The migrations of early culture: A study of the significance of the geographical distribution of the practice of mummification as evidence of the migrations of peoples and the spread of certain customs and beliefsSmith, Grafton Elliot
History
The migrations of early culture: A study of the significance of the geographical distribution of the practice of mummification as evidence of the migrations of peoples and the spread of certain customs and beliefs
Smith, Grafton Elliot
Ethnology; Human beings -- Migrations; Mummies
These interesting records are of considerable value in establishing
connexions between East Africa and regions further east, which will be
discussed in the following pages.
[In my search for information concerning the practice of embalming in
India, where by inference I was convinced it must have had some vogue
in ancient times, I completely overlooked the important memoir by Mr.
W. Crooke on “Primitive Rites of Disposal of the Dead, with Special
Reference to India” (_Journ. Anthrop. Inst._, Vol. XXIX, 1899, p. 272).
Since the rest of this article has been in print Mr. Crooke has kindly
called my attention to his memoir and given me a lot of other valuable
information. Fortunately all this evidence supports and substantiates
the opinions I had previously arrived at inductively. For it provides
a complete series of connecting links between the western and eastern
portions of the chain I am reconstructing. It is too bulky to insert here
and too important merely to summarise, so that I must postpone fuller
discussion of this Indian evidence until some future time.]
If it is admitted that the custom of mummification as it is practised,
for example, in the islands of the Torres Straits was derived from Egypt,
however remotely and indirectly, it is clear that, as the technique
includes a number of curious features which were not introduced in Egypt
before the XVIIIth, XXth and XXIst Dynasties (respectively in the case
of different procedures), the migration of people carrying the methods
east could not have left Egypt before the time of the XXIst Dynasty,
say 900 B.C. as the earliest possible date. At this time Egypt was in
very close relationship with the Soudan and Western Asia; and it is
obvious that the Egyptian practices may have reached the Persian Gulf
by three routes:—(1) _viâ_ the Soudan, the head-waters of the Nile and
the Somali Coast, (2) by the Red Sea route, and (3) from the Phœnician
Coast down the Euphrates. No doubt all three routes served as avenues for
communication and for the transmission of cultural influences; and it is
not essential for our immediate purposes to enquire which channel served
to transmit each element of Egyptian culture that made its influence
felt in the neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf at this period. For it was
a period of active maritime enterprise, especially on the part of the
Phœnicians, both in the Mediterranean and the Southern Seas, and a time
when the fluctuating political fortunes of Egypt, Western Asia and the
Soudan produced a more intimate intermingling of the peoples, so that
they mutually influenced one another most profoundly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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