Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/392

362 purification. At the same time a man's ghost after death, especially if he had been great and powerful in his lifetime, was capable of inflicting much injury on his surviving relatives and subjects. The dead body had therefore to be treated with the utmost respect, on pain of the ghost's displeasure and the certain punishment that would ensue if this was not done. Accordingly the corpse was washed, clothed in its best, and laid out on some sort of couch, while the family and the professional mourners gave vent to wails and lamentations, which in primitive times extended to cutting the face, lacerating the breasts, or piercing the arms with arrows. Among the poor the dead man was probably burnt or buried in the course of twenty-four hours. But the great had to be treated with much greater ceremony. Friends, relations, or subjects had to come from a distance to pay their last homage to the deceased. This necessarily led to considerable delay. With Romans of patrician rank about seven days elapsed before the body was entombed. If the friends at a distance could not come to the defunct, the defunct had to be taken to the friends. Herodotus relates that when a Scythian king died, the body was placed on a waggon and carried through all the different tribes. As a mere subject, when dead, was laid on a waggon and carried round to his friends for a space of forty days, the interval between the death and burial of a king must have been much greater. It was therefore necessary to preserve the body in some way, at any rate for a limited time. In describing the funeral rites of the Scythians Herodotus mentions that when the king died the intestines were removed and the inside filled with sweet-smelling herbs. The opening in the belly was then sewn up and the body enclosed in wax. Not quite 300 years ago, Giorgio Interiano relates much the same of the Cherkes of the North-west Caucasus. On the death of a man of rank they made a