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.The diffusion of theirinfluence can be readily traced in the four directions or rather,to the points between somewhat as follows.THE S OUTHWES TWARD DI FFUS I ONAlready we have heard something of the early diffusion of thishigh culture complex to the Sudan.Far to the south, in the areamarked by the great stone temple ruins of Zimbabwe, in SouthRhodesian Matabeleland, ritual regicide appears to have beenpracticed until as late as 1810.The stars and a sacred oracle wereconsulted by the priests every four years and, without fail, theverdict would be "death for the king." The custom there was thatthe king's first wife who had assisted him with the making ofthe sacred first fire of his reign should strangle him with a cordmade of the foot-sinew of a bull.The night should be a nightof the new moon.The corpse should be taken by the priests thatnight to a hut on the summit of a mountain and there placed ona platform beneath which a great leathern sack should be hung.The first day, the entrails of the king were removed and tossedinto the sack; the second, the body was stuffed with herbs andleaves and sewn up again.On the third day, the skull was openedfrom behind and its contents were emptied into the sack.Thefourth day, the corpse was lashed in a crouch position, swathedwith cloth in such a way that the toe- and fingertips with theirnails should protrude, and then wrapped in the fresh hide of ajet-black bull with a white mark on its forehead.Every night fora full year a priest would open the bull hide and massage themummy in such a way that its liquid and maggots as well as toeand fingernails should drop into the sack.And when this year wasaccomplished once again on a night of the new moon thefavorite wife of the king (not she who had strangled him, but an-other) was compelled to submit to the removal of her clothing,piece by piece, after which she was strangled, naked.The bodywas brought into a cave on the east slope of the mountain; theking's body into one on the west.And when the king had been THRESHOLDS OF THE NEOLI THI C 421immured, the dead queen was clothed and likewise immured.Themost elaborate ceremonies, however, were reserved for the trans-portation of the sack from the charnel hut on top of the mountainto a holy cave in its side.Three people were slain as sacrifices andthe sack was sealed within the cave with a hollow reed leadingfrom the chamber to the outer world.A priest watched this reeduntil, one day, the king's soul emerged from it in the form of aworm, beetle, lizard, snake, or some other small dragon; where-upon the reed was removed, the hole was sealed, and offerings weremade that should be annually renewed.31"In all of our mappings of historical culture movements inAfrica," Frobenius writes, "no distribution is repeated more fre-quently than that of a broad plain down the east coast from theNile to the Zambesi that is to say, running in a north-to-southdirection and lying close to the Eritrean shore and then twotongues extending westward from this belt across the continent,the one in the norm reaching as far as to Senegal.[See map, p.167.]These two transverse areas reveal divergencies, which, however, areby far neither as numerous nor as important as the signs of inneraccord and unity." 32And elsewhere he writes:The fragments of mythology and ritual that have come tolight in southeast Africa, in the nuclear zone of the southernpart of the Eritrean sphere, compel us to reconstruct an imagethat resembles that of the Sumerian and the Indian Dravidianlore of life and the gods as closely as one egg resembles an-other.The moon-god imaged as a great bull; his wife, theplanet Venus; the goddess offers her life for her spouse; andeverywhere, this goddess, as the Morning Star, is the goddessof war, as Evening Star a goddess of illicit love, and a uni-versal mother besides; in all three zones (Africa, DravidianIndia, and Sumer) the drama of the astral sky is the modeland very destiny of all life, and when projected as such uponearth gave rise to what may have been the very earliest formand concept of the state namely, that of a sacred, cosmic,priestly image.Is it too bold, given these circumstances, tospeak of a Great Eritrean Culture Zone, which in ancienttimes comprised the shores of the Indian Ocean? 33 422 PRI MI TI VE MYTHOLOGYWe can regard this Great Eritrean area as the first zone of dif-fusion of the mythology of our mythogenetic Fertile Crescent; fora basal neolithic culture stratum has been identified as early asabout 4500 B.C.in the Nile Valley; and a high neolithic about 4000.Furthermore, there is now dependable C-14 evidence that some-thing of the neolithic had reached Northern Rhodesia as early asc.4000 B.C.,34 while the arts of the Bronze and Iron Ages surelywere established in Sudanese Napata by, respectively, c.750-744and c.397-362 B.C.35The chief Egyptian sites of the basal stratum are on the leftbank of the Nile, at Merimde, in the Delta region, and at Fayum,somewhat farther south, as well as on the right bank, about twohundred miles up the river, at Tasa.The assemblages differ slightlyamong themselves but in their culture level are about equivalent,the characteristic features being a rough black pottery; excellentbasketry; spindle whorls for the fashioning of linen; palettes forcosmetics; burial in a contracted posture (at Tasa) or as in sleep,facing east (Merimde); bone, ivory, and (at Fayum) ostrich-shellbeads; boar's-tusk and tiny stone-ax (celt) amulets (at Merimde);wheat stored in silos; and a barnyard stock of swine, cattle, sheep,and goats.C-14 dates for Fayum range c.4440-c.4100 B.C.Merimde and Fayum, owing to an encroachment of the desert,were abandoned toward the close of this period, while at Tasa anew racial stock appeared with a high neolithic style of culture,the so-called Badarian [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]