These facts are so familiar that we are apt to overlook the strangeness of them in the history of religious evolution. The cult of ancestral spirits begins in the lowest barbarism, just above the level of the Australian tribes, who, among the Dieri, show some traces of the practice, at least, of ghost feeding. [Footnote: Howitt, _Native Tribes of South-Eastern Australia,_ p. 448. There are also traces of propitiation in Western Australia (MS. of Mrs. Bates).] Sometimes, as in many African tribes, ancestor worship is almost the whole of practical cult. Usually it accompanies polytheism, existing beside it on a lower plane. It was prevalent in the Mycenae of the shaft graves; in Attica it was uninterrupted; it is conspicuous in Greece from the ninth century onwards. But it is unknown to or ignored by the Homeric poets, though it can hardly have died out of folk custom. Consequently, the poems are of one age, an age of cremation and of burial in barrows, with no ghost worship. Apparently some revolution as regards burial occurred between the age of the graves of the Mycenaean acropolis and the age of Homer. That age, coming with its form of burning and its absence of the cult of the dead, between two epochs of inhumation, ancestor worship, and absence of cairns, is as certainly and definitely an age apart, a peculiar period, as any epoch can be. Cremation, with cairn burial of the ashes, is, then, the only form of burial mentioned by Homer, and, as far as the poet tells us, the period was not one in which iron was used for swords and spears. At Assarlik (Asia Minor) and in Thera early graves, prove the use of cremation, but also, unlike Homer, of iron weapons. [Footnote: Paton, Journal _of Hellenic Studies,_ viii. 64_ff_. For other references, cf. Poulsen, _Die Dipylongraeben_, p. 2, Notes. Leipzig 1905.] In these graves the ashes are inurned. There are examples of the same usage in Salamis, without iron. In Crete, in graves of the period of geometrical ornament ("Dipylon"), burning is more common than inhumation. Cremation is attested in a _tholos_ or beehive-shaped grave in Argos, where the vases were late Mycenaean. Below this stratum was an older shaft grave, as is usual in _tholos_ interments; it had been plundered? [Footnote: Poulsen, p.2.]