Manchester Memoirs, Vol. lix. (191 5), No. 10. 45 



the deluge, the destruction of the " sons of men " by 

 petrifaction, and the repeopling the earth by the incestuous 

 intercourse of the " children of the gods." 



Ferry, who has made a study of the geographical 

 distribution and associations of these curiously-linked 

 traditions, has clearly demonstrated that they form an 

 integral part of the cultural equipment of the sun- 

 worshipping, stone-using peoples. 



In the foregoing statement I have endeavoured to 

 indicate also their genetic connection with the ideas trnt 

 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 dis- 

 tinctive 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 ethno- 

 logists 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 



