Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/361

 NOTIONS AS TO A FUTURE LIFE. 339 would be buried when dead in the first convenient corner, without epitaph or sepulchral furnishing. This hypothesis would explain two things that need explana- tion the absence from Assyria of such tombs as are found in every other country of the Ancient World, and the great size of the Chaldsean cemeteries. Both Loftus and Taylor received the same impression, that the assemblages of coffins, still huge in spite of the numbers that have been destroyed during the last twenty centuries, can never have been due entirely to the second and third rate cities in whose neighbourhood they occur. Piled one upon another they form mounds covering wide spaces of ground, and so high that they may be seen for many miles across the plain. 1 This district must have been the common cemetery of Chaldaea and perhaps of Assyria ; the dead of Babylon must have been conveyed there. Is it too much to suppose that by means of rivers and canals those of Nineveh may have been taken there too ? Was it not in exactly that fashion that mummies were carried by thousands from one end of the Nile valley to the other, to the places where they had to rejoin there ancestors ? 2 But we need not go back to Ancient Egypt to find examples of corpses making long journeys in order to reach some great national burying-place. Loftus received the first hint of his suggestion from what he himself saw at Nedjef and at Kerbela, where he met funeral processions more than once on the roads of Irak-Arabi. From every town in Persia the bodies of Shiite Mussulmans, who desire to repose near the mortal remains of AH 1 LOFTUS especially speaks strongly upon this point (Travels, &c. p. 199). "By far the most important of these sepulchral cities is Warka, where the enormous accumulation of human remains proves that it was a peculiarly sacred spot, and that it was so esteemed for many centuries. It is difficult to convey anything like a correct notion of the piles upon piles of human relics which there utterly astound the beholder. Excepting only the triangular space between the three principal ruins, the whole remainder of the platform, the whole space between the walls, and an unknown extent of desert beyond them, are everywhere filled with the bones and sepulchres of the dead. There is probably no other site in the world which can compare with Warka in this respect ; even the tombs of Ancient Thebes do not contain such an aggregate amount of mortality. From its foundation by Urukh until finally abandoned by the Parthians a period of probably 2,500 years Warka appears to have been a sacred burial-place ! " 2 See the curious paper of M. E. LE BLANT entitled : Tables egyptiennes a Inscriptions grecques (Revue archeologiqne, 1874).