86 ELLIOT SMITH, Distribution of Mummification. 



by evidence derived from utterly different sources, not 

 only from India itself but also from other countries. For, 

 scattered throughout the length and breadth of India, are 

 to be found thousands of indications (in traditions, beliefs, 

 customs, social organisation and material relics) that the 

 complete "heliolithic" culture had reached India not later 

 than the beginning of the seventh century B.C. 



Moreover the evidence which I have culled from 

 Oldham bears out the conclusions my own investiga- 

 tions lead up to, namely, that the "heliolithic" culture 

 spread from India to Malaysia soon after it reached India 

 itself. It is surely something more than a mere coinci- 

 dence that the period of the greatest maritime exploits of 

 the Phoenicians, in the course of which, according to many 

 authorities, they reached India or even further east, should 

 coincide with that of the great pre-Aryan maritime race 

 of India, whose great expeditions, as the above quotations 

 indicate, were primarily for purposes of commerce between 

 the Persian Gulf and the West Coast of India. There is 

 gradually accumulating a considerable mass of evidence 

 to suggest that, if the Asuras were not themselves Phoe- 

 nicians, they acquired their maritime skill from these 

 famous sailors and traders. The same hardy mariners 

 who brought the new knowledge and practices from the 

 Persian Gulf to India and Ceylon also carried it further, 

 to Burma and Indonesia. 



That this is so is clearly shown by the fact that these 

 customs spread to Indonesia and the Pacific before 

 cremation was introduced ; and it has been indicated 

 above that the introduction of the practice of cremation 

 into India may have taken place within a century of the 

 arrival of the " heliolithic " civilization there. Hence it 

 is obvious that the latter must have spread to the far east 

 soon after it reached India ; and the completeness of the 



