Manchester Memoirs, Vol. lix. (191 5), No. 10. 55 



attention (1) to the fact of the sacrifice of the chief's 

 (? wives and) servants and (2) to the burial of the chief 

 himself on a bed. 



We know that the Egyptian practice of mummifi- 

 cation spread south into Nubia (39) and the Soudan. 



According to Herodotus the ancient Macrobioi pre- 

 served the bodies of their dead by drying : then they 

 covered them with plaster, painted them to look like 

 living men, and set them up in their houses for a year. 

 For a fuller account of this practice and much more 

 instructive information for comparison see Ridgeway's 

 " Early Age of Greece," Vol. I., p. 483 et seq. 



Numerous references in the classical writers lead us 

 to believe that a similar custom of keeping the mummy 

 in the house of the relatives for a longer or shorter period 

 may have been in vogue in Egypt. Throughout the 

 widespread area in which mummification was practised — 

 from Africa to America — a precisely similar practice is 

 found among many peoples. 



The custom of covering the mummies with plaster 12 is 

 an interesting survival of the practice described by Junker 

 in Egypt (vide supra), which seems to supply the explana- 

 tion of the curious measures adopted for modelling the 

 face in Melanesia. 



Even at the present day, centuries after the art of the 

 embalmer disappeared from Egypt, mummification is being 

 attempted by certain people dwelling in the neighbour- 

 hood of the head-waters of the Nile. 



In his article in Hastings' Dictionary (32, p. 418) 

 Hartland states that the practice of mummification is 



12 Mr. Crooke has called my attention to a similar practice in India. 

 Leith (Journ. Anthr. Soc. of Bombay, Vol. I., 1886, pp. 39 and 40) staled 

 thai the k'dsl Khanda contained an account of a Brahman who preserved 

 his mother's corpse. After having it preserved and wrapped he ''coated the 

 whole with pure clay and finally deposited the corpse in a copper coffin." 



