Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/66

 testimony to the truth of the Japanese historical narrative which represents Jimmu as the leader of the last and most highly civilised among the bands of colonists constituting the ancestors of the present Japanese race. Thus the "divine warrior," after having been temporarily erased from the tablets of history by the modern sceptic of the West, is projected upon them once more from the newly opened graves of the primæval Japanese. It is true that there is an arithmetical difficulty: it has been supposed that the dolmens do not date from a period more remote than the third century before Christ, whereas Jimmu's invasion is assigned to the seventh. But no great effort of imagination is required to effect a compromise between the uncertain chronology of the Japanese annals and the tentative estimates of modern archæologists.

Some of the burial customs revealed by these ancient tombs resemble the habits of the Scythians as described by Herodotus. The Japanese did not, it is true, lay the corpse of a chieftain between sheets of gold, nor did they inter his favourite wife with similar pomp in an adjoining chamber; but they did deposit with him his weapons, his ornaments, and the trappings of his war-horse, and in remote times they followed the barbarous rule of burying alive, in the immediate vicinity of his sepulchre, his personal attendants, male and female, and probably also his steed. To the abrogation of that cruel rule is due much