58 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



Another phase of religious belief in Upper Guinea is ancestry 

 worship, which has here been developed to a degree 

 unknown elsewhere. As the departed have to be 



the"Cus- maintained in the same social position beyond the 



toms." 



grave that they enjoyed in this world, they must be 

 supplied with slaves, wives, and attendants, each according to his 

 rank. Hence the institution of the so-called " customs," or anni- 

 versary feasts of the dead, accompanied by the sacrifice of human 

 victims, regulated at first by the status and afterwards by the 

 whim and caprice of chiefs and kings. In the capitals of the 

 more powerful states, Ashanti, Dahomey, Benin, the scenes wit- 

 nessed at these sanguinary rites rivalled in horror those held in 

 honour of the Aztec gods. Details may here be dispensed with 

 on a repulsive subject, ample accounts of which are accessible 

 from many sources to the general reader. In any case these 

 atrocities teach no lesson, except that most religions have waded 

 through blood to better things, unless arrested in mid-stream by 

 the intervention of higher powers, as happily in Upper Guinea, 

 where the human shambles of Kumassi, Abomeh, Benin and most 

 other places have now been swept away. 



On the capture of Benin by the English in 1897 a rare and 



unexpected prize fell into the hands of ethnologists. 



Here was found a large assortment of carved 



ivories, woodwork, and especially a series of about 

 300 bronze and brass plates or panels with figures of natives and 

 Europeans, armed and in armour in full relief, all cast by the cire 

 perdue process 1 , some barbaric, others, and especially a head in 

 the round of a young negress, showing high artistic skill. These 

 remarkable objects are now mostly in the British Museum, where 

 they have been studied by Messrs C. H. Read and O. M. Dalton 2 , 

 who are evidently right in assigning the better class to the six- 

 teenth century, and to the aid, if not the hand, of some Portuguese 

 artificers in the service of the King of Benin. They add that 

 "casting of an inferior kind continues down to the present time ' : 



1 That is, from a wax mould destroyed in the casting. After the operation 

 details were often rilled in by chasing or executed in repousse work. 



2 " Works of Art from Benin City," Jour. Anthrop. Inst., February, 1898, 

 p. 362 sq. 



