Note 327.2 — Chapter XIII · FUNERAL RITES.

Even if already buried in another place the Sindhi and their neighbours, the Yusufzais of Afghanistan, will exhume the bones and bring them home for a fresh burial.327.2 So do the natives of the Gold Coast, even though years have elapsed since the death.327.3 Dr. Brinton tells us that “the custom of common ossuaries for each gens appears to have prevailed among the Lenâpe”; and he quotes Gabriel Thomas as relating that “if a person of note dies very far away from his place of residence, they will convey his bones home some considerable time after, to be buried there.” The Nanticokes buried their corpses for some months, and then, taking up the bones, they cleaned them and deposited them in a common ossuary. When they removed to another place these bones were carried with them.327.4 Common ossuaries were very usual among the North American tribes; and in the Ohio mounds is evidence that the custom dates back to a considerable antiquity.328.1 These are only a few of the examples that might be given. It is thus by no means necessary that the entire body should be buried in the common ground: the bones only were sufficient. But sometimes it is not practicable to bury the whole skeleton; nor is it necessary. If what is done to a detached portion of the body be done to the whole, all that is necessary is to make a selection. The bones usually chosen are those of the skull; the reasons for the choice being probably those which determine the choice of the skull as a keepsake, according to a custom considered a few pages back. When the Samoans made war at a distance from their homes, they brought back, in returning, the skulls of their dead to the ancestral graves.328.2 Among the villagers of the Wanyika, in the highlands of Eastern Africa, the head is dug up some time after interment and sent to the capital to be buried, for there was formerly the general cemetery of the whole tribe, and there still its councils are held.328.3 It is the custom of the Greeks and the Orthodox Albanians, as of the Bretons and other European peoples, to dig up the bones after a certain period of burial, wash them in wine, and deposit them in an ossuary. But, because the Albanians lead a migratory life, a large proportion of the male population dies abroad. “The bones of these wanderers are afterwards collected and sent home; or, at any rate, a portion of them—a skull or a single bone—is brought back to their native place.”328.4 Among the ancient Romans a bone of such as died abroad or in war was sent home to the relatives for burial. This usage was expressly recognised by a law of the Twelve Tables which abolished in all other cases the pre-existing custom of cutting out a bone in order to bury it when the rest of the body was burnt.329.1 At the cremation the hot ashes were extinguished in wine, collected by the relatives and deposited in an urn in the grave-chamber. At Kalna, near Calcutta, is a place called Samáj Bati, where a bone of every deceased member of the family of the Rajah of Bardwan is deposited.329.2 Various tribes of Bengal, among which are the Santals, Oraons and Garos, ultimately commit some of the burnt fragments of bone to the river, where they are carried down by the current to the far-off eastern land whence, if we may trust the national traditions, their ancestors originally came, thus “uniting the dead with the fathers.” Instances, we are told, have been known of a Santal “son following up the traces of a wild beast which had carried off his parent, and watching, without food or sleep, during several days for an opportunity to kill the animal, and secure one of his father’s bones to carry to the river.”330.1 The Khási of Assam, on the other hand, place the ashes in the family bone-receptacle; and it is worthy of note that those of husband and wife are never placed in the same, because they belong to different clans, and the ashes of the children are put in that of their mother. Major Godwin-Austen says “that the collection of the bones into one vault, as it may be termed, is done under the impression that the souls of the departed may all mingle together again in one large family without trouble or suffering. The idea of a member of a family being a wanderer in the other world, cut off from, and unable to join, the circle of the spirits of his own clan is most repugnant to the feelings of a Khási or Sinteng.” Consequently great efforts are made to recover, even after the lapse of many years, the calcined bones of any member of the gens who may have died at a distance.330.2 Some of the Garos, neighbours of the Khási, seem to follow this custom, while others put the ashes into the river like the Santals.330.3 The Bhumij of Bengal inter some of the unconsumed fragments of bone at the foot of a tulsi-plant in the courtyard of the dead man’s house, and the rest in the original cemetery of the family. “The theory is that the bones should be taken to the village in which the ancestors of the deceased had the status of bhuinhárs, or first clearers of the soil; but this is not invariably acted up to, and the rule is held to be sufficiently complied with if a man’s bones are buried in a village where he or his ancestors have been settled for a tolerably long time.”330.4