wood, and only the arms of the deceased, with his horse, were given to the flames with him; then a mound of earth was heaped up over all.[1] Cæsar speaks of Celtic tribes as burying with the dead their most valuable possessions, and sacrificing human beings, probably, also, the horse.
In Celtic, Slavonic, and German graves or cairns, horses' bones are expected to be found. At Mecklenburg the presence of horse-remains is not unfrequent. In a barrow on the Baltic coast, the skeleton of a very tall man was discovered eight feet below the surface or summit of the mound; and beside the skull, on the left side, lay bones of a horse's head, and several flint knives at the top and bottom. More than a dozen human skeletons lay around in a circle, the skulls inwards towards the principal one, and a number of stone weapons. At another place a stone cairn was opened in which were two graves; in both were arms, stone implements and weapons, amber ornaments, and the remains of unburnt horses' bones. Similar remains were found in other stone cairns. At Calbe, near the former place, Wagner discovered the skeleton of a horse, surrounded by at least twenty urns, in a grave marked on the surface by three large stones. Wilhelm mentions a grave in which the skull of a skeleton rested on the cranium of a horse, and the other bones of the animal lay around the grave. In tombs supposed to belong to the Alemannic tribes, this antiquarian discovered similar remains.
At Selzen, on the Rhine, Lindenschmidt found a
- ↑ Tacitus. Chap. 27.
