Histories

The burial-places of the kings are in the land of the Gerrhi, which is the end of the navigation of the +Dnepr (river), Europe Borysthenes. Whenever their king has died, the Scythians dig a great four-cornered pit in the ground there; when this is ready, they take up the dead man—his body enclosed in wax, his belly cut open and cleaned and filled with cut marsh-plants and frankincense, and parsley and anise seed, and sewn up again—and transport him on a wagon to another tribe.