Anthropology and the Classics. Andrew Lang

birds—resembling the simplification of the same figures seen in the Cretan linear script.

      On another base are three more sacred figures with rayed heads, signifying Christ and two apostles, taken into the Lapp Pantheon at a somewhat lower level. The centre of this compartment is occupied by the sun, and about the field are depicted a reindeer, wolf, bear, ox, fox, squirrel, and snake. To the right are three wavy lines representing a lake and exactly reproducing the Egyptian hieroglyph of ‘water’.

      Fig. 10 shows a more elaborate example,[20] of which the interpretation has not been supplied. The variation of gesture displayed, somewhat rudely it is true, by the various figures on this drum illustrates the intimate and ever-recurring connexion between pictography and gesture-language.

      These Lapp troll drums must have been generally in use till the end of the seventeenth century. It was not, indeed, till the middle of the succeeding century that Christianity took a real hold on the population. That there has been a considerable survival of surreptitious heathenism among the Lapps, I myself was able to ascertain during two journeys undertaken with that object through Finnish and Russian Lapland in 1874, and again in 1876. It was specially interesting to observe that some of the traditional figures seen on the old troll drums are still engraved on the reindeer-horn spoons of that region.