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
According to Page (=52=), who has described one of the two Jivaro
specimens now in the Manchester Museum, desiccation by heat was the
method of preservation. He adds, “‘Momea’ and ‘Chancha’ are the names
commonly given to such specimens by the natives.” Surely the former must
be a Spanish importation!
A comparison of this variety in the methods of preserving the body
in America with the series of similar practices which I have been
following from the African shore, makes it abundantly plain that there
can be no doubt as to the source of the American inspiration to do such
extraordinary things. The remarkable burial ritual and all the associated
procedures afford strong corroborative evidence.
But the proof of the influence of the civilizations of the Old World on
pre-Columbian America does not depend upon the evidence of one set of
practices, however complex, bizarre and distinctive they may be.
The positive demonstration that I have endeavoured to build up in this
communication depends upon the fact that the whole of the complex
structure of the “heliolithic” culture, which was slowly built up in
Egypt during the course of the thirty centuries before 900 B.C., spread
to the east, acquiring on its way accretions from the civilizations of
the Mediterranean, Western Asia, Eastern Africa, India, Eastern Asia and
Indonesia and Oceania, until it reached America. Like a potent ferment it
gradually began to leaven the vast and widespread aboriginal culture of
the Americas.
The rude megalithic architecture of America bears obvious evidences of
the same inspiration which prompted that of the Old World; and so far
as the more sumptuous edifices are concerned the primary stimulus of
Egyptian ideas, profoundly modified by Babylonian, and to a less extent
Indian and Eastern Asiatic, influences is indubitable. Comparison of the
truncated pyramids of America, of the Pacific, Eastern Asia and Indonesia
with those of ancient Chaldea, affords quite definite corroboration of
these views. It would be idle to pretend that so complex a design and so
strange a symbolism as the combination of the sun’s disc with the serpent
and the greatly expanded wings of a hawk, carved upon the lintel of the
door of a temple of the sun, could possibly have developed independently
in Ancient Egypt and in Mexico (see especially Bancroft, =3=, Vol. IV.,
p. 351).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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