It is suggested by Mr. Murray, as by Helbig, that cremation was adopted, during the dark age of the Migrations, by men who wished to burn their dead "into their ultimate dust," that the dust might not be violated by hostile hands. The custom, Mr. Murray suggests, was a revival of what the Northerners had used "in the forest country from which they came." Possibly if wood were very scarce in Crete and Greece, the Northerners there might adopt the local method of burial, and revert to their own custom at Troy, where Ida furnished forests. But Homer supposes cremation and caim-burial to be universal in Greece; and his whole theory of the future life rests on cremation. The rite admits the dead to the House of Hades, ineffectual shadows, unfed, unfeared, unworshipped; and from the House of Hades they never return. By the eighth century, and so on continuously, ghosts _can_ appear to men, and are fed, feared, and worshipped, as they had been in Aegean times. The belief of Homer is the belief of Israel, Hades is the Sheol of Samuel. The manners of ancient Israel are of interest as regards cremation. The Philistines treated the corpse of Saul as Hector meant to treat that of Patroclus, whose head he would have set on a spike above the wall of Troy. "They fastened Saul's body to the wall of Beth-shan." His sons' corpses were used in the same way, but were rescued by valiant Israelites, who burned the bones and buried them under a tree. This appears to have been done for the purpose of concealing the bones from further outrage. No cairn is mentioned.[6] But cremation, in the case of kings at least, appears to have persisted in Israel and Judah. Asa, king of Judah, when he died, was "laid in the bed which was filled with sweet odours and divers kinds of spices; and they made a very great burning for him." His tomb he had caused to be digged for him; there his bones were laid.[7] Of Jehoram we read that "his people made no burning for him, like the burning of his forefathers."[8] Jeremiah prophesies for Zedekiah: "Thou shalt die in peace: and with the burnings of thy forefathers, the former kings which were before thee, so shall they burn odours for thee."[9] In Israel an unusual lack of interest in the future life accompanied cremation of kings, if cremated they were; but the commentators prefer to believe that they were not, and that only odorous substances and "furniture" were burned. Why burn furniture?[10] But Homer's faith is unique in Greece, Aegean or historic it represents a single age of culture--which has left no material proof of its existence. Homer's burial rites cannot have arisen out of a practice adopted during the Migrations, for no people that wished to conceal the resting-place of their dead would raise above it a conspicuous cairn and pillar, for the very purpose of keeping the dead in perpetual memory. Such cairns would merely have invited desecration during the Migrations.[11]