Megalith

“ Yet, as we find it in its great diffusion, it provides homes for the living as well as for the dead. In their original home, perhaps in Africa, the megalithic race may have lived in huts of wattle or skins, but after their migration the need of protection in a hostile country and the exigencies of a colder climate may have forced them to employ stone for their dwellings. In any case, in megalithic architecture as seen in Europe the tomb and the dwelling types are considerably intermixed, and may have reacted on one another. ”

“ In time the vast majority of the megalithic monuments of Europe seem to begin near the [147] end of the neolithic period and cover the copper age, the later forms continuing occasionally into that of bronze. Here again it is curious that megalithic building, if merely an independent phase in many countries, should arise in so many at about the same time, and with no apparent reason. ”

“ Other megalithic structures can be definitely classed as dwellings or tombs, as we have seen in our separate treatment of them. It is not improbable that, if we are right in considering the dolmen as the most primitive form of megalithic monument, megalithic architecture was funerary in origin. ”

“ The pronounced liking for megalithic monuments exhibited by the primitive Britons must have strongly influenced all future comers for many a century. All analogy suggests that Mediaeval folk were still sufficiently pagan to treat such relics with a kind of “hyperdulia.” A sacred stone, or group of stones, may well have been embedded in the walls of the church, or set up as an altar, in order to propitiate those who gave up the old faith with reluctance.
When we examine megaliths which were indubitably placed in position by the labours of men, we find ourselves on surer ground. ”

“ It is probable that the problem will never be solved. The only way to attempt a solution would be to show that in some part of the megalithic area the structures were definitely earlier than in any other, and that as we move away from that part in any direction they become later and later. ”

“ If, therefore, we admit the dolmens to be historic, or, in other words, that the erection of megalithic monuments was practised during the first ten centuries after the Christian era, we have no difficulty in understanding where our examples came from, or to whom they are due. ”

“ Such a person asks questions about the instruments which the builders of the megaliths may have used in their observations, about the possible obstacles which may have blocked out of view portions of the horizon, about the difficulty in ascertaining which standard line was used, where all the monoliths are so crude and irregular. ”

“ It is more than accident that the many places in which, according to this theory, the megalithic phase independently arose all lie in most natural sea connection with each other, while not one is in the interior of Europe. ”

“ Megalithic monuments are perhaps the most interesting of all the witnesses of the remote past, into the history of which we are now inquiring, and of which so little is known. From the shores of the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains, from the frontiers of Russia to the Pacific Ocean, from the steppes of Siberia to the plains of Hindustan, we see rising before us monuments of the same characteristic form, built in the same manner. This is a very important fact in the history of humanity, and of which it is difficult to exaggerate the importance. ”

“ The use of stone for building might have arisen in many places independently. But megalithic architecture is something [145] much more than this. It is the use of great stones in certain definite and particular ways. We have already examined what may be called the style of megalithic architecture and found that the same features are noticeable in all countries where these buildings occur. In each case we see a type of construction based on the use of large orthostatic slabs, sometimes surmounted by courses of horizontal masonry, with either a roof of horizontal slabs or a corbelled vault. ”

“ All kinds of megalithic structures are found-dolmens and circles like Stonehenge, Cairns, underground cells excavated in the live rock, barrows topped with huge slabs, cup stones, mounds in the form of step pyramids, and sacrificial altars. ”

“ For these reasons it is impossible to consider megalithic building as a mere phase through which many nations passed, and it must therefore have been a system originating with one race, and spreading far and wide, owing either to trade influence or migration. ”

“ They may have traded with Cornwall, and discovered lands even farther north, but to assume that so small a people could have erected all the megalithic remains found in Scandinavia and the continent of France, and other countries where they never settled, perhaps never visited, is to ascribe great effects to causes so insignificant as to be wholly incommensurable. ”

“ There is nothing inherently impossible or even improbable in the suggestion that a great immigration brought the megalithic monuments from Sweden to India or vice versa. History is full of instances of such migrations. [148] According to the most widely accepted modern theory the whole or at least the greater part of the neolithic population of Europe moved in from some part of Africa at the opening of the neolithic age. In medieval history we have the example of the Arabs, who in their movement covered a considerable portion of the very megalithic area which we are discussing. ”

“ Later, the efforts for defence from enemies and for architectural display, which have always employed so much time and power, began to be made. The megalithic period has left traces over much of the earth. ”

“ So long as everything is vague and mythical, explorers do not know what to observe or record: this work, however, presents a distinct and positive view of the age or use of the megalithic remains, and every new fact must tend either to upset or confirm the theory it seeks to establish. ”

“ Two of the largest of the wall stones are 5 feet long and 3 feet wide, with an estimated thickness of 2 feet. As it would take4 several men to carry one of these stones from the quarry to its place in the wall, they might be called megaliths. ”

“ The dolmens of Africa are often found to contain objects peculiar to the Iron Age, and it is said that in some parts of India the people are still in the habit of erecting menhirs, cromlechs, dolmens and other megalithic monuments. Scandinavian archaeologists assign their dolmens exclusively to the Stone Age. ”

“ In the twilight, all these ruins of the dead, all the scattered blocks of granite are mingled in mournful groupings, outlined in fantastic silhouette against the pale copper of the sky; broken arches, tilted domes, and rocks that rise up like tall phantoms.
Farther on, when we have left behind this region of tombs, the granites alone litter the expanse of sand, granites to which the usury of centuries has given the form of huge round beasts. In places they have been thrown one upon the other and make great heaps of monsters. ”

“ The vast dead megalopolis that yawned around us seemed to be the last general center of the race—built early in the Cretaceous Age after a titanic earth buckling had obliterated a still vaster predecessor not far distant. ”

“ Ruins heaped on ruins, rows and rows of columns with great irregular gaps where Time and man have performed the work of destruction; huge pillars rising singly and in groups, scattered masses of enormous stones, broken arches and gateways and porticos, walls of immense strength encircling what was once the city, and in the back ground the great Temple of the Sun, these form the picture. ”

“ A few miles off, a range of low brown hills, covered with a stunted vegetation, runs parallel with the shore—along their undulating sides, angular spires of granite project through the parched and scanty soil; while on their highest brow one solitary giant stands, resembling an obelisk, from which the anchorage derives its name, 'The Granite Pillar.' No appearance of human life or labour exists around; the whole is a desert, over which these columnar formations—resembling a city of the Titans, crumbling slowly into dust—hold an empire of solitude and death. ”

“ That craving for the grand and the sublime, that hungering after cataclysms and convulsions, that insatiable appetite for upheavals, and Titanic earth-throes, and all the mightier machinery of Nature, has done no little mischief to geology. Men have reasoned that gigantic results in the physical structure of the earth must have had equally gigantic causes operating in sublime conflict and in periodic paroxysms, now heaving a mountain chain to the clouds of heaven, now swallowing up a continent in the depths of the sea. ”

“ In the time long since gone by, when the world was young, the men of a large province desired to build a temple, a temple which might be seen by men from afar. Their ground, however, was low, and there was no lofty mountain on which they might rear it, and it was deemed wise by all to entreat the giants, who lived in the far East, to help them bring the earth together in one place for a mound.
Willingly did the giants consent to aid them, but asked, “Why labor to dig the earth and pile it into a mound? ”

“ There is not a feature of any kind on which the eye can rest. In the foreground the earth is all tunnelled and tumbled; quarries stretch in every direction, with huge, gaunt, straddling, gallows-like structures emerging, a wheel spinning at the top, and ropes travelling into the abyss; heaps of grey débris, interspersed with stunted grass, huge excavations, ugly ravines with a spout of grim stone at the seaward opening, like the burrowings of some huge mole. ”

“ No more men slaying men, or tall majestic structures spearing the very sky with their tops, but only ruins and blackened plains, raw cliffs and far-flung wastes, the wreckage of great metal things I did not recognize, and among them a few, a very few human figures, prowling like jackal-rats furtively in the chaos. These pictures were all very ancient, with their dye-stuffs flaked and marred by time. ”

“ It limns the interiors of pyramids, catacombs, caves, and mines, giving incidental help to archaeology and geology; and, in regions inaccessible to man, pictures the depths of the sea. It serves in war—and might in peace—to aid the topographer in mapping plans of city and country; in times of siege it has reduced correspondence to microscopic limits for carriage in the only possible way—by birds; and from year to year this wonderful art continues to be applied in new and valuable uses. ”

“ A little farther and the whole scenery changes, and the armies approach tremendous mountains of solid granite, ominously dark, shining like hammered iron, rising abruptly from the stone débris and black patches of mountain fir, and towering bluffs and crags seem to pierce the sky with their sharp peaks, bastions and jagged ridges, like gigantic fortresses. ”

“ This setting sun illumines with splendour a silent chaos of granite, which is not that of the slipping of mountains, but that of ruins. And of such ruins as, to our eyes unaccustomed hereditarily to proportions so gigantic, seem superhuman. In places, huge masses of carven stone—pylons—still stand upright, rising like hills. Others are crumbling in all directions in bewildering cataracts of stone. ”

“ Indeed, the whole vast plain is one field of ruin. Columns and colossii, sphynxes and towers, rear their giant forms above the waste of sand as far as the eye can see. Wherever the traveler wanders, the same wrecks of the past arrest his progress. Some are barely visible above the sand, while others stand out clear and dauntless, as if defying the might of Time. ”

“ We pass over vast treeless plains strewn in all directions, as far as the horizon, with huge broken masses and boulders of granite. A scene more expressive of gloom and desolation cannot be imagined. The huge fragments, scattered about as far as the eye can reach, are piled up occasionally into enormous heaps, which look like the remains of ruined cities of an unknown age ”

“ The assaults of the Typhons and Jötuns upon the celestial dynasty, and their attempts to scale the fiery citadels of the gods by making ladders of mountains, indicate clearly enough the different revolutions read by geology in the various strata and rocky layers piled upon the primitive granite of the globe, the bursting through of eruptions from the central fire, extruding and uplifting mountains, and the subsidence of the ocean from one ripple-marked sea-beach to another lower down. ”

“ He found that the steps were still in place, but trembling on the verge of an abyss.
At the bottom of the chasm, he saw one huge monolith of granite; its face, where not covered with loose earth, was bright and glittering. The end of it was buried in the debris of the landslip. ... ”

“ They certainly were never put into their present places by human strength or skill; and though an earthquake might have broken off the lower stone, and rolled it into the valley, no account can be given of the other, which lies on the hill, unless, which I forgot to examine, there be still near it some higher rock, from which it might be torn. All nations have a tradition, that their earliest ancestors were giants, and these stones are said to have been thrown up and down by a giant and his mistress. ”

“ There are accumulated, beneath the detritus piled up by centuries, the shapeless and yet imposing ruins of generations which have disappeared and left no sign; remnants of walls, pyramids, and obelisks rise at times before the startled eyes of the Indian or the hunter, as if to reveal to them that in times perhaps contemporary with the deluge, a powerful nation, now utterly effaced from the world, existed at this spot. ”