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PUBLICATIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER.

The Migrations of Early Culture.

Published by the University of Manchester at THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 12, LIME GROVE, OXFORD ROAD, MANCHESTER

LONGMANS, GREEN & CO. LONDON: 39, Paternoster Row NEW YORK: 443-449, Fourth Avenue and Thirtieth Street BOMBAY: 8, Hornby Road CALCUTTA: 303, Bowbazar Street MADRAS: 167, Mount Road

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

MANCHESTER AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 12, LIME GROVE, OXFORD ROAD LONGMANS, GREEN & CO. London, New York, Bombay, etc. 1915

UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER PUBLICATIONS

PREFACE

When these pages were crudely flung together no fate was contemplated for them other than that of publication in the proceedings of a scientific society, as an appeal to ethnologists to recognise the error of their ways and repent. They were intended merely as a mass of evidence to force scientific men to recognise and admit that in former ages knowledge and culture spread in much the same way as they are known to be diffused to-day. The only difference is that the pace of migration has become accelerated.

The re-publication in book form was suggested by the Secretary of the Manchester University Press, who thought that the matters discussed in these pages would appeal to a much wider circle of readers than those who are given to reading scientific journals.

Such a method of stating the argument necessarily involves a considerable amount of repetition of statements and phrases, which is apt to irritate the reader and offend his sense of literary style. In extenuation of this admitted defect it must be remembered that the brochure was intended as a protest against the accusation of artificiality and improbability so often launched against the explanation suggested here: the cumulative effect of corroboration was deliberately aimed at, by showing that many investigators employing the most varied kinds of data had independently arrived at identical conclusions and often expressed them in similar phrases.

Only a very small fraction of the evidence is set forth in the present work. Much of the most illuminating information has only come to the author's knowledge since this memoir was in the press; and a vast amount of the data, especially that relating to Europe, India and China, is too intimately intertwined with the effects of other cultures to be discussed and dissociated from them in so limited a space as this.

Nor has any attempt been made to discuss the times of the journeys, the duration of the intercourse, or the details of the goings and the comings of the ancient mariners who distributed so curious an assortment of varied cargoes to the coast-lines of the whole world--literally "from China to Peru." They exerted an influence upon the history of civilization and achieved marvels of maritime daring that must be reckoned of greater account, as they were so many ages earlier, than those of the more notorious mediaeval European adventurers and buccaneers who, impelled by similar motives, raided the Spanish Main and the East Indies.

As the pages show, this book is reprinted from volume 59, part 2, of the "Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society," session 1914-15; and I am indebted to the Council of that body for their kind permission to re-issue it in its present form.

G. ELLIOT SMITH.

Map 1. A rough chart of the geographical distribution of certain customs, practices and traditions

Map 2. An attempt to represent roughly the areas more directly affected by the "heliolithic" culture-complex, with arrows to indicate the hypothetical routes taken in the migration of the culture-bearers who were responsible for its diffusion

In entering upon the discussion of the geographical distribution of the practice of mummification I am concerned not so much with the origin and technical procedures of this remarkable custom. This aspect of the problem I have already considered in a series of memoirs . I have chosen mummification rather as the most peculiar, and therefore the most distinctive and obtrusive, element of a very intimately interwoven series of strange customs, which became fortuitously linked one with the other to form a definite culture-complex nearly thirty centuries ago, and spread along the coast-lines of a great part of the world, stirring into new and distinctive activity the sluggish uncultured peoples which in turn were subjected to this exotic leaven.

If one looks into the journals of anthropology and ethnology, there will be found amongst the vast collections of information relating to man's activities a most suggestive series of facts concerning the migrations of past ages and the spread of peculiar customs and beliefs.

If a map of the world is taken and one plots out the geographical distribution of such remarkable customs as the building of megalithic monuments , the worship of the sun and the serpent , the custom of piercing the ears , tattooing , the practice of circumcision, the curious custom known as couvade, the practice of massage, the complex story of the creation, the deluge, the petrifaction of human beings, the divine origin of kings and a chosen people sprung from an incestuous union , the use of the swastika-symbol , the practice of cranial deformation, to mention only a few of the many that might be enumerated, it will be found that in most respects the areas in which this extraordinary assortment of bizarre customs and beliefs is found coincide one with the other. In some of the series gaps occur, which probably are more often due to lack of information on our part than to real absence of the practice; in other places one or other of the elements of this complex culture-mixture has overflowed the common channel and broken into new territory. But considered in conjunction these data enable us definitely and precisely to map out the route taken by this peculiarly distinctive group of eccentricities of the human mind. If each of them is considered alone there are many breaks in the chain and many uncertainties as to the precise course: but when taken together all of these gaps are bridged. Moreover, in most areas there are traditions of culture-heroes, who brought in some or all of these customs at one and the same time and also introduced a knowledge of agriculture and weaving.

So far as I am aware no one hitherto has called attention to the fact that the practice of mummification has a geographical distribution exactly corresponding to the area occupied by the curious assortment of other practices just enumerated. Not only so, but in addition it is abundantly clear that the coincidence is not merely accidental. It is due to the fact that in most regions the people who introduced the habit of megalithic building and sun-worship also brought with them the practice of mummification at the same time.

The custom of embalming the dead is in fact an integral part of the "heliolithic culture," and perhaps, as I shall endeavour to demonstrate, its most important component. For this practice and the beliefs which grew up in association with it were responsible for the development of some of the chief elements of this culture-complex, and incidentally of the bond of union with other factors not so intimately connected, in the genetic sense, with it.

Before plunging into the discussion of the evidence provided by the practice of mummification, it will be useful to consider for a moment the geographical distribution of the other components of the "heliolithic culture." I need not say much about megalithic monuments, for I have already considered their significance elsewhere ; but I should like once more specifically to call the attention of those who are obsessed by theories of the independent evolution of such monuments, and who scoff at Fergusson , to the memoirs of Lane Fox and Meadows Taylor . The latter emphasises in a striking manner the remarkable identity of structure, not only as concerns the variety and the general conception of such monuments, but also as regards trivial and apparently unessential details. With reference to "the opinion of many," which has "been advanced as an hypothesis, that the common instincts of humanity have suggested common methods of sepulture," he justly remarks, "I own this kind of vague generalisation does not satisfy me, in the face of such exact points of similitude.... Such can hardly have been the result of accident, or any common human instinct" .

But it is not merely the identity of structure and the geographical distribution that proves the common origin of megalithic monuments. It is further strongly corroborated by a remarkable series of beliefs, traditions and practices, many of them quite meaningless and unintelligible to us, which are associated with such structures wherever they are found. Stories of dwarfs and giants , the belief in the indwelling of gods or great men in the stones, the use of these structures in a particular manner for certain special councils , and the curious, and, to us, meaningless, practice of hanging rags on trees in association with such monuments . In reference to the last of these associated practices, Lane Fox remarks, "it is impossible to believe that so singular a custom as this could have arisen independently in all these countries."

Taking all of these facts into consideration, it is to me altogether inconceivable how any serious enquirer who familiarises himself with the evidence can honestly refuse to admit that the case for the spread of the inspiration to erect megalithic monuments from one centre has been proved by an overwhelming mass of precise and irrefutable data. But this evidence does not stand alone. It is linked with scores of other peculiar customs and beliefs, the testimony of each of which, however imperfect and unconvincing some scholars may consider it individually, strengthens the whole case by cumulation; and when due consideration is given to the enormous complexity and artificiality of the cultural structure compounded of such fantastic elements, these are bound to compel assent to their significance, as soon as the present generation of ethnologists can learn to forget the meaningless fetish to which at present it bends the knee.

But suppose, for the sake of argument, we shut our ears to the voice of common sense, and allow ourselves to be hypnotised into the belief that some complex and highly specialised instinct impelled groups of men scattered as far apart as Ireland, India and Peru independently the one of the other to build mausolea of the same type, to acquire similar beliefs regarding the petrifaction of human beings, and many other extraordinary things connected with such monuments, how is this "psychological explanation" going to help us to explain why the wives of the builders of these monuments, whether in Africa, Asia or America, should have their chins pricked and rubbed with charcoal, or why they should circumcise their boys, or why they should have a tradition of the deluge? Does any theory of evolution help in explaining these associations? They are clearly fortuitous associations of customs and beliefs, which have no inherent relationship one to the other. They became connected purely by chance in one definite locality, and the fact that such incongruous customs reappear in association in distant parts of the globe is proof of the most positive kind that the wanderings of peoples must have brought this peculiar combination of freakish practices from the centre where chance linked them together.

Because it was the fashion among a particular group of megalith-builders to tattoo the chins of their womenkind, the wanderers who carried abroad the one custom also took the other: but there is no genetic or inherent connection between megalith-building and chin-tattooing.

Such evidence is infinitely stronger and more convincing than that afforded by one custom considered by itself, because in the former case we are dealing with an association which is definitely and obviously due to pure chance, such as the so-called psychological method, however casuistical, is impotent to explain.

But the study of such a custom as tattooing, even when considered alone, affords evidence that ought to convince most reasonable people of the impossibility of it having independently arisen in different, widely scattered, localities. The data have been carefully collected and discussed with clear insight and common sense by Miss Buckland in an admirable memoir, which I should like to commend to all who still hold to the meaningless dogma "of the similarity of the working of the human mind" as an explanation of the identity of customs. Tattooing is practised throughout the great "heliolithic" track.

Tattooing of the chin in women is practised in localities as far apart as Egypt, India, Japan, New Guinea, New Zealand, Easter Island and North and South America.

Miss Buckland rightly draws the conclusion that "the wide distribution of this peculiar custom is of considerable significance, especially as it follows so nearly in the line" which she had "indicated in two previous papers as suggestive of a prehistoric intercourse between the two hemispheres.... When we find in India, Japan, Egypt, New Guinea, New Zealand, Alaska, Greenland and America, the custom of tattooing carried out in precisely the same manner and for the same ends, and when in addition to this we find a similarity in other ornaments, in weapons, in games, in modes of burial, and many other customs, we think it may fairly be assumed that they all derived these customs from a common source, or that at some unknown period, some intercourse existed" .

In the first of her memoirs Miss Buckland calls attention to "the curious connection between early worship of the serpent and a knowledge of metals," which is of peculiar interest in this discussion, because the Proto-Egyptians, who were serpent-worshippers , had a knowledge of metals at a period when, so far as our present knowledge goes, no other people had yet acquired it. Referring to the ancient Indian Indra, the Chaldean Ea and the Mexican Quetzalcoatl, among other gods, Miss Buckland remarks:--"The deities, kings and heroes who are symbolised by the serpent are commonly described as the pioneers of civilisation and the instructors of mankind in the arts of agriculture and mining."

Further, in an interesting article on "Stimulants in Use among Savages and among the Ancients" , she tells us that "among aboriginal races in a line across the Pacific, from Formosa on the West to Peru and Bolivia on the East, a peculiar, and what would appear to civilised races a disgusting mode of preparing fermented drinks, prevails, the women being in all cases the chief manufacturers; the material employed varying according to the state of agriculture in the different localities, but the mode of preparation remaining virtually the same" .

If space permitted I should have liked to make extensive quotations from Park Harrison's most conclusive independent demonstration of the spread of culture along the same great route, at which he arrived from the study of the geographical distribution of the peculiar custom of artificially distending the lobe of the ear . This practice was not infrequent in Egypt in the times of the new Empire, a fact which Harrison seems to have overlooked: but he records it amongst the Greeks, Hebrews, Etruscans, Persians, in Boeotia, Zanzibar, Natal, Southern India, Ceylon, Assam, Aracan, Burma, Laos, Nicobar Islands, Nias, Borneo, China, Solomon Islands, Admiralty Islands, New Hebrides, New Caledonia, Pelew Islands, Navigators Island, Fiji, Friendly Islands, Penrhyn, Society Islands, Easter Island, Peru, Palenque, Mexico, Brazil and Paraguay. This is an excellent and remarkably complete mapping out of the great "heliolithic" track.

The identity of geographical distribution is no mere fortuitous coincidence.

It is of peculiar interest that Harrison is able to demonstrate a linked association between this custom and sun-worship in most of the localities enumerated. In the figures illustrating his memoir other obvious associations can be detected intimately binding it by manifold threads into the very texture of the "heliolithic culture." If to this we add the fact that in many localities the design tattooed on the skin was the sun, we further strengthen the woof of the closely woven fabric that is gradually taking shape.

But there are several interesting bits of corroborative evidence that I cannot refrain from mentioning.

One of the most carefully-investigated bonds of cultural connection between the Eastern Mediterranean in Phoenician times and pre-Columbian America has recently been put on record by Zelia Nuttall in her memoir on "a curious survival in Mexico of the use of the Purpura shell-fish for dyeing" . After a very thorough and critical analysis of all the facts of this truly remarkable case of transmission of an extraordinary custom, Mrs. Nuttall justly concludes that "it seems almost easier to believe that certain elements of an ancient European culture were at one time, and perhaps once only, actually transmitted by the traditional small band of ... Mediterranean seafarers, than to explain how, under totally different conditions of race and climate, the identical ideas and customs should have arisen" . Nor does she leave us in any doubt as to the route taken by the carriers of this practice. Found in association with it, both in the Old and the New World, was the use of conch-shell trumpets and pearls. The antiquity of these usages is proved by their representation in pre-Columbian pictures or, in the case of the pearls, the finding of actual specimens in graves.

In Phoenician Greek, and later times these shell-trumpets were extensively used in the Mediterranean: "European travellers have found them in actual use in East India, Japan and, by the Alfurs, in Ceram, the Papuans of New Guinea, as well as in the South Sea islands as far as New Zealand," and in many places in America . "In the Old and the New World alike, are found, in the same close association, the purple industry and skill in weaving; the use of pearls and conch-shell trumpets; the mining, working and trafficking in copper, silver and gold; the tetrarchial form of government; the conception of 'Four Elements'; the cyclical form of calendar. Those scholars who assert that all of the foregoing must have been developed independently will ever be confronted by the persistent and unassailable fact that, throughout America, the aborigines unanimously disclaim all share in their production and assign their introduction to strangers of superior-culture from distant and unknown parts" .

Many other equally definite proofs might be cited of the transmission of customs from the Old to the New World, of which the instance reported by Tylor is the classical example; but I know of no other which has been so critically studied and so fully recorded as Mrs. Nuttall's case.

But the difficulty may be raised--as in fact invariably happens when these subjects come up for discussion--as to the means of transmission. Rivers has explained what does actually happen in the contact of peoples and how a small group of wanderers bringing the elements of a higher culture can exert a profound and far-reaching influence upon a large uncultured population .

Lane-Fox's memoir "on Early Modes of Navigation" not only affords in itself an admirable summary of the definite evidence for the spread of culture; but is also doubly valuable to us, because incidentally it illustrates also the actual means by which the migrations of the culture-bearers took place. The survival into modern times, upon the Hooghly and other Indian rivers, of boats provided with the fantastic steering arrangement used by the Ancient Egyptians 2000 years B.C., is in itself a proof of ancient Egyptian influence in India; and the contemporary practice of representing eyes upon the bow of the ship enables us to demonstrate a still wider extension of that influence, for in modern times that custom has been recorded as far apart as Malta, India, China, Oceania and the North-West American coast.

But there is no difficulty about the question of the transmission of such customs. Most scholars who have mastered the early history of some particular area, in many cases those who most resolutely deny even the possibility of the wider spread of culture, frankly admit--because it would stultify their own localised researches to deny it--the intercourse of the particular people in which they are interested and its neighbours. Merely by using these links, forged by the reluctant hands of hostile witnesses, it is possible to construct the whole chain needed for such migrations as I postulate

No one who reads the evidence collected by such writers as Ellis , de Quatrefages and Percy Smith can doubt the fact of the extensive prehistoric migrations throughout the Pacific Ocean along definitely known routes. Even Joyce states that migrations from India extended to Indonesia and all the islands of the Pacific; and even that "it is likely that the coast of America was reached" .

There is no doubt as to the reality of the close maritime intercourse between the Persian Gulf and India from the eighth century B.C. ; and of course it is a historical fact that the Mediterranean littoral and Egypt had been in intimate connexion with Babylonia for some centuries before, and especially after, that time.

In the face of this overwhelming mass of definite evidence of the reality not only of the spread of culture and its carriers, but also of the ways and the means by which it travelled, it will naturally be asked how it has come to pass that there is even the shadow of a doubt as to the migrations which distributed this "heliolithic" culture-complex so widely in the world. It cannot be explained by lack of knowledge, for most of the facts that I have enumerated are taken bodily from the anthropological journals of forty or more years ago.

But the whole of the formidable series of obstacles raised by this kind of argument has been entirely swept away by Dr. Rivers, who has demonstrated how often it has happened that a population has completely lost some useful art which it once had, and even more often clung to some useless practice .

The remarkable feature of the present state of the discussion is that, in spite of Rivers' complete demolition of these difficulties , most ethnologists do not seem to realise that there is now a free scope for taking a clear and common-sense view of the truth, unhindered by any obstructions. It is characteristic of the history of scientific, no less than of theological argument, that the immediate effect of the destruction of the foundations of cherished beliefs is to make their more fanatical votaries shout their creed all the louder and more dogmatically, and hurl anathemas at those who dissent.

It is a singular commentary on the attitude of the "orthodox" school of ethnologists that, when pressed to accept the obvious teaching of ethnological evidence, they should desert the strong intrenchments which the difficulties of full and adequate explanation have afforded them in the past, and take refuge behind the straw barricades of imaginary psychological and biological analogies, which they have hastily constructed for their own purposes, and in flagrant defiance of all that the psychologist understands by the phrase "working of the human mind," if perchance he is ever driven to employ this expression, or the meaning attached by the biologist to "evolution."

It is not sufficient proof of my thesis, however, merely to expose the hollowness of the pretensions of one's opponents, nor even to show the identity of geographical distribution and the linking up of customs to form the "heliolithic" culture-complex. Many writers have dimly realised that some such spread of culture took place, but by misunderstanding the nature of the factors that came into play or the chronology of the movements they were discussing and Enoch's books, to mention the latest, but by no means the worst offenders), have brought discredit upon the thesis I am endeavouring to demonstrate.

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