Note 211.2 — Chapter XII · Eschatologic Ideas of East and West.

In these practices the primitive Hellene and Semite were on the same level, nor is it likely that either was the pupil of the other. One important difference, important at least for our purpose, we can mark, which is connected with the difference between Hellenic and Oriental climate. The Hellenic ghost might take water among his offerings, and the neglected soul might be pitied for being ἄνυδρος211.2; he might also eat his porridge in the Anthesteria; but he preferred wine, and the offerings of blood—the αἱμακουρία—and especially the sacrifice of animals. And we may gather from the painting on the Phaistos sarcophagus that the blood-oblation to the dead was part of the pre-Hellenic ritual in Crete. The triple-libation, also, that Homer mentions, of wine, honey-mead, and water, and which the later Greeks retained, may be regarded as a Minoan tradition, for its great antiquity among the Aegean people is attested by the libation-table found by Sir Arthur Evans in the cave of Zeus on Mount Dickte. Here there is no trace of the teaching of the Babylonian priest: nor in the blood-offerings to the dead. For the Babylonian ghost, parched with thirst in the intolerable heat of Mesopotamia, craved not blood—which, as far as I know, is never mentioned in the description of his funeral-rites—but beer in the earliest period,212.1 and in the later specially water. It is water that was supposed to make the deceased comparatively happy: