36 ELLIOT Smith, Distribution of Mummification. 



The elaborate ritual that had grown up and the im- 

 posing architectural traditions were not abandoned when 

 this discovery was made. Even in these modern en- 

 lightened days human nature does not react in that way. 

 The cherished beliefs held by centuries of ancestors are 

 not renounced for any discovery of science. The ethno- 

 logist has not given up his objections to the idea of the 

 spread of culture, now that all the difficulties that mili- 

 tated against the acceptance of the common-sense view 

 have been removed ! Nor did the Egyptians of the Proto- 

 dynastic period revert to the practices of their early 

 ancestors and take to sand-burial again. They adopted 

 the only other alternative open to a people who retained 

 implicitly the belief in the necessity of preserving the 

 body, i.e. y they set about attempting to attain by art what 

 nature unaided no longer secured, so long as they clung 

 to their custom of burying in large tombs. They en- 

 deavoured artificially to preserve the bodies of their dead. 

 This explains what I meant to imply when I said 

 that the megalithic idea and the incentive to mummify 

 the dead are genetically related, the one to the other. 

 The stone-tomb came into existence as a direct result of 

 the importance attached to the corpse. This develop- 

 ment defeated the very object that inspired it. The 

 invention of the art of embalming was the logical out- 

 come of the attempt to remedy this unexpected result. 



As in the history of every similar happening else- 

 where, necessity, or what these simple-minded people 

 believed to be a necessity, was the " mother of invention." 

 In the course of the following discussion it will be 

 seen that the practice of mummification became linked up 

 in another way with what may be called the megalithic 

 traditions. The crudely-preserved body no longer re- 

 tained any likeness to the person as his friends knew him 



