Note 13 — Chapter XII

It is also possible that to represent the contracted position of his corpses was beyond the power of Eannatum's sculptor. Moreover, the employment of a common grave beneath a tumulus upon the field of battle may possibly have been a modified survival of an earlier practice, its retention having been dictated by convenience. Although no instance of its occurrence has been noted during excavations in Babylonia, we find a very similar form of burial employed at Susa during the period of its first settlement. It would appear that the dead were there buried outside the earthern rampart which marked the city-wall, without any special order or direction, and not enclosed by matting, pot, or sarcophagus. The bodies were placed in a common ditch and covered with earth, others being added from time to time beside or above them, so that sometimes four or five layers of skeletons are found super-imposed. That the corpses here were separately interred would seem to follow from the fact that each is accompanied by its own funerary offerings and furniture placed around the head; see De Morgan, "Rev. d'Assyr." Vol. VII., No. 1 (1909), p. 4 f. It may be added that the Sumerians, like the predynastic and early dynastic Egyptians, did not embalm their dead. The use of oil and honey for this purpose (see King, "Babylonian Religion," p. 49 f.), the latter of which is ascribed to the Babylonians by Herodotus (I., 198), would seem to have been of comparatively late introduction, and suggested by the Egyptian processes of mummification. It is interesting to note that, according to the evidence obtained by M. Naville at Abydos during the season of 1909-10, the contracted form of burial survived in Egypt at least as late as the Sixth Dynasty.