When General Grant was at Assioot, on the Upper Nile, during his journey around the world, he was doubly welcomed as a guest by the American vice-consul, who was a native of Egypt. A bullock was sacrificed at the steamer landing, and its head was laid on one side of the gang-plank, and its body on the other. The outpoured blood was between the head and the body, under the gang-plank, so that, in stepping from the steamer to the shore, General Grant would cross over it. When he reached the house of the vice-consul, a sheep was similarly sacrificed at the threshold, in such a way that General Grant passed over the blood in entering.[11]
It is also said in Egypt: “If you buy a dahabiyeh,” and therefore are to cross its threshold for the occupancy of your new home on the water, “you must kill a sheep, letting the blood flow on the deck, or side, of the boat, in order that it may be lucky. Your friends will afterwards have to dine on the sheep.”[12] There seems, indeed, to be a survival of this idea in the custom of “christening” a ship at the time of its launching, in England and America, a bottle of wine–the “blood of the grape”[13]–being broken on the bow of the vessel as it crosses the threshold of the deep. And a feast usually follows this ceremony also.[14]
In Zindero, or Gingiro, or Zinder, in Central Africa, a new king is welcomed at the royal residence with a bloody threshold offering. “Before he enters his palace two men are to be slain; one at the foot of the tree by which his house is chiefly supported; the other at the threshold of his door, which is besmeared with the blood of the victim. And it is said ... that the particular family, whose privilege it is to be slaughtered, so far from avoiding it, glory in the occasion, and offer themselves willingly to meet it.”[15]
Among the Arabs in Central Africa, the blood welcome of a guest at the threshold of a home is a prevailing custom. “The usual welcome upon the arrival of a traveler, who is well received in an Arab camp, is the sacrifice of a fat sheep, that should be slaughtered at the door of the hut or tent, so that the blood flows to the threshold.”[16]
On the arrival of strangers among the primitive tribes of Liberia, in West Africa, a fowl is killed, and its blood is sprinkled at the doorway.[17]