120 INTRODUCTION. 



dead man, wives, children, and others, probably slaves l . The frequent 

 occurrence of several bodies, all certainly interred at the same time, 

 the finding of a man and woman in adjoining graves, which must 

 have been excavated together, or of two persons of different sexes 

 in the same grave, with the remains of children, or with deposits 

 of burnt bones, are incidents difficult to interpret in any other way. 

 Nor has the practice been so uncommon that we need feel much 

 hesitation in attributing it to the ancient dwellers upon the wolds. 

 The custom of suttee which still, in spite of the most stringent 

 enactments, lingers in India, shows that, under an elaborate reli- 

 gious system and in highly organised communities, a habit so 

 repugnant to our ideas has nevertheless prevailed. That it was in 

 use amongst the ancient Scythians, the account of the burial of 

 their kings given by Herodotus (and amply confirmed by the ex- 

 amination of the burial mounds of the countries occupied by that 

 people) abundantly proves 2 . That women, however, were not in 

 the condition of slaves, but held a position of trust as the equals 

 in some degree of the husband, may perhaps be considered as not 

 improbable, when the manner in which they seem to have received 

 burial in the barrows is remembered. They have been found in- 

 terred apart from any male, and occupying an important position 

 in the burial mounds, in some cases a woman being the sole tenant 

 of a barrow, a circumstance which is quite inconsistent with their 

 place in the house being merely a servile one. 



The barrows do not afford much information upon which to 

 build any theory respecting their religious ideas, nor indeed could 



1 Colonel Meadows Taylor found, in a large number of the sepulchral places he 

 examined in the Dekhan, the remains of bodies, with the bones disturbed and lying 

 confusedly about. In many cases the skulls were separate from their bodies. The 

 conclusion at which he arrives is, that these fragmentary skeletons are the remains 

 of persons slain at the burial of a chief person. Cairns, Cromlechs, &c. in the 

 Dekhan, Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. xxiv. p. 339. 



2 Herodotus, iv. c. 71. It may not be out of place to give an account of the burial 

 of a Fiji chief. ' The dead chief lay in state, with a dead wife by his side, on a raised 

 platform ; the corpse of his mother (who had been strangled) on a bier at his feet, 

 and a murdered servant on a mat in the midst of the house. A large grave was dug 

 in the foundation of a house near by, in which the servant was laid first, and upon her 

 the other three corpses, wrapped and wound up together/ Calvert, Fiji and the 

 Fijians, vol. ii. p. 301. The same practice appears to have prevailed as late as the 

 eighth century among the Wends. Boniface, the Apostle of Germany, in a letter to 

 Ethibald, King of the Mercians, says : ' Winedi . . . tarn magno zelo matrimonii 

 amorem mutuum servant, ut mulier, viro proprio mortuo, vivere recuset, et laudabilis 

 mulier inter illas esse judicatur, quse propria manu sibi mortem intulit, ut in una 

 strue pariter ardeat cum viro suo.' Bonifacii Epist., in Magna Bibliotheca Veterimi 

 Patrum, viii. 74. 



