In the foregoing statement I have endeavoured to indicate also their genetic connection with the ideas that sprang from the early practice of mummification in Egypt.
There are many other curious features of the early Egyptian practices which might have served as straws to indicate how the cultural current had flowed, if much more substantial proofs had not been available of the reality of the movement. The diffusion of such a distinctive object as the Egyptian head-rest, which used to be buried with mummies of the Pyramid Age, is an example. It occurs widely spread in Africa, Southern Asia, Indonesia and the Pacific.
But the use of beds as funerary biers is a much more distinctive custom. The believers in theories of the independent evolution of customs may say “is it not natural to expect that people who regarded death as a kind of sleep should have placed head-rests and beds in the graves of their dead?” But how would such ethnologists explain the use of a funerary bier on the part of people (such as many of the less cultured people who adopted this Egyptian custom) who do not themselves use beds?
The evidence afforded by the use of biers is, in fact, a most definite demonstration of the diffusion of customs. Although it is a familiar scene in ancient Egyptian pictures to find the mummy borne upon a bed—a custom which we know from Egyptian literature, no less than that of the Jews, Phœnicians, Greeks and Romans to have been actually observed—only one Egyptian cemetery, so far as I am aware—a proto-dynastic site, excavated by Flinders Petrie (=54=) at Tarkhan—has revealed corpses lying upon beds. But in a cemetery, some sixteen centuries later, excavated by Reisner in the Soudan (=62=), a similar practice was demonstrated. Garstang has recorded the observance of a similar custom further South (Meroe) at a later date.
These form useful connecting links with the region around the head-waters of the Nile, where even in modern times this practice has survived, and the mummified corpse of the king is placed upon a rough bier. I shall have occasion to point out later on that this curious practice spread from East Africa along the Asiatic littoral to Indonesia, Melanesia and Polynesia, thence to the American continent; and in most places was definitely associated with attempts at preservation of the corpse.