The Gauls, as we know from Cæsar, burned some of the servants, slaves, and favourite animals of the dead chief, or warrior, in celebrating their funeral rites. Cremation was not practised in Asia Minor, Phœnicia, or Palestine. The Egyptians embalmed their dead, for they believed that as long as the body existed, so long did the soul exist in the spirit world. The Scythians, as Herodotus tells us, did not burn, but buried their dead. They embalmed the body of their king; and ‘they strangle and bury with him one of his concubines, his cook, cup-bearer, groom, lackey, his messenger, and some of his horses, firstlings of all his other possessions, and some golden cups.’ Over all was raised a mound; and ‘this Scythian custom, in its late Greek and Roman imitations, explains the countless tumuli which travellers see to this day in Bulgaria, in the Dobrudscha, in Wallachia, Moldavia, and Southern Russia, as far as the Crimea.’[65] The Thracians either burned or buried their dead, held feasts and games, and raised tumuli. In Illyria and in Bosnia, as we have stated, inhumation and cremation were observed at the same time. Historical evidence goes to show that the Thracians and Illyrians were conquered by the Celtic tribes from the Alps; ‘and as the culture of the early Iron Age in the Danubian region corresponds to that of the Celtic Hallstatt, there is a probability that the practice of cremation, which makes its appearance in the early Iron Age in Bosnia, and which was practised by some Thracians in the fifth century B.C., was introduced by the Celtic conquerors who lived with the Illyrians and Thracian tribes.’[66] Mr. Ridgeway, having carefully considered the methods of disposing of the dead in the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, finds that, without exception, ‘inhumation, or some other method of disposing of the body without the use of fire, was universal in early times, and continued so over most of the area down to the Christian era.’ His conclusion is ‘that cremation did not pass into Greece from either Libya, Egypt, or Asia Minor, nor did it originate among the Pelasgians of the islands, nor yet in the mainland.’[67] Whether the practice arose among the Celtic tribes of Central Europe, or was adopted by them, it passed with other customs and things westwards and northwards along the trade routes, and its adoption in Britain and Ireland was merely a matter of time.