[1] _Beowulf_, 184-188, Mr. Clark Hall's translation. [2] _Odyssey_, xi. 489-491. [3] _Beowulf_, 2803-2808. [4] _Odyssey_, xi. 74-76. [5] Burrows, _Discoveries in Crete_, p. 101. Evans, _Prehistoric Tombs of Knossos_, p. 134. [6] 1 Sam. xxxi. 10-13. [7] 2 Chron. xvi. 14. [8] 2 Chron. xxi. 19. [9] Jer. xxxiv. 5. [10] Hastings' _Dict. of Bible_, art. "Cremation." [11] _R. G. E_. pp. 72, 73. Mr. Murray supposes cremation, with _secret_ burial. If so, the cairn was a later addition made in settled times, after the Migrations. [12] Mr. Burrows remarks: "Neither Professor Ridgeway nor Mr. Lang is able to make the slightest use of the combinations suggested by the East Cretan graves," in which, for example, bronze weapons and inhumated bones are found side by side with burned bones, in urns, and iron weapons (_Discoveries in Crete_, p. 215). The facts are certainly of no use to any theory of mine: they are quite un-Homeric facts. I can only state the question thus: Homer uniformly describes a very well known mode of burial. Did he invent it? Did he receive it from tradition; and if so, from a tradition of what place and period? Is it possible that a poet of the age of overlapping of bronze and iron, of inhumation and cremation, in Greece, persists in reproducing, in great detail, a method of burial removed from his own experience by all the time that had passed since the Achaeans left their northern forests? If they retained the mode in Greece, where are the cairns? [13] Iliad, vii. 85. The word is also found, Iliad, xvi. 456 = 674. [14] xxiii. 170, 171. [15] xxiii. 23. CHAPTER XII RELIGION IN GREECE: PRE-HISTORIC, HOMERIC, AND HISTORICAL In religion, as in all things, the Homeric world at certain points stands apart from the worlds that preceded and followed it. The Aegeans probably did not give _divine_ honours to the dead. Over Royal tombs in the acropolis of Mycenae was "a small round altar with a well-like opening in the middle, which had doubtless been used for sacrificing to the dead."[1] This is ghost-feeding, not ghost-divinising. We have also a Cretan picture of a ghost standing outside his tomb, while an ox is sacrificed to him, the blood falling into the vessel. But such traces of hero-worship are rare in Aegean art, and Cretan _art_ shows no representations of sacrifice of animals to gods. There was, indeed, an ancient tradition that Minos abolished blood-sacrifices.[2] Certain sites, however, show bones of animals sacrificed in Minoan times. On the other hand, worship of high gods is frequently represented on Aegean engraved rings and in pictures. While there is no representation of blood-sacrifice to gods, fruit of a sacred tree is often plucked, by attendants, for goddesses, standing or seated.[3]