430 ANNUAL EEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION^ 1916. 



is there any trace of smoke, and it is clear that great progress in the 

 art of artificial illumination had already been made. We now know 

 that stone lamps, decorated in one case with the engraved head of an 

 ibex, were already in existence. 



Such was the level of artistic attainment in southwestern Europe, 

 at a modest estimate some 10,000 years earlier than the most 

 ancient monuments of Egypt or Chaldsea! Nor is this an iso- 

 lated phenomenon. One by one, characteristics, both spiritual 

 and material, that had been formerly thought to be the special 

 marks of later ages of mankind have been shown to go back to 

 that earlier world. I myself can never forget the impression pro- 

 duced on me as a privileged spectator of a freshly uncovered inter- 

 ment in one of the Balzi Rossi Caves — an impression subsequently 

 confirmed by other experiences of similar discoveries in these caves, 

 which together first supplied the concordant testimony of an elabo- 

 rate cult of the dead on the part of Aurignacian man. Tall skeletons 

 of the highly developed Cro-Magnon type lay beside or above their 

 hearths, and protected by great stones from roving beasts. Flint 

 knives and bone javelins had been placed within reach of their hands, 

 chaplets and necklaces of sea shells, fish vertebrae, and studs of carved 

 bone had decked their persons. With these had been set lumps of 

 iron peroxide, the red stains of which appeared on skulls and bones, 

 so that they might make a fitting show in the underworld. 



Colors, too, to paint his body. 



Place within his hand, 

 That he glisten, bright and ruddy, 



In the Spirit-Land!* 



Nor is it only in this cult of the departed that we trace the dawn of 

 religious practices in that older world. At Cogul we may now survey 

 the ritual dance of nine skirted women round a male satyrlike figure 

 of short stature, while at Alpera a gowned sister ministrant holds up 

 what has all the appearance of being a small idol. It can hardly be 

 doubted that the small female images of ivory, steatite, and crystal- 

 line talc from the same Aurignacian stratum as that of the Balzi 

 Rossi interments, in which great prominence is given to the organs 

 of maternity, had some fetichistic intention. So, too, many of the 

 figures of animals engraved and painted on the inmost vaults of the 

 caves may well have been due, as M. Salomon Reinach has suggested, 

 to the magical ideas prompted by the desire to obtain a hold on the 

 quarries of the chase that supplied the means of livelihood. 



In a similar religious connection may be taken the growth of a 

 whole family of signs, in some cases obviously derivatives of fuller 

 pictorial originals, but not infrequently simplified to such a degree 



1 Schiller " Nadowessier's Todtenlied." 



