Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/541

 Recent Greek Archceology and Folk-lore. 533

if this were the case, it offers no analogy, so far as I am aware, with anything in Hellenic custom or tradition. On the other hand, there is in these primitive tombs abundant evidence of what seems to be a cult of the dead. Nearly all the graves contain some form of offering, whether pottery, ornaments, shells, or knives, deposited sometimes in the " box" itself, sometimes above the upper or below the lower slab ; one of Bent's tombs contained pottery alone, with no trace of bones whatever. At Melos a further development was observed ; here we have the remains of not only a necropolis of precisely the same character, but of a town, which must have been already destroyed in pre-Greek times. Some of these tombs are hewn in the solid rock ; and here and there, while con- taining similar objects, are of much larger size, with a double chamber sufficiently large to admit a person stand- ing upright ; in these cases there are niches in the walls of the tomb which have evidently been intended for holding a lamp or a vase, such as would be used in bringing offerings to the dead.^ It looks very much as if these primitive people, not so very long after the Stone Age, had already developed the idea of the soul inhabiting the tomb, even though the huddled fleshless bones had long lost all reminiscence of the human form.

The primitive pottery of these people is itself instructive as an instance of how different races at different dates independently arrive at the same practical results. The forms are independent of the wheel, and therefore open to any kind of imitative influence : primitive man uses for his vessel, if he lives by the seashore, a shell ; if inland, perhaps a gourd, or a horn, or a basket of plaited withies : to make this last water-tight he must cover it with clay ; and hence we have among this pottery forms derivative from shells, gourds, and horns, and patterns which are clearly suggested

^ Similar tombs in Syra are described {Rev. Arch., 1862, p. 224) as Roman ! But thirty years has made a considerable difference in our ideas.