At Kerma, near the Third Cataract, Reisner has recently unearthed a cemetery which he refers to the Hyksos Period (=62=, p. 23). “The burial customs are revolting in their barbarity. On a carved bed in the middle of a big circular pit the chief personage lies on his right side with his head east. Under his head is a wooden pillow: between his legs a sword or dagger. Around the bed lie a varying number of bodies, male and female, all contracted on the right side, head east. Among them are the pots and pans, the cosmetic jars, the stools, and other objects. Over the whole burial is spread a great ox-hide. It is clear they were all buried at once. The men and women round about must have been sacrificed so that their spirits might accompany the chief to the other world.... I could not escape the belief that they had been buried alive” (=62=). These funerary practices supply a most important link in the chain which I am endeavouring to forge. I would especially call attention (1) to the fact of the sacrifice of the chief’s (? wives and) servants and (2) to the burial of the chief himself on a bed. We know that the Egyptian practice of mummification spread south into Nubia (=39=) and the Soudan. According to Herodotus the ancient Macrobioi preserved the bodies of their dead by drying: then they covered them with plaster, painted them to look like living men, and set them up in their houses for a year. For a fuller account of this practice and much more instructive information for comparison see Ridgeway’s “Early Age of Greece,” Vol. I., p. 483 _et seq._ Numerous references in the classical writers lead us to believe that a similar custom of keeping the mummy in the house of the relatives for a longer or shorter period may have been in vogue in Egypt. Throughout the widespread area in which mummification was practised—from Africa to America—a precisely similar practice is found among many peoples. The custom of covering the mummies with plaster[12] is an interesting survival of the practice described by Junker in Egypt (_vide supra_), which seems to supply the explanation of the curious measures adopted for modelling the face in Melanesia. Even at the present day, centuries after the art of the embalmer disappeared from Egypt, mummification is being attempted by certain people dwelling in the neighbourhood of the head-waters of the Nile. In his article in Hastings’ Dictionary (=32=, p. 418) Hartland states that the practice of mummification is found “more or less throughout the west of Africa: among the Niamniam of the Upper Nile basin the bodies of chiefs, and among the Baganda the kings, are preserved, and the custom is found also among the Warundi in German East Africa (Frobenius); and in British Central Africa the corpse is rubbed with boiled maize (Werner).”