The county record. [volume] (Kingstree, S.C.) 1885-1975, 1908-10-22
ANTIQUITY OF The COFFIN.
Probably a Survival of the Mummy
Case or the Domen.

human manufacture do not as
rule excite our curiosity. The box
| like form of a coffin, for instance,
suggests nothing. Even an under
taker has no views on the raison
d'etre of coffins save that they con-
duce to decencv. Yet on grounds
of propriety many nations, such as
the ancient Romans and the Hin
docs, have preferred cremation to
interment, since the latter involves
the Disagreement and gradual de-
cay of the dead.
Coffins indeed are not explainable
on grounds of hygiene or scemli-
ness, for which primitive men cared
very little. Rather must we see in
the modern wooden coffin copy of
the prehistoric stone or chalk re-
ceptacle which was a conventional
reproduction of one of two things
the mummy cases familiar to stu
dents of Egyptology or the dolmen
Tor stone house, in which prehis-
toric non-Ayran races, especially
around the Mediterranean from
Egypt westward, were in the habit
of burying their dead.
Coffins were, as Lord Avebury
points out in his "Prehistoric
Times" apparently unknown to
very ancient man. The dead were
buried in sitting posture.o or in the
attitude of sleep in what were re-
garded as a kind of ghost houses.
The most elaborate and fully differ
entiated of these houses of the dead
are. as Professor Scrgi maintains,
the pyramids. with their mummies
and various precautions against the
decay Of the body.
\ less elaborate differentiation of
the house idea is to he found in the
dolmens still remaining all over the
world from India to Great Britain.
4 dolmen, built of five slabs of
stone, covered by tumulus, crown
ed by menhir, surrounded by a
stone circle, as at Stonehenge and
Avebury, and led up to by an ave-
nue. of standing stones. is, in fact, a
rude adumbration of the pyramid.
Inside the dolmen the dead sat
crouched among cooking utensils,
arms, etc, put there for their use
in the spirit world. Is it too much
to suppose that the earliest stone
coffins were limitations of the dol
mens-in fact, dolmens in minia-
turc:?
Whether this be so or not, it is
very probable that or old fashion
ed standing tombstones, and espe-
ciallv our table tombs (Which are
five SidcdI. as well as the family
vaults of great families, with their
traditions of cmbalmmcnt and their
ieadcn she'll cofiinS, which conven-
t!onallv outline the shapes of the
dead within, are so many relics Of
the remote epoch when a tomb was
conceived of as a house in which
the dead continue to live their for
mer lives.
The leaden shell coffins just men
toned may indeed have originated
the modern coffin. The latter was
still, for no apparently sufficient
reason, to be constructed in ac-
cordance with careful measure
ments and in conventional imitation
of the human shape. The leaden
shell in the family vault sometimes
goes so far as conventionally to pre-
serve the outline of the fingers of
the corpse, and this fact would seem
to point back to a time when
corpses were not confined. Thus
the shell, and afterward the coffin
or elaborated shell, might be re-
garded as interpretations in the dol
men scheme of burial. - London
Lancet.