The oldest cemeteries or funeral monuments of any sort date from the neolithic period. Then the full meaning of Death seems to have broken suddenly on man, and his whole life became little more than a _meditatio mortis_, a preparation for the world beyond the tomb. What Professor Granger says of the ancient Romans applies to very many primitive tribes: “In the belief of the Romans, the right to live was not estimated more highly than the right to receive proper burial.”[257] The funeral or mortuary ceremonies, which are often so elaborate, and so punctiliously performed in savage tribes, have a twofold purpose. They are equally for the benefit of the individual and for that of the community. If they are neglected or inadequately conducted, the restless spirit of the departed cannot reach the realm of joyous peace, and therefore he returns to lurk about his former home and to plague the survivors for their carelessness. It was therefore to lay the ghost, to avoid the anger of the disembodied spirit, that the living instituted and performed the burial ceremonies; while it became to the interest of the individual to provide for it that those rites should be carried out which would conduct his own soul to the abode of the blessed. These were as various as were the myths of the after-world and the fancies as to the number and destiny of the personal souls. Most common of them all was some sort of funeral feast. The disagreeable suggestion is close, that this was a survival of the habit of eating the corpse itself. Up to a very recent date that habit prevailed among the Bolivian Indians; and so desirable an end was it esteemed that the traveller D’Orbigny tells of an old man he met there whose only regret at embracing Christianity was that his body would be eaten by worms instead of by his relations! The later theory, however, was that then the soul itself was supplied with food. It partook spiritually of the viands and thus, well fortified for its long journey, departed in good humour with those it left behind. The same notion led to the world-wide custom of providing it with many articles by placing them in the tomb or burning them on the funeral pyre. This extended not only to weapons, utensils, ornaments, and clothing, but not infrequently to companions. On the coast of Peru the wives of a man were burned alive with his dead body, and among the Natchez they were knocked on the head and interred under the same mounds.[258] I have seen the mummy of a woman from the Cliff Dwellers of Arizona, holding in her arms the body of her babe which had been strangled with a cord, still tightly stretched around its little neck. Plainly the sympathetic survivors had reflected how lonely the poor mother would be in the next world without her babe, and had determined that its soul should accompany hers. Elsewhere, slaves or companions in arms were slain or slew themselves that they might accompany some famous chieftain to his long home.