The funeral rites are simple. The body of the Yezidi, like that of a Mohammedan, is washed in running water. After being laid on a flat board, they dress him with his former clothes, close the openings in his body with pieces of cotton, place the sacred clay of Šeiḫ ‘Adi in his mouth, on his face and forehead, under his shoulders and eyes, and on his stomach. This done, they carry the dead on the board to the cemetery. The ḳawwals, burning incense, lead the procession; the immediate relatives, especially the women, following, dressed in white and throwing dust over their heads, and accompanied by male and female friends and neighbors. If the dead be a man, they then dance, the mother or the wife holding in one hand the sword or shield of the dead, and in the other, long locks cut from her own hair. They bury him with his face turned toward the north star. Everyone present throws a little dust over the grave while saying, “O man, thou wert dust and hast returned to dust to-day.” Then the šeiḫ says, “When we say, ‘Let us rise and go home,’ then the dead man will say, ‘I will not go home with the people.’ And when he tries to get up, his head will strike the stone, when he will say, ‘O, I am among the dead.’” When they return home, the family slaughters oxen and sheep and gives meat to the poor. The poor kill four or five sheep; the rich, a hundred. The kochaks prophesy of the dead, whether he will return to the earth or will go to another world. They hold that some will be eternally condemned, but that all will spend an expiatory period; and that the dead have communion with the living, in which the good souls dwelling in the heavens make revelations to their brethren on earth. III NATIONALITY Four different theories have been advanced as to the race to which the Yezidis belong. There are those who think them to be of Indo-European origin, for there is a type among them that has a white skin, a round skull, blue eyes and light hair. And there are those who suppose them to be Arabs on the ground that the color of skin of another type is brown, their eyes are wide, their lips are thick and their hair is dark. The western writers, moreover, have in the past always taken them for Kurds because of the close resemblance of the two in appearance and manners. In his “La Turquie d’Asie,” Vital Cunet says that though the Yezidis have been taken for Kurds, they can no longer be regarded as such, for in many ways they resemble other nationalities. On the other hand Hormuzd Rassam, in his “Asshur and the Land of Nimrud” seems to agree with those who suppose them to be of Assyrian origin. He bases this inference on the independent and martial spirit which they possess, and their tendency to rebel against their oppressors, which, according to him, may be taken as an indication of ancestral inheritance.[162] IV LOCALITY