Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/28

 Funereal Rites. was deposited the residuum from the pyre {Figs. 167, 245). At the time of their discovery they were full of bones, which bore no trace of fire. That inhumation should have been the rule during the course of the Mycenian period is no more than could have been expected from the ancestors of the Homeric Greeks. Interment agrees far better than burning with the first simple conceptions of man relating to a life beyond the grave.' The funereal rite in question was never abandoned by the Egyptians, whose ideas in this direction were rigorously pushed to their extreme con- sequences, and over whom they held so firm and abiding a sway.^ As de Coulanges has forcibly shown, the sepulchral rites of Fig. 245.— Cicle. Clay val. Height, o m., 48 ; widih near the rim, t tn,, 105. historic Greece and the laws which governed her cities, are wholly opposed to cremation practices, which allow nothing to remain of the body except a handful of ashes. '^ The beliefs which many a detail in these rites, many a provision made by the laws for peculiar manners and customs, seem to imply, are in unison with the same order of ideas which were prevalent in Egypt. At the bottom of the grave, into which wine libations and sacrificial fat are poured, we feel the mysterious presence of a being who continues, in ill-defined conditions, an existence resembling that which he led beneath the light of the sun. It ' OrS!, Urmfunebri Crelesi.
 * See our analysis of the ideas under consideration in History of Art.
 * De Coulanges, La cite anlique.