaving.

So far as I am aware no one hitherto has called attention to the fact that the practice of mummification has a geographical distribution exactly corresponding to the area occupied by the curious assortment of other practices just enumerated. Not only so, but in addition it is abundantly clear that the coincidence is not merely accidental. It is due to the fact that in most regions the people who introduced the habit of megalithic building and sun-worship (a combination for which it is convenient to use Professor Brockwell’s distinctive term “heliolithic culture”) also brought with them the practice of mummification at the same time.

The custom of embalming the dead is in fact an integral part of the “heliolithic culture,” and perhaps, as I shall endeavour to demonstrate, its most important component. For this practice and the beliefs which grew up in association with it were responsible for the development of some of the chief elements of this culture-complex, and incidentally of the bond of union with other factors not so intimately connected, in the genetic sense, with it.

Before plunging into the discussion of the evidence provided by the practice of mummification, it will be useful to consider for a moment the geographical distribution of the other components of the “heliolithic culture.” I need not say much about megalithic monuments, for I have already considered their significance elsewhere (90 to 96); but I should like once more specifically to call the attention of those who are obsessed by theories of the independent evolution of such monuments, and who scoff at Fergusson (17), to the memoirs of Lane Fox (20) and Meadows Taylor (100). The latter emphasises in a striking manner the remarkable identity of structure, not only as concerns the variety and the general conception of such monuments, but also as regards trivial and apparently unessential details. With reference to “the opinion of many,” which has “been advanced as an hypothesis, that the common instincts of humanity have suggested common methods of sepulture,” he justly remarks, “I own this kind of vague generalisation does not satisfy me, in the face of such exact points of similitude.... Such can hardly have been the result of accident, or any common human instinct” (p. 173).

But it is not merely the identity of structure and the geographical distribution (in most cases along continuous coast-lines or related islands) that proves the common origin of megalithic monuments. It is further strongly corroborated by a remarkable series of beliefs, traditions and practices, many of them quite meaningless and unintelligible to us, which are associated with such structures wherever they are found. Stories of dwarfs and giants (13), the belief in the indwelling of gods or great men in the stones, the use of these structures in a particular manner for certain special councils (20, pp. 64 and 65), and the curious, and, to us, meaningless, practice of hanging rags on trees in association with such monuments (20, pp. 63 and 64). In reference to the last of these associated practices, Lane Fox remarks, “it is impossible to believe that so singular a custom as this could have arisen independently in all these countries.”

In an important article on “Facts suggestive of prehistoric intercourse between East and West” (Journ. Anthr. Inst., Vol. 14, 1884, p. 227), Miss Buckland calls attention to a remarkable series of identities of customs and beliefs, and amongst them certain legends concerning the petrification of dance maidens associated with stone circles as far apart as Cornwall and Peru.

Taking all of these facts into consideration, it is to me altogether inconceivable how any serious enquirer who familiarises himself with the evidence can honestly refuse to admit that the case for the spread of the inspiration to erect megalithic monuments from one centre has been proved by an overwhelming mass of precise and irrefutable data. But this evidence does not stand alone. It is linked with scores of other peculiar customs and beliefs, the testimony of each of which, however imperfect and unconvincing some scholars may consider it individually, strengthens the whole case by cumulation; and when due consideration is given to the enormous complexity and artificiality of the cultural structure compounded of such fantastic elements, these are bound to compel assent to their significance, as soon as the present generation of ethnologists can learn to forget the meaningless fetish to which at present it bends the knee.

But suppose, for the sake of argument, we shut our ears to the voice of common sense, and allow ourselves to be hypnotised into the belief that some complex and highly specialised instinct (i.e. precisely the type of instinct which real psychologists—not the ethnological variety—deny to mankind) impelled groups of men scattered as far apart as Ireland, India and Peru independently the one of the other to build mausolea of the same type, to acquire similar beliefs regarding the petrifaction of human beings, and many other extraordinary things connected with such monuments, how is this “psychological explanation” going to help us to explain why the wives of the builders of these monuments, whether in Africa, Asia or America, should have their chins pricked and rubbed with charcoal, or why they should circumcise their boys, or why they should have a tradition of the deluge? Does any theory of evolution help in explaining these associations? They are clearly fortuitous associations of customs and beliefs, which have no inherent relationship one to the other. They became connected purely by chance in one definite locality, and the fact that such incongruous customs reappear in association in distant parts of the globe is proof of the most positive kind that the wanderings of peoples must have brought this peculiar combination of freakish practices from the centre where chance linked them together.

Because it was the fashion among a particular group of megalith-builders to tattoo the chins of their womenkind, the wanderers who carried abroad the one custom also took the other: but there is no genetic or inherent connection between megalith-building and chin-tattooing.

Such evidence is infinitely stronger and more convincing than that afforded by one custom considered by itself, because in the former case we are dealing with an association which is definitely and obviously due to pure chance, such as the so-called psychological method, however casuistical, is impotent to explain.

But the study of such a custom as tattooing, even when considered alone, affords evidence that ought to convince most reasonable people of the impossibility of it having independently arisen in different, widely scattered, localities. The data have been carefully collected and discussed with clear insight and common sense by Miss Buckland (10) in an admirable memoir, which I should like to commend to all who still hold to the meaningless dogma “of the similarity of the working of the human mind” as an explanation of the identity of customs. Tattooing is practised throughout the great “heliolithic” track. [Striking as Miss Buckland’s map of distribution is as a demonstration of this, if completed in the light of our present information, it would be even more convincing, for she has omitted Libya, which so far as we know at present may possibly have been the centre of origin of the curious practice.]

Tattooing of the chin in women is practised in localities as far apart as Egypt, India, Japan, New Guinea, New Zealand, Easter Island and North and South America.

Miss Buckland rightly draws the conclusion that “the wide distribution of this peculiar custom is of considerable significance, especially as it follows so nearly in the line” which she had “indicated in two previous papers (8 and 9) as suggestive of a prehistoric intercourse between the two hemispheres.... When we find in India, Japan, Egypt, New Guinea, New Zealand, Alaska, Greenland and America, the custom of tattooing carried out in precisely the same manner and for the same ends, and when in addition to this we find a similarity in other ornaments, in weapons, in games, in modes of burial, and many other customs, we think it may fairly be assumed that they all derived these customs from a common source, or that at some unknown period, some intercourse existed” (p. 326).

In the first of her memoirs (8) Miss Buckland calls attention to “the curious connection between early worship of the serpent and a knowledge of metals,” which is of peculiar interest in this discussion, because the Proto-Egyptians, who were serpent-worshippers (see Sethe, 74), had a knowledge of metals at a period when, so far as our present knowledge goes, no other people had yet acquired it. Referring to the ancient Indian Indra, the Chaldean Ea and the Mexican Quetzalcoatl, among other gods, Miss Buckland remarks:—“The deities, kings and heroes who are symbolised by the serpent are commonly described as the pioneers of civilisation and the instructors of mankind in the arts of agriculture and mining.”

Further, in an interesting article on “Stimulants in Use among Savages and among the Ancients” (9), she tells us that “among aboriginal races in a line across the Pacific, from Formosa on the West to Peru and Bolivia on the East, a peculiar, and what would appear to civilised races a disgusting mode of preparing fermented drinks, prevails, the women being in all cases the chief manufacturers; the material employed varying according to the state of agriculture in the different localities, but the mode of preparation remaining virtually the same” (9, p. 213).

If space permitted I should have liked to make extensive quotations from Park Harrison’s most conclusive independent demonstration of the spread of culture along the same great route, at which he arrived from the study of the geographical distribution of the peculiar custom of artificially distending the lobe of the ear (29). This practice was not infrequent in Egypt (79) in the times of the new Empire, a fact which Harrison seems to have overlooked: but he records it amongst the Greeks, Hebrews, Etruscans, Persians, in Bœotia, Zanzibar, Natal, Southern India, Ceylon, Assam, Aracan, Burma, Laos, Nicobar Islands, Nias, Borneo, China, Solomon Islands, Admiralty Islands, New Hebrides, New Caledonia, Pelew Islands, Navigators Island, Fiji, Friendly Islands, Penrhyn, Society Islands, Easter Island, Peru, Palenque, Mexico, Brazil and Paraguay. This is an excellent and remarkably complete [if he had used the data now available it might have been made even more complete] mapping out of the great “heliolithic” track.

The identity of geographical distribution is no mere fortuitous coincidence.

It is of peculiar interest that Harrison is able to demonstrate a linked association between this custom and sun-worship in most of the localities enumerated. In the figures illustrating his memoir other obvious associations can be detected intimately binding it by manifold threads into the very texture of the “heliolithic culture.” If to this we add the fact that in many localities the design tattooed on the skin was the sun, we further strengthen the woof of the closely woven fabric that is gradually taking shape.

To these forty-year-old demonstrations let me add Wilson’s interesting recent monograph on the swastika (105), which independently tells the same story and blazens the same great track around the world (see his map). He further calls attention to the close geographical association between the distribution of the swastika and the spindle-whorl. By attributing the introduction of weaving and the swastika into most localities where they occur by the same culture-heroes he thereby adds the swastika to the “heliolithic” outfit, for weaving already belongs to it.

To these practices one might add a large series of others of a character no less remarkable, such, for example, as circumcision, the practice of massage (57, 67 and 11), the curious custom known as couvade, all of which are distributed along the great “heliolithic” pathway and belong to the great culture-complex which travelled by it.

But there are several interesting bits of corroborative evidence that I cannot refrain from mentioning.

One of the most carefully-investigated bonds of cultural connection between the Eastern Mediterranean in Phœnician times and pre-Columbian America (Tehuantepec) has recently been put on record by Zelia Nuttall in her memoir on “a curious survival in Mexico of the use of the Purpura shell-fish for dyeing” (50). After a very thorough and critical analysis of all the facts of this truly remarkable case of transmission of an extraordinary custom, Mrs. Nuttall justly concludes that “it seems almost easier to believe that certain elements of an ancient European culture were at one time, and perhaps once only, actually transmitted by the traditional small band of ... Mediterranean seafarers, than to explain how, under totally different conditions of race and climate, the identical ideas and customs should have arisen” (pp. 383 and 384). Nor does she leave us in any doubt as to the route taken by the carriers of this practice. Found in association with it, both in the Old and the New World, was the use of conch-shell trumpets and pearls. The antiquity of these usages is proved by their representation in pre-Columbian pictures or, in the case of the pearls, the finding of actual specimens in graves.

In Phœnician Greek, and later times these shell-trumpets were extensively used in the Mediterranean: “European travellers have found them in actual use in East India, Japan and, by the Alfurs, in Ceram, the Papuans of New Guinea, as well as in the South Sea islands as far as New Zealand,” and in many places in America (p. 378). “In the Old and the New World alike, are found, in the same close association, (1) the purple industry and skill in weaving; (2) the use of pearls and conch-shell trumpets; (3) the mining, working and trafficking in copper, silver and gold; (4) the tetrarchial form of government; (5) the conception of ‘Four Elements’; (6) the cyclical form of calendar. Those scholars who assert that all of the foregoing must have been developed independently will ever be confronted by the persistent and unassailable fact that, throughout America, the aborigines unanimously disclaim all share in their production and assign their introduction to strangers of superior-culture from distant and unknown parts” (p. 383).

Many other equally definite proofs might be cited of the transmission of customs from the Old to the New World, of which the instance reported by Tylor (102) is the classical example[2]; but I know of no other which has been so critically studied and so fully recorded as Mrs. Nuttall’s case.

But the difficulty may be raised—as in fact invariably happens when these subjects come up for discussion—as to the means of transmission. Rivers has explained what does actually happen in the contact of peoples (68) and how a small group of wanderers bringing the elements of a higher culture can exert a profound and far-reaching influence upon a large uncultured population (64 to 70).

Lane-Fox’s [Pitt Rivers’] memoir “on Early Modes of Navigation” (21) not only affords in itself an admirable summary of the definite evidence for the spread of culture; but is also doubly valuable to us, because incidentally it illustrates also the actual means by which the migrations of the culture-bearers took place. The survival into modern times, upon the Hooghly and other Indian rivers, of boats provided with the fantastic steering arrangement used by the Ancient Egyptians 2000 years B.C., is in itself a proof of ancient Egyptian influence in India; and the contemporary practice of representing eyes upon the bow of the ship enables us to demonstrate a still wider extension of that influence, for in modern times that custom has been recorded as far apart as Malta, India, China, Oceania and the North-West American coast.

But there is no difficulty about the question of the transmission of such customs. Most scholars who have mastered the early history of some particular area, in many cases those who most resolutely deny even the possibility of the wider spread of culture, frankly admit—because it would stultify their own localised researches to deny it—the intercourse of the particular people in which they are interested and its neighbours. Merely by using these links, forged by the reluctant hands of hostile witnesses, it is possible to construct the whole chain needed for such migrations as I postulate (see Map II.)

No one who reads the evidence collected by such writers as Ellis (15), de Quatrefages (60) and Percy Smith (98)[3] can doubt the fact of the extensive prehistoric migrations throughout the Pacific Ocean along definitely known routes. Even Joyce (whose otherwise excellent summaries of the facts relating to American archæology have been emasculated by his refusal to admit the influence of the Old World upon American culture) states that migrations from India extended to Indonesia (and Madagascar) and all the islands of the Pacific; and even that “it is likely that the coast of America was reached” (61, p. 119).[4]

There is no doubt as to the reality of the close maritime intercourse between the Persian Gulf and India from the eighth century B.C. (13; 14; 51; and 101); and of course it is a historical fact that the Mediterranean littoral and Egypt had been in intimate connexion with Babylonia for some centuries before, and especially after, that time.

Map 2.—An attempt to represent roughly the areas more directly affected by the “heliolithic” culture-complex, with arrows to indicate the hypothetical routes taken in the migrations of the culture-bearers who were responsible for its diffusion.

In the face of this overwhelming mass of definite evidence of the reality not only of the spread of culture and its carriers, but also of the ways and the means by which it travelled, it will naturally be asked how it has come to pass that there is even the shadow of a doubt as to the migrations which distributed this “heliolithic” culture-complex so widely in the world. It cannot be explained by lack of knowledge, for most of the facts that I have enumerated are taken bodily from the anthropological journals of forty or more years ago.

The explanation is to be found, I believe, in a curious psychological process incidental to the intensive study of an intricate problem. As knowledge increased and various scholars attempted to define the means by (and the time at) which the contacts of various peoples took place, difficulties were revealed which, though really trivial, were magnified into insuperable obstacles. All of these real difficulties were created by mistaken ideas of the relative chronology of the appearance of civilisation in various centres, and especially by the failure to realise that useful arts were often lost. For example, if on a certain mainland A two practices, a and b—one of them, a, a useful practice, say the making of pottery; the other, b, a useless custom, say the preservation of the corpse—were developed, and a was at least as old, or preferably definitely older than b, it seemed altogether inconceivable to the ethnologist if an island B was influenced by the culture of the mainland A, at some time after the practices a and b were in vogue, that it might, under any conceivable circumstances, fail to preserve the useful art a, even though it might allow the utterly useless practice b to lapse. Therefore it was argued that, if the later inhabitants of B mummified their dead, but did not make pottery, this was clear evidence that they could not have come under the influence of A.

But the whole of the formidable series of obstacles raised by this kind of argument has been entirely swept away by Dr. Rivers, who has demonstrated how often it has happened that a population has completely lost some useful art which it once had, and even more often clung to some useless practice (65).

The remarkable feature of the present state of the discussion is that, in spite of Rivers’ complete demolition of these difficulties (65), most ethnologists do not seem to realise that there is now a free scope for taking a clear and common-sense view of the truth, unhindered by any obstructions. It is characteristic of the history of scientific, no less than of theological argument, that the immediate effect of the destruction of the foundations of cherished beliefs is to make their more fanatical votaries shout their creed all the louder and more dogmatically, and hurl anathemas at those who dissent.

This is the only explanation I can offer of the remarkable presidential address delivered by Fewkes to the Anthropological Society of Washington in 1912 (18), Keane’s incoherent recklessness[5] (41, pp. 140, 218, 219, and 367 to 370), and the amazing criticisms which during the last four years I have had annually to meet. There is no attempt at argument, but mere dogmatic and often irrelevant assertions. The constant appeal to the meaningless phrase “the similarity of the working of the human mind”[6] (18), as though it were a magical incantation against logical induction, and harping on the so-called “psychological argument” (41), which is directly opposed to the teaching of psychology, are the only excuses one can obtain from the “orthodox” ethnologist for this obstinate refusal to face the issue. Of course it is a historical fact that the discussions of the theory of evolution inclined ethnologists during the last century the more readily to accept the laisser faire attitude, and put an end to all their difficulties by the pretence that most cultures developed independently in situ. It is all the more surprising that Huxley took some small part in encouraging this lapse into superficiality and abuse of the evolution conception, when it is recalled that, as Sir Michael Foster tells us, the then President of the Ethnological Society “made himself felt in many ways, not the least by the severity with which he repressed the pretensions of shallow persons who, taking advantage of the glamour of the Darwinian doctrine, talked nonsense in the name of anthropological science” (“Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley,” Vol. I., p. 263).

It is a singular commentary on the attitude of the “orthodox” school of ethnologists that, when pressed to accept the obvious teaching of ethnological evidence, they should desert the strong intrenchments which the difficulties of full and adequate explanation have afforded them in the past, and take refuge behind the straw barricades of imaginary psychological and biological analogies, which they have hastily constructed for their own purposes, and in flagrant defiance of all that the psychologist understands by the phrase “working of the human mind,” if perchance he is ever driven to employ this expression, or the meaning attached by the biologist to “evolution.”

It is not sufficient proof of my thesis, however, merely to expose the hollowness of the pretensions of one’s opponents, nor even to show the identity of geographical distribution and the linking up of customs to form the “heliolithic” culture-complex. Many writers have dimly realised that some such spread of culture took place, but by misunderstanding the nature of the factors that came into play or the chronology of the movements they were discussing (see especially Macmillan Brown’s (7) and Enoch’s (16) books, to mention the latest, but by no means the worst offenders), have brought discredit upon the thesis I am endeavouring to demonstrate.

Another danger has arisen out of the revulsion against Bastian’s old idea of independent evolution by his fellow-countrymen Frobenius, Graebner, Ankermann, Foy and others, with the co-operation of the Austrian philologist, Schmidt, and the Swiss ethnologist, Montandon (who has summarised the views of the new school in the first part of the new journal, Archives suisses d’Anthropologie générale, May, 1914, p. 113); for they have rushed to the other extreme, and, relying mainly upon objects of “material culture,” have put forward a method of analysis and postulated a series of migrations for which the evidence is very doubtful. Rivers (64) has pointed out the unreliability of such inferences when unchecked by the consideration of elements of culture which are not so easily bartered or borrowed as bows and spears. He has insisted upon the fundamental importance of the study of social organisation as supplying the most stable and trustworthy data for the analysis of a culture-complex and an index of racial admixture. The study of such a practice as mummification, the influence of which is deep-rooted in the innermost beliefs of the people who resort to it, affords data almost as reliable as Rivers’ method; for the subsequent account will make it abundantly clear that the practice of embalming leaves its impress upon the burial customs of a people long ages after other methods of disposal of their dead have been adopted.

I have been led into this digression by attempting to make it clear that the mere demonstration of the identity of geographical distribution and the linking together of a series of cultural elements by no means represents the solution of the main problem.

What has still to be elucidated is the manner and the place in which the complex fabric of the “heliolithic” culture was woven, the precise epoch in which it began to be spread abroad and the identity of its carriers, the influences to which it was subjected on the way, and the additions, subtractions and modifications which it underwent as the result.

Although I have now collected many of the data for the elucidation of these points, the limited space at my disposal compels me to defer for the present the consideration of the most interesting aspect of the whole problem, the identity of the early mariners who were the distributors of so strange a cargo. It was this aspect of the question which first led me into the controversy; but I shall be able to deal with it more conveniently when the ethnological case has been stated. The enormous bulk of the data that have accumulated compels me to omit a large mass of corroborative evidence of an ethnological nature; but no doubt there will be many opportunities in the near future for using up this reserve of ammunition.

Before setting out for the meeting of the British Association in Australia last year I submitted the following abstract of a communication (96) to be made to the Section of Anthropology:—

“After dealing with the evidence from the resemblances in the physical characteristics of widely separated populations—such, for instance, as certain of the ancient inhabitants of Western Asia on the one hand, and certain Polynesians on the other—suggesting far-reaching prehistoric migrations, the distribution of certain peculiarly distinctive practices, such as mummification and the building of megalithic monuments, is made use of to confirm the reality of such wanderings of peoples.

“I have already (at the Portsmouth, Dundee, and Birmingham meetings) dealt with the problem as it affects the Mediterranean littoral and Western Europe. On the present occasion I propose to direct attention mainly to the question of the spread of culture from the centres of the ancient civilisations along the Southern Asiatic coast and from there out into the Pacific. From the examination of the evidence supplied by megalithic monuments and distinctive burial customs, studied in the light of the historical information relating to the influence exerted by Arabia and India in the Far East, one can argue by analogy as to the nature of migrations in the even more remote past to explain the distribution of the earliest peoples dwelling on the shores of the Pacific.

“Practices such as mummification and megalith-building present so many peculiar and distinctive features that no hypothesis of independent evolution can seriously be entertained in explanation of their geographical distribution. They must be regarded as evidence of the diffusion of information, and the migrations of bearers of it, from somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Eastern Mediterranean, step by step out into Polynesia, and even perhaps beyond the Pacific to the American littoral.”

At that time it was my intention further to develop the arguments from megalithic monuments which I had laid before the Association at the three preceding meetings and elsewhere (90; 91; 92; 93; and especially 94); and endeavour to prove that the structure and the geographical distribution of these curious memorials pointed to the spread of a distinctive type of culture along the Southern Asiatic littoral, through Indonesia and Oceania to the American Continent. The geographical distribution of the practice of mummification was to have been used merely as a means of corroboration of what I then imagined to be the more complete megalithic record, and of emphasizing the fact that Egypt had played some part at least in originating these curiously linked customs.

But when I examined the mummy from Torres Straits in the Macleay Museum (University of Sydney), and studied the literature relating to the methods employed by the embalmers in that region (1; 19; 25; and 27), I was convinced, from my knowledge of the technical details used in mummification in ancient Egypt (see especially 78; 86 and 87), that these Papuan mummies supplied us with the most positive demonstration of the Egyptian origin of the methods employed. Moreover, as they revealed a series of very curious procedures, such as were not invented in Egypt until the time of the New Empire, and some of them not until the XXIst Dynasty, it was evident that the cultural wave which carried the knowledge of these things to the Torres Straits could not have started on its long course from Egypt before the ninth century B.C., at the earliest.

The incision for eviscerating the body was made in the flank, right or left, or in the perineum (19; 25)—the two sites selected for making the embalming incision in Egypt (78); the flank incision was made in the precise situation (between costal margin and iliac crest) which was distinctive of XXIst and XXIInd Dynasty methods in Egypt (86); and the wound was stitched up in accordance with the method employed in the case of the cheaper kinds of embalming at that period (78). When the flank incision was not employed an opening was made in the perineum, as was done in Egypt—the second method mentioned by Herodotus—in the case of less wealthy people (56, p. 46).

The viscera, after removal, were thrown into the sea, as, according to Porphyry and Plutarch, it was the practice in Egypt at one time (56, pp. 57 and 58) to cast them into the Nile.

The body was painted with a mixture containing red-ochre, the scalp was painted black, and artificial eyes were inserted. These procedures were first adopted (in their entirety) in Egypt during the XXIst Dynasty, although the experiments leading up to the adoption of these methods began in the XIXth.

But most remarkable of all, the curiously inexplicable Egyptian procedure for removing the brain, which in Egypt was not attempted until the XVIIIth Dynasty—i.e., until its embalmers had had seventeen centuries experience of their remarkable craft (78)—was also followed by the savages of the Torres Straits (25; 27)!

Surely it is inconceivable that such people could have originated the idea or devised the means for practising an operation so devoid of meaning and so technically difficult as this! The interest of their technique is that the Torres Straits operators followed the method originally employed in Egypt (in the case of the mummy of the Pharaoh Ahmes I. [86, p. 16]), which is one requiring considerable skill and dexterity, and not the simpler operation through the nostrils which was devised later (78).

The Darnley Islanders also made a circular incision through the skin of each finger and toe, and having scraped off the epidermis from the rest of the body, they carefully peeled off these thimbles of skin, and presented them to the deceased’s widow (25; 27).

This practice is peculiarly interesting as an illustration of the adoption of an ancient Egyptian custom in complete ignorance of the purpose it was intended to serve. The ancient Egyptian embalmers (and, again, those of the XXIst Dynasty) made similar circular incisions around fingers and toes, and also scraped off the rest of the epidermis: but the aim of this strange procedure was to prevent the general epidermis, as it was shed (which occurred when the body was steeped for weeks in the preservative brine bath), from carrying the finger- and toe-nails with it (78). A thimble of skin was left on each finger and toe to keep the nail in situ; and to make it doubly secure, it was tied on with string (78) or fixed with a ring of gold or a silver glove (84).

In the Torres Straits method of embalming the brine bath was not used; so the scraping off of the epidermis was wholly unnecessary. In addition, after following precisely the preliminary steps of this aimless proceeding, by deliberately and intentionally removing the skin-thimbles and nails they defeated the very objects which the Egyptians had in view when they invented this operation!

An elaborate technical operation such as this which serves no useful purpose and is wholly misunderstood by its practitioners cannot have been invented by them. It is another certain proof of the Egyptian origin of the practice.

There is another feature of these Papuan mummies which may or may not be explicable as the adoption of Egyptian practices put to a modified, if not a wholly different, use. Among the new methods introduced in Egypt in the XXIst Dynasty was a curious device for restoring to the mummy something of the fulness of form and outline it had lost during the process of preservation. Through various incisions (which incidentally no doubt allowed the liquid products of decomposition to escape) foreign materials were packed under the skin of the mummy (78; 87). These incisions were made between the toes, sometimes at the knees, in the region of the shoulders, and sometimes in other situations (78). In the Papuan method of mummification “cuts were made on the knee-caps and between the fingers and toes; then holes were pierced in the cuts with an arrow so as to allow the liquids to drip from them” (Hamlyn-Harris, 27, p. 3). In one of the mummies in the Brisbane museum there seem to be incisions also in the shoulders. The situation of these openings suggests the view that the idea of making them may (and I do not wish to put it any more definitely) have been suggested by the Egyptian XXIst Dynastic practice. For, although the incisions were made, in the latter case, for the purpose of packing the limbs, incidentally they served for drainage purposes.

But it was not only the mere method of embalming, convincing and definite as it is, that establishes the derivation of the Papuan from the Egyptian procedure; but also all the other funerary practices, and the beliefs associated with them, that help to clinch the proof. The special treatment of the head, the use of masks, the making of stone idols, these and scores of other curious customs (which have been described in detail in Haddon’s and Myers’ admirable account [25]) might be cited.

When I called the attention of the Anthropological Section to these facts and my interpretation of them at the meeting of the British Association in Melbourne, Professor J. L. Myres opened the discussion by adopting a line of argument which, even after four years’ experience of controversies of the megalith-problem, utterly amazed me. “What more natural than that people should want to preserve their dead? Or that in doing so they should remove the more putrescible parts? Would not the flank be the natural place to choose for the purpose? Is it not a common practice for people to paint their dead with red-ochre?” It is difficult to believe that such questions were meant to be taken seriously. The claim that it is quite a natural thing on the death of a near relative for the survivors instinctively to remove his viscera, dry the corpse over a fire, scrape off his epidermis, remove his brain through a hole in the back of his neck, and then paint the corpse red is a sample of casuistry not unworthy of a mediæval theologian. Yet this is the gratuitous claim made at a scientific meeting! If Professor Myres had known anything of the history of Anatomy he would have realized that the problem of preserving the body was one of extreme difficulty which for long ages had exercised the most civilized peoples, not only in antiquity, but also in modern times. In Egypt, where the natural conditions favouring the successful issue of attempts to preserve the body were largely responsible for the possibility of such embalming, it took more than seventeen centuries of constant practice and experimentation to reach the stage and to acquire the methods exemplified in the Torres Straits mummies. In Egypt also a curious combination of natural circumstances and racial customs was responsible for the suggestion of the desirability and the possibility artificially to preserve the corpse. How did the people of the Torres Straits acquire the knowledge even of the possibility of such an attainment, not to mention the absence of any inherent suggestion of its desirability? For in the hot, damp atmosphere of such places as Darnley Island the corpse would never have been preserved by natural means, so that the suggestion which stimulated the Egyptians to embark upon their experimentation was lacking in the case of the Papuans. But even if for some mysterious reasons these people had been prompted to attempt to preserve their dead, during the experimental stage they would have had to combat these same unfavourable conditions. Is it at all probable or even possible to conceive that under such exceptionally difficult, not to say discouraging, circumstances they would have persisted for long periods in their gruesome experiments; or have attained a more rapid success than the more cultured peoples of Egypt and Europe, operating under more favourable climatic conditions, and with the help of a knowledge of chemistry and physics, were able to achieve? The suggestion is too preposterous to call for serious consideration.

But if for the moment we assume that the Darnley Islander instinctively arrived at the conclusion that it was possible to preserve the dead, that he would rather like to try it, and that by some mysterious inspiration the technical means of attaining this object was vouchsafed him, why, when the whole ventral surface of the body was temptingly inviting him to operate by the simplest and most direct means, did he restrict his choice to the two most difficult sites for his incision? We know why the Egyptian made the opening in the left flank and in other cases in the perineum; but is it likely the Papuan, once he had decided to cut the body, would have had such a respect for the preservation of the integrity of the front of the body as to impel him to choose a means of procedure which added greatly to the technical difficulty of the operation? We have the most positive evidence that the Papuan had no such design, for it was his usual procedure to cut the head off the trunk and pay little further attention to the latter. Myres’ contention will not stand a moment’s examination.

As to the use of red-ochre, which Myres rightly claimed to be so widespread, no hint was given of the possibility that it might be so extensively practised simply because the Egyptian custom had spread far and wide.

It is important to remember that the practice of painting stone statues with red-ochre (obviously to make them more life-like) was in vogue in Egypt before 3000 B.C.; and throughout the whole “heliolithic” area, wherever the conception of human beings dwelling in stones, whether carved or not, was adopted, the Egyptian practice of applying red paint also came into vogue. But it was not until more than twenty centuries later—i.e. when, for quite definite reasons in the XXIst Dynasty, the Egyptians conceived the idea of converting the mummy itself into a statue—that they introduced the procedure of painting the mummy (the actual body), simply because it was regarded as the statue (78).

After Professor Myres, Dr. Haddon offered two criticisms. Firstly, the incisions in the feet and knees were not suggested by Egyptian practices, but were made for the strictly utilitarian purpose of draining the fluids from the body. I have dealt with this point already (vide supra). His second objection was that there were no links between Egypt and Papua to indicate that the custom had spread. The present communication is intended to dispose of that objection by demonstrating not only the route by which, but also how, the practice reached the Torres Straits after the long journey from Egypt.

It will be noticed that this criticism leaves my main arguments from the mummies quite untouched. Moreover, the fact that originally I made use of the testimony of the mummies merely in support of evidence of other kinds (the physical characters of the peoples and the distribution of megalithic monuments) was completely ignored by my critics.

But, as I have already remarked, it is not merely the remarkable identity of so many of the peculiar features of Papuan and Egyptian embalming that affords definite evidence of the derivation of one from the other; but in addition, many of the ceremonies and practices, as well as the traditions relating to the people who introduced the custom of mummification, corroborate the fact that immigrants from the west introduced these elements of culture. In addition, they also suggest their affinities.

“A hero-cult, with masked performers and elaborate dances, spread from the mainland of New Guinea to the adjacent islands: part of this movement seems to have been associated with a funeral ritual that emphasised a life after death.... Most of the funeral ceremonies and many sacred songs admittedly came from the west” (Haddon, 25, p. 45).

“Certain culture-heroes severally established themselves on certain islands, and they or their followers introduced a new cult which considerably modified the antecedent totemism,” and taught “improved methods of cultivation and fishing” (p. 44).

“An interesting parallel to these hero-cults of Torres Straits occurred also in Fiji. The people of Viti-Levu trace their descent from [culture-heroes] who drifted across the Big Ocean and taught to the people the cult associated with the large stone enclosures” (p. 45).

In these islands the people were expert at carving stone idols and they had legends concerning certain “stones that once were men” (p. 11). It is also significant that at the bier of a near relative, boys and girls, who had arrived at the age of puberty, had their ears pierced and their skin tattooed (p. 154).

Thus Haddon himself supplies so many precise tokens of the “heliolithic” nature of the culture of the Torres Straits.

These hints of migrations and the coming of strangers bringing from the west curious practices and beliefs may seem at first sight to add little to the evidence afforded by the technique of the embalming process; but the subsequent discussion will make it plain that the association of these particular procedures with mummification serves to clinch the demonstration of the source from which that practice was derived.

It is doubly interesting to obtain all this corroborative evidence from the writings of Dr. Haddon, in view of the fact, to which I have already referred, that he vigorously protested against my contention that the embalmers of the Torres Straits acquired their art, directly or indirectly, from Egypt. For, in his graphic account of a burial ceremony at Murray Islands, his confession that, as he watched the funerary boat and the wailing women, his “mind wandered back thousands of years, and called up ancient Egypt carrying its dead in boats across the sacred Nile” has a much deeper and more real significance than he intended. The analogy which at once sprang to his mind was not merely a chance resemblance, but the expression of a definite survival amongst these simple people in the Far East of customs their remote ancestors had acquired, through many intermediaries no doubt, from the Egyptians of the ninth century B.C.

At the time when Dr. Haddon asked for the evidence for the connection between Egypt and Papua, I was aware only of the Burmese practices (vide infra) in the intervening area, and the problem of establishing the means by which the Egyptian custom actually spread seemed to be a very formidable task.

But soon after my return from Australia all the links in the cultural chain came to light. Mr. W. J. Perry, who had been engaged in analysing the complex mixture of cultures in Indonesia, kindly permitted me to read the manuscript of the book he had written upon the subject. With remarkable perspicuity he had unravelled the apparently hopeless tangle into which the social organisation of this ethnological cockpit has been involved by the mixture of peoples and the conflict of diverse beliefs and customs. His convincing demonstration of the fact that there had been an immigration into Indonesia (from the West) of a people who introduced megalithic ideas, sun-worship and phallism, and many other distinctive practices and traditions, not only gave me precisely the information I needed, but also directed my attention to the fact that the culture (for which, so he informed me, Professor Brockwell, of Montreal, had suggested the distinctive term “heliolithic”) included also the practice of mummification. In the course of continuous discussions with him during the last four months a clear view of the whole problem and the means of solving most of its difficulties emerged.

For Perry’s work in this field, no less than for my own, Rivers’ illuminating and truly epoch-making researches (64 to 70) have cleared the ground. Not only has he removed from the path of investigators the apparently insuperable obstacles to the demonstration of the spread of cultures by showing how useful arts can be lost (65); but he has analysed the social organisation of Oceania in such a way that the various waves of immigration into the Pacific can be identified and with certainty be referred back to Indonesia (69). Many other scholars in the past have produced evidence (for example 2; 60; 61 and 98) to demonstrate that the Polynesians came from Indonesia; but Rivers analysed and defined the characteristic features of several streams of culture which flowed from Indonesia into the Pacific. Perry undertook the task of tracing these peoples through the Indonesian maze and pushing back their origins to India. In the present communication I shall attempt to sketch in broad outline the process of the gradual accumulation in Egypt and the neighbourhood of the cultural outfit of these great wanderers, and to follow them in their migrations west, south and east from the place where their curious assortment of customs and accomplishments became fortuitously associated one with the other (Map II.).

I cannot claim that my colleagues in this campaign against what seems to us to be the utterly mistaken precepts of modern ethnology see altogether eye to eye with me. They have been dealing exclusively with more primitive peoples amongst whom every new attainment, in arts and crafts, in beliefs and social organisation, in everything in fact that we regard as an element of civilization, has been introduced from without by more cultured races, or fashioned in the conflict between races of different traditions and ideals.

My investigations, on the contrary, have been concerned mainly with the actual invention of the elements of civilization and with the people who created practically all of its ingredients—the ideas, the implements and methods of the arts and crafts which give expression to it. Though superficially my attitude may seem to clash with theirs, in that I am attempting to explain the primary origin of some of the things, with which they are dealing only as ready-made customs and beliefs that were handed on from people to people, there is no real antagonism between us.

It is obvious that there must be a limit to the application of the borrowing-explanation; and when we are forced to consider the people who really invented things, it is necessary to frame some working hypothesis in explanation of such achievements, unless we feebly confess that it is useless to attempt such enquiries.

In previous works (82 and 85) I have explained why it must be something more than a mere coincidence that in Egypt, where the operation of natural forces leads to the preservation of the corpse when buried in the hot dry sand, it should have become a cardinal tenet in the beliefs of the people to strive after the preservation of the body as the essential means of continuing an existence after death. When death occurred the only difference that could be detected between the corpse and the living body was the absence of the vital spirit from the former. [For the interpretation of the Egyptians’ peculiar ideas concerning death, see Alan Gardiner’s, important article (23).] It was in a condition in some sense analogous to sleep; and the corpse, therefore, was placed in its “dwelling” in the soil lying in the attitude naturally assumed, by primitive people when sleeping. Its vital spirit or ka was liberated from the body, but hovered round the corpse so long as its tissues were preserved. It needed food and all the other things that ministered to the welfare and comfort of the living, not omitting the luxuries and personal adornments which helped to make life pleasant. Hence at all times graves became the objects of plunder on the part of unscrupulous contemporaries; and so incidentally the knowledge was forthcoming from time to time of the fate of the body in the grave.