imbued with the essential ideas of Egyptian culture, reached San Cristoval and introduced, not only burial in pyramidal structures, but also the custom of erecting a statue to serve as the abiding place of the ghost of the dead man. Such extraordinary resemblances between the mortuary customs of Egypt and San Cristoval justify us in comparing the beliefs concerning the soul held in the two places. I have already described the belief of San Cristoval. Of the two souls of that region one leaves the body by the fontanelle or the mouth at death, and sets out on a long journey to a distant place called Rodomana, while the other enters the statue upon the funeral mound. In Egypt there was also a belief in two souls, one of which flew to the sun in the form of a bird, while the other, called the ka or double, was believed to inhabit the statue representing the dead man erected within the mastaba. With the exception of the substitution of the journey to the vague Rodomana for the journey of the dead to the sun in Egypt, there is an almost exact resemblance between the beliefs of the two peoples, a resemblance far closer than that which exists between the beliefs of Egypt and Indonesia. The main fact, therefore, which has to be explained is the existence of the closest similarity of belief between the widely separated Egypt and San Cristoval, while between these two regions there is another set of beliefs common to Indonesia and New Guinea, having many points of resemblance with those of Egypt and San Cristoval but of a more complex kind. This is the fact which calls for explanation, and for this purpose I venture to put forward the following hypothesis. Travellers imbued with the culture of Egypt, if not themselves Egyptian, reached Indonesia and passed on to Melanesia, the motive which lured them so far into the unknown being the desire for gold, pearls and other precious objects, which has been shown by Mr. Perry[1] to have
- ↑ “The Relationship between the Geographial Distribution of Megalithic Monuments and Ancient Mines.” Mem. and Proc. Manchester Lit. and Phil. Soc. 1915.
