Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/134

 Likewise in funerals were its virtues required. The priests of Amon under the XVIIIth dynasty were instructed to "be vigilant concerning your duty, be ye not careless concerning any of your rules; be ye pure, be ye clean concerning divine things... bring ye up for me that which came forth before, put on the garments of my statues, consisting of linen; offer ye to me of all fruit, give ye me shoulders of beef, fill ye for me the altar with milk, let incense be heaped thereon." (Breasted, op. cit., II, 571.) "They buried him in his own sepulchres... and laid him in the bed which was filled with sweet odours and divers kinds of spices prepared by the apothecaries' art; and they made a very great burning for him." (II Chron. XVI, 14). At the time of the Periplus this was particularly the fashion in Rome, as Pliny observes with disapproval (VII, 42):—

"It is the luxury which is displayed by man, even in the paraphernalia of death, that has rendered Arabia thus "happy;" and which prompts him to bury with the dead what was originally understood to have been produced for the service of the gods. Those who are likely to be the best acquainted with the matter, assert that this country does not produce, in a whole year, so large a quantity of perfumes as was burnt by the Emperor Nero at the funeral obsequies of his wife Poppaea. And then let us only take into account the vast number of funerals that are celebrated throughout the whole world each year, and the heaps of odors that are piled up in honor of the bodies of the dead; the vast quantities, too, that are offered to the gods in single grains; and yet, when men were in the habit of offering up to them the salted cake, they did not show themselves any the less propitious; nay, rather, as the facts themselves prove, they were even more favorable to us then than they are now. How large a portion, too, I should like to know, of all these perfumes really comes to the gods of heaven, and the deities of the shades below?"

The customs ruling the gathering and shipment of frankincense are carefully described by Pliny (XII, 30), as follows:

"There is no country in the world," (forgetting, however, the Somali peninsula), "that produces frankincense except Arabia, and indeed not the whole of that. Almost in the very center of that region are the Atramitae, a community of the Sabaei, the capital of whose kingdom is Sabota, a place situate on a lofty mountain. At a distance of eight stations from this is the incense-bearing region, known by the name of Saba (Abasa?). This district is inaccessible because of rocks on every side, while it is bounded on the right by the sea, from which it is shut out by tremendously high cliffs......