 |
The number of objects picked up at different stages of the excavations was very considerable. Dr. Schliemann neglected absolutely nothing that appeared to him at all worthy of his collection, which now belongs to the Royal Museum of Berlin and contains some twenty thousand objects, including weapons and implements, some of stone, others of bronze, and thousands of vases and fusaioles, gazing upon which we see rise before our eyes a picture of a civilization unknown before but through the Iliad and a few meagre historical allusions.
Before we note in detail the most remarkable of the objects in Dr. Schliemann's collection, we must add that recent researches have also brought to light the remains of a little temple dedicated to Pallas Athene and referred to in history, as well as those of a large Doric temple erected by Lysimachus, and of a magnificent theatre capable of holding six thousand spectators, and which probably dates from the end of the Roman Republic. The human bones picked lip among the ruins of the different towns play be attributed to the practice, already general, of cremation. Virchow has examined the skull of a woman found at Troy, which is of a pronounced brachycephalic type (82.5). The crania from the third town, on the other hand, are dolichocephalic, the mean cranial capacity being sixty-seven. If we could reason with any certainty from cranial capacity, this would appear to point to a different race, but it would not do to come to any positive conclusion with only one Trojan cranium to judge by.
FIGURE 89
Vase ending in the snout of an animal. Found on the hill of Hissarlik at a depth of 45 1/2 feet.
But to return to Dr. Schliemann's fine collection. The pottery from the first town, found at a depth of from thirty-two to fifty-two feet (Fig. 89), is superior alike in color, form, and construction, to the keramic ware of the following periods. The potter's wheel was unknown, or at least very rarely used,[255] and pottery was hand made and polished with bone or wood polishers, the marks of which can still be made out. The forms are varied and often graceful, many of them, as do those found in the mounds of North America imitating those of the animals among which the potters lived. The usual color of the keramic ware is black, some times decorated with white lozenge-shaped ornaments. Some vases have also been found colored red, yellow, and brown, and even decked with garlands of flower and fruit, as are some of those of Santorin. We must also mention some apodal vases, and others with three feet, used for funeral purposes, containing human ashes (Fig. 90). The terra-cotta fusaioles, found in such numbers among the ruins of the towns that rose successively from the hill of Hissarlik, are, on the other hand, rare at Dardania, if we may retain that name.[256]
FIGURE 90
Funeral vase containing human ashes. Found at a depth of 50 feet.
Excavations have brought to light more than six hundred celts or knives, generally of smaller size than those found in Denmark or France. Rock of many kinds, including serpentine, schist, felsite, jadeite, diorite, and nephrite, were used; and saws of flint or chalcedony, some toothed on one side only, others on both, are of frequent occurrence. They were fixed into handles of wood or horn, and kept in place with some agglutinative substance, such as pitch, several of them still retaining traces of this primitive glue. We must also mention awls, pins of bone and ivory, and ossicles or knuckle bones, in every stage of manufacture, confirming the accounts of Greek historians, who tell us of the great antiquity of the game played with them. The Dardanians used wooden and bone implements and weapons almost exclusively. It is impossible to say whether they were acquainted with the use of metals, but we might assert that they were if we could quite certainly attribute to them a certain mould of mica schist, found at a depth of 45 1/2 feet, which bad been used in the process of casting spits and pins, which are. supposed to be of more ancient date than the fibulae.
FIGURE 91
Large terra-cotta vases found at Troy.
FIGURE 92
Earthenware pitcher found at a depth of 19 1/2 feet.
FIGURE 93
Vase found beneath the ruins of Troy.
The most valuable objects of the collection come from the deposits representing the town of Troy; they are all twisted, broken, and charred, bearing witness to the fierceness of the flames in which the town perished. These discoveries reveal to us the daily life of the people of Troy. Judging from the number of boars' tusks found, hunting must have been a favorite pastime with them. The bones of oxen, sheep, and goats, of smaller species than those of the present day, have also been found. Horses and dogs were rare, and cats unknown. The domestic poultry of the present day was also wanting, no remains of birds having been found except a few bones of the wild swan and the wild goose. Fish and mollusca, as proved by the immense numbers of bones and shells, formed an important part of the diet of the Trojans. They also fed largely on cereals, which they cultivated with success; and wheat, the grains of which were very small, was known to them. The preservation of these vegetable relics was due to carbonization.
FIGURE 94
Terra-cotta vase found with the treasure of Priam.
FIGURE 95
Vase found beneath the ruins of Troy.
The pottery discovered is of an infinite variety, and includes jars from 4 3/4 feet to 7 3/4 feet high (Fig. 91), of Which Schliemann found more than six hundred, nearly all of them empty. Their size need not surprise us, for Ciampini[257] speaks of a pottery DOLIUM of such vast size and height that a ladder of ten or twelve rungs was needed to reach the opening.[258] With these jars were found some large goblets, some long-necked vessels (Fig. 92), some amphorae, and vases with three feet (Fig. 93). Some of the vases had lids the shape of a bell (Fig. 94), others were provided with flaps or horns by which to lift them (Fig. 95). The potter gave free vent to his imagination, but the decorations representing fish-bones, palm branches, zigzags, circles, and dots, are all of very inferior execution.
FIGURE 96
Earthenware pig found at a depth of 13 feet.
FIGURE 97
Vase surmounted by an owl's head. Found beneath the ruins of Troy.
Two series of terra-cotta objects deserve special mention, one representing animals, generally pigs (Fig. 96), though an example has been found of a hippopotamus; a fact of very great interest, as this animal does not live at the present day anywhere but in the heart of Africa. We know from this terra-cotta representation that it lived in Greece in the days of Troy. Pliny speaks of it in Upper Egypt in his day, and according to Mariette it lived thirty-five centuries before the Christian era in the delta formed by the mouth of the Nile. The second series of objects referred to above as of special interest are vases representing the heads of owls with the busts of women (Fig. 97). It is easy to make out the beak, eyes, and ears of the bird, and the breasts and navel of the woman. In some instances the face, breasts, and sexual organs of a woman are represented by a series of dots forming a triangle with the point downwards.[259] Other dots represent a necklace, and very similar designs are to be seen on the Chaldean cylinders. Can we then connect them in any way with the relics of Troy, and is it possible that the Trojans and Chaldeans were of common origin? However that may be, the constant repetition of these signs proves that they were of hieratic character. Terra-cotta was also used for a very great number of other purposes, as was the case everywhere before the introduction of metals. Some deep and some flat plates made of very common clay have been found, together with buttons, funnels, bells, children's toys, and seals on which, some authorities think, Hittite characters can be made out. No lamps, or anything that could serve their purpose, have been found. The Trojans probably used torches of resinous wood or braziers, when they required artificial light.
It would be impossible to give a list of the objects of every variety found among the ruins of Troy, with the aid of which we can form a very definite idea of the private life of its people. Some fragments of an ivory lyre, and some pipes pierced with three holes at equal distances, bear witness to their taste for music; a distaff, still full of charred wool, deserted by the spinner when she fled before the conflagration, tells of domestic industry and manual dexterity, while marble and stone phalli prove that the generative forces of nature were worshipped.[260]
FIGURE 98
Copper vases found at Troy.
The weapons and implements found included haematite and diorite projectiles used in slings, stone hatchets, and hammers pierced to receive handles, flint saws and obsidian knives. Metallurgy began to play an important part, and stone with its minor resisting power was quickly superseded by bronze. In fact, Virchow was certainly justified in saying that the whole town belonged to the Bronze age. Iron was still unknown, at least so far no trace of it has been found, either among the ruins of Troy or of the towns which succeeded it. Several crucibles and moulds of mica, schist, or clay have been found with one of granite of rectangular shape bearing on each face the hollows in tended to receive the fused- metal. The Schliemann museum possesses numerous battle-axes[261] of bronze, some double-bladed daggers with crooked ends, lances similar to those discovered at Koban,[262] and thousands of spits, some with spherically shaped heads, others of spiral form. Some of these spits are made of copper, as are some large nails weighing thirty ounces, so that this metal was evidently still often used in a pure state.
FIGURE 99
Vases of gold and electrum, with two ingots, found beneath the ruins of Troy.
FIGURE 100
Gold and silver objects from the treasure of Priam.
FIGURE 101
Gold ear-rings, head-dress, and necklace of golden beads from the treasure of Priam.
At the foot of the palace, the ruins of which rise from the Acropolis at a depth of 27 1/2 feet, the pick-axes of the explorers brought to light metal shields, vases (Fig. 98), and dishes mixed together in the greatest confusion, often soldered together by the intense heat to which they had been subjected. They had probably been enclosed in a wooden chest that was destroyed in the conflagration.[263] We are astonished at the wealth revealed to us. Cups, goblets, and bottles of gold (Figs. 99 and 100) lay side by side with golden necklaces[264] and ear-rings of electrum.[265] The ornaments that had belonged to women are especially curious. At one place alone several diadems (Fig. 101) were picked up, with fifty-six ear-rings, six bracelets, and nine thousand minor objects, such as rings, buckles, buttons, dice, pins, beads, and ornaments of a great variety.[266] All these treasures were piled up in a great silver vase, into which they had doubtless been hastily thrown in the confusion of a precipitate flight. They are all of characteristic forms, quite unlike anything in Assyrian or Egyptian art. Were they made in Troy itself? Dr. Schliemann doubts it; he thinks that the makers of such clumsy pottery are not likely to have been able to produce jewelry of such delicate and remarkable workmanship. I should not like to be so positive, for even amongst the most advanced peoples we find very common objects mixed with others showing artistic skill. Why should it not have been the same at Troy? I think that in future Trojan art must take its place in the history of the progress of humanity. The nineteenth century has brought that art to light, and by a strange caprice of chance the treasures of Priam adorn the museum of Berlin, and we have seen the diadem of fair Helen exhibited in the South Kensington Museum of London.[267]
Treasures nearly as valuable as those we have been describing were found in earthenware vases in several other parts of the ruins. Unfortunately, many of the objects found were stolen and melted down by the workmen, whilst others were taken to the Imperial Palace at Constantinople, whence they are doomed to be dispersed. In 1873, however, Dr. Schliemann was fortunate enough to hit upon a deposit containing twenty gold ear-rings, and four golden ornaments which had formed part of a necklace.[268] Similar ornaments were found at Mykenae, near Bologna, in the Caucasus, in the Lake dwellings, and, stranger still, on the banks of the Rio Suarez in Colombia.[269]
I will not add more to what I have already said about the towns which succeeded each other on the ruins of Troy, and of which the successive stages of rubbish on the hill of Hissarlik are the only witnesses left. The flames spared none who settled on that doomed spot, and new arrivals disappeared as rapidly as they came. The Ilium of the Greeks and Romans alone enjoyed any prosperity, but it too was in its turn swept away; and at the present day a few wandering shepherds and their flocks are the sole dwellers upon the hill immortalized by Homer.
Before concluding this chapter I must refer once more to a, fact of considerable interest. In that part of the deposits of Hissarlik which represents Troy, Dr. Schliemann picked up the perforated whorls to which the name of fusaioles has been given (Fig. 102), and of which we spoke in our account of the Lake Dwellings of Switzerland. These fusaioles are generally of common clay mixed with bits of mica, quartz, or silica, though some few have been found at Mykenae and Tiryns of steatite. The clay whorls before being baked were plunged into a bath of a very fine clay of gray, yellow, or black color, and then carefully polished. They nearly all bear ornaments of very primitive execution, such as stars, the sun, flowers, or animals, and more rarely representations of the human figure.
FIGURE 102
Terra-cotta fusaioles.
We ourselves think these fusaioles are amulets which were taken to Troy by the Trojans, and piously preserved by their successors. One important fact tends to confirm this hypothesis. A great number of them bear the sign of the SWASTIKA[270] (Fig. 103), the cross with the four arms, the sacred symbol of the great Aryan race so long supposed to be the source of all the Indo-European races. The SWASTIKA is engraved, not only on the fusaioles, but also on the diadems of the daughters of Priam, on the idols the Trojans worshipped, and on numerous objects from the Lydian and Greco-Roman towns. We meet with the double cross among the prehistoric races of the basin of the Danube, who colonized the shores of the Troad and the north of Italy, and it was introduced with the products of that antique civilization on the one side to the Greeks, the Etruscans, the Latins, the Gauls, the Germanic races, the Scandinavians, and the Bretons; and on the other to the people of Asia Minor, Persia, India, China, and Japan.[271]
FIGURE 103
Cover of a vase with the symbol of the SWASTIKA. Found at Troy.
This sign of the SWASTIKA meets us at every turn; we find it on many ancient Persian books, on the temples of India, on Celtic funeral stones, and on a Hittite cylinder. It is seen on vases of elegant form from Athens and Melos; on others from Ceres, Chiusi, and Cumae, as well as on the clumsy pottery recently discovered at Konigswald on the Oder and on the borders of Hungary; on bronze objects from the Caucasus, and the celebrated Albano urn; on a medal from Gaza in Palestine and on an Iberian medal from Asido. We see it on the Gallo-Roman rings of the Museum of Namur, and on the plaques of the belt, dating from the same epoch, which form part of the magnificent collection of M. Moreau. Schliemann tells us of it at Mykenae and at Tiryns. Chantre found it on the necropoles of the Caucasus. It is engraved on the walls of the catacombs of Rome, on the chair of Saint Ambrose at Milan, on the crumbling walls of Portici, and on the most ancient monuments of Ireland, where it is often associated with inscriptions in the ogham character.[272]
The SWASTIKA occurs twice on a large piece of copper found at Corneto, which now belongs to the Museum of Berlin. Cartailhac noticed it in the CITANIA of Portugal, some of which date from Neolithic times.[273] The English in the Ashantee war noticed it on the bronzes they took at Coomassie on the coast of Guinea, and it has also been found on objects discovered in the English county of Norfolk.
FIGURE 104
Stone hammer from New Jersey bearing an undeciphered inscription.
Moreover, if we cross the Atlantic we find the same symbol engraved on the temples of Yucatan, the origin of which is unknown, on a hatchet found at Pemberton, in New Jersey (Fig. 104), on vases from a Peruvian sepulchre near Lima, and on vessels from the PUEBLOS of New Mexico. Dr. Hamy, in his "American Decades," represents it on a flattened gourd belonging to the Wolpi Indians, and the sacred tambours of the Esquimaux of the present day bear the same symbol, which was probably transmitted to them by their ancestors. The universality of this one sign amongst the Hindoos, Persians, Hittites, Pelasgians, Celts, and Germanic races, the Chinese, Japanese, and the primitive inhabitants of America is infinitely strange, and seems to prove the identity of races so different to each other, alike in appearance and in customs, and is a very important factor in dealing with the great problem of the origin of the human species.
We have dwelt much on the discoveries of Dr. Schliemann, but we must add that, like all great discoveries, they have been very vigorously contested.[274] Boetticher, for instance, considers the ruins of Hissarlik to be nothing more than the remains of a necropolis where cremation was practised according to the Assyrio-Babylonian custom.[275] A distinguished and very honest savant, S. Reinach, constituted himself the champion of this theory at the meeting of the Congress in Paris in 1889. Schliemann replied very forcibly, and the meeting appeared to be with him in the matter, as were also a number of men of science who visited Hissarlik in 1888, and we think that in the end history will adopt the opinion of the great Danish antiquarian.
We have now passed in review the chief of the works left behind him by man from the earliest (lays of his existence to the dawn of historic times. We must still show prehistoric man in the presence of death, the universal destroyer, and learn from the evidence of the tombs of the remote past how our ancestors met the common doom.
CHAPTER VIII
Tombs.
The true history of man will be found in his tombs, says Thucydides; and as a matter of fact the sepulchre has ever occupied much of the thoughts of man, the result of a religious sentiment, a conviction that all does not end with the life which so quickly passes by.
From the very earliest times we meet with tokens of the hopes and fears connected with a future existence; but, as I have already stated, the human bones that can with certainty be said to date from Palaeolithic times are very rare. We know but very few facts justifying us in asserting that the contemporary of the mammoth and of the cave bear had already learnt to respect the remains of what had once been a man like himself. One of these few facts deserves, I think, to be noticed with some detail.
In 1886, excavations in the cave of Spy[276] (Namur), or rather in a terrace some thirty-six feet long by nineteen and a half wide giving access to it, brought to light two human skeletons. One was that of an individual already advanced in life, probably of the feminine sex, the other of a man in the prime of life. These skeletons were imbedded in a very hard breccia containing also fragments of ivory and numerous flints of very small size. Some of them had very fine scratches on both sides. From what I could learn on the spot, the skeletons when found were in a recumbent position. The bones, few of which were missing, were still in their natural position, and near to one of them were picked up several arrow- or lance-heads, one of which, of phtanite, some two and a half inches long, was of the purest Mousterien type. The bones were those of short, squat individuals, and the skulls were of the type of the Canstadt race, the most ancient of which anything is known; the thickness of the crania was about one third of an inch. The forehead, is low and retreating, the eyebrows are prominent, and the lower jaws strong and well developed.
At the same level and in that immediately above it were picked up the remains of the mammoth, the RHINOCEROS TICHORHINUS, the cave bear, and the large cave hyena, the reindeer, and numerous other mammals belonging to the Quaternary fauna. Everything points to the conclusion that the man and woman whose remains have so opportunely come to light were contemporary with these animals, and that their bodies were placed after death in the cave in which they were found.
Belgium has furnished numerous examples of sepulchral caves, of a date, however, less ancient than that we have been considering. Recent excavations in the Chauvaux Cave revealed two skeletons leaning against the walls in a crouching position, the legs tucked under the body. In the Gendron Cave M. Dupont discovered seventeen skeletons lying in a low, narrow passage, stretched out at full length with the feet toward the wall, and arranged in twos and threes, one above the other. In the middle of all these dead was the skeleton of one man placed upright, as if to watch over the other bodies.
The Duruthy Cave at Sordes opens near the point of junction of the waters of the Pan and Oloron, whence their united waters flow into the Adour. At the northern extremity of this cave is a natural niche in which lay more than thirty skeletons, some of men, some of women, and some of children, mixed together in the greatest confusion. Worked flints, bone stilettos, and ornaments lay around, all. of the forms characteristic of Palaeolithic times.
It would seem that we have here evidence of the practice of a funeral rite, which consisted in first stripping the bodies of flesh, and then laying the bones in caves, where they were often left unnoticed by the living occupants of the same refuge.[277]
The caves of Baousse-Rousse, near Mentone, give fresh proof of the extension of this rite, if we may so call it. The skeletons lay upon a bed of powdered iron ore, in some cases as much as two fifths of an inch thick, and this accumulation could not have taken place if the skeleton had not been deprived of its flesh before inhumation. The flesh must have been taken off by some rapid process, for the bones remain, as a general rule, in their natural positions, united by their tendons and ligaments. In Italy, says Issel, the cave men buried their dead in the caves they lived in, a thin layer of earth alone separating them from the living; the bodies, adds Pigorini,[278] generally lay on the left side, the head rested on the left hand, and the knees were bent. Beside the skeleton was placed a vase containing red chalk, to be used for painting the body in the new world it was supposed to be about to enter.
We could quote similar discoveries in Sicily, Belgium, and the southern Pyrenees. Beneath the tumulus of Plouhennec, in Brittany, bones were strewn about in the greatest disorder. Some archaeologists are of opinion that the openings in certain dolmens were used for throwing in the bones of the dead who successively went to join their ancestors. In many of the Long Barrows of England the bones appear to have been flung in pell-mell; the space was too narrow to hold the complete body, so that before inhumation the flesh must have been separated from the bones. In no other way can we explain the confusion in which the human remains lay when they were discovered.[279] Pigorini thinks this is a proof that primitive races worshipped their dead, and held their bodies in veneration.[280] Perhaps they even carried them about in their migrations. However that may be, the custom of separating the flesh from the bones was continued until cremation became general. This would explain the huge ossuaries found in regions so widely separated.
Although, however, the mode of sepulture we have just described was practised for a long time in certain places, we cannot admit it to have been general. In certain megalithic tombs we find dispositions similar to those described in speaking of the Gendron Cave. Excavations beneath the Port-Blanc dolmen (Morbihan) brought to light a rough pavement on which lay numbers of skeletons, closely packed one against another, which skeletons were probably those of men who had been held in honor, and to commemorate whom the dolmen was set up. Separated from them by a layer of stones and earth rested another series of skeletons, not so closely packed as the first. The new-comers had respected their predecessors, and no one had violated the sanctuary of the dead. Similar facts were noted at Grand Compans, near Luzarches,[281] and it is evident that successive inhumations beneath dolmens often took place, and instances might, if necessary, be multiplied.
Another singular funeral rite was practised in remote antiquity. Many of the bones found in the various caves of Mentone were colored with red hematite.[282] As this was only the case with the bones of adults, those of children retaining their natural whiteness, it evidently had some special significance. In 1880, the opening of a cave of the Stone age in the district of Anagni, a short distance from Rome, brought to light the facial portion of a human cranium, colored bright red with cinnabar. Nor are these by any means exceptional cases, for similar coloration was noticed on bones picked up at Finalmarina and several other places in Liguria and Sicily. The custom had therefore become general in the Neolithic period in the whole of the Italian peninsula.[283] We also meet with it in other countries; at the Prehistoric Congress, when in session at Lisbon, Dolgado added to what was said about the discoveries in Italy the fact that the cave men of Furninha practised a similar rite. In the KURGANES of the department of Kiev crania were found colored with a mineral substance, fragments of which were strewn about near the skeletons. The most ancient of the KURGANES appear to date from the Stone age, for in them were found implements made of flint and reindeer-horn, mixed with the bones of rodents[284] long since extinct in that district. A similar practice is met with in the tombs of Poland, many bones being covered with a coating of red color, in some instances one fifth of an inch thick. Excavations in the Kitor valley (province of Irkutsk, Siberia have brought to light several tombs which appear to date from the sauce period as the KURGANES of Kiew. The dead were buried with the weapons and ornaments they would like to use in the new life which had begun for them. The tomb was then filled in with sand, with which care was taken to mix plenty of red ochre. It is difficult not to conclude that this was a relic of a rite fallen into desuetude.
At the present day certain tribes of North America expose their dead on the tops of trees, and before burying the bones, when stripped of their flesh, cover them with a coating of a bright red color. In the island of Espiritu Santo many human bones have also been picked up painted with an oxide of argillaceous iron. These customs, strange as they may appear, were evidently practised in honor of ancestors; atavism is as clearly shown in customs and traditions as in physical structure.
At Solutre is a sepulchre formed of unhewn slabs of stone. The body of the dead rested on a thick bed of the broken and crushed bones of horses. The remains of reindeer were mixed with the human bones. Were these too relics of funeral rites, and were the animal bones those of the horses and reindeer that had belonged to their hunter? It is impossible to say. Solutre, situated as it was on an admirable site on a hill overlooking the valley of the Seine, protected from the north winds and close to a plentiful stream, has also been a favorite resort of man. In the tombs all ages are mixed together, and if some do indeed date from Neolithic times, others are Roman, Burgundian, Merovingian. There may be among them a certain number dating from the Reindeer period; that is about all we can assert with any certainty in the present state of our knowledge. The Abbe Ducrost, however, in an important essay[285] asserts that he has found incontrovertible proofs of the interment of Solutreens on the hearths of their homes in Palaeolithic times. If this be so, the custom is one of frequent occurrence, and has been continued for centuries; for De Colanges, in his fine work on ancient cities, shows that at Rome the earliest tombs were on the hearth itself of the dwelling. De Mortillet, on the other hand, dwells very earnestly on the mode of inhumation at Solutre, and sees in the juxtaposition of human remains and the DEBRIS of hearths but the result of displacement, and of the regular turning upside down of which the hill of Solutre has been the scene. To this Reinach replied, to the effect that, whereas a few years ago De Mortillet's authority led many archaeologists to suppose that the men of the Reindeer period did not bury their dead, facts, ever more important than theories, have now proved beyond a doubt that this very decided opinion is a mistake. Not only did the men of remote antiquity bury their dead; they laid them, as at Solutre, on the hearths near which they had lived.[286]
The dead were often buried seated or bent forward, and it is interesting to note the same custom beneath the mounds of America and the tumuli of Europe. It is touching to see how in death men wished to recall their life on earth; the cradle was, so to speak, reproduced in the tomb, and man lay on the bosom of earth, the common mother of humanity, like the child on the bosom of his own mother. Perhaps, too, the seated position was meant to indicate that man, who had never known rest during his hard struggle for existence, had found it at last in his new life. The men of the rough and barbarous times of the remote past were unable to conceive the idea of a future different to the present, or of a life which was not in every respect the same as that on earth had been.
Whatever may have been the motive, this mode of burial was practised from the Madeleine period.[287] At Bruniquel, in Aveyron, the dead were found crouching in their last home. This position is, however, peculiarly characteristic of Neolithic times, and is met with throughout Europe. Eight skeletons were recently discovered bending forward in the sepulchral cave of Schwann (Mecklenburg). In Scandinavia there are so many similar cases that it is difficult to make a selection. Tit the sepulchral cave of Oxevalla (East Gothland) the dead are all in crouching attitudes, and tumuli dating from the most remote antiquity cover over a passage, formed of immense blocks of stone, leading to a central chamber, in which are numerous seated skeletons resting against the walls.
On the shores of the Mediterranean, excavations of the Vence Cave (Alpes-Maritimes) brought to light a number of dead arranged in a circle as if about to take a meal in common. The bodies were crouching in the position of men sitting on their heels; the spinal column was bent forward and the head nearly touched the knees. In the centre of this strange group were noticed some fragments of pottery and the remains of a large bird, a buzzard probably. Perhaps its death among the corpses was a mere accident.[288] The dolmens of Aveyron yielded some flint-flakes and arrow-heads, pieces of pottery, pendants, and bone, stone, shell, and slate-colored schist beads. Beneath one of these dolmens was found one small bronze object, quite an exceptional instance of the occurrence of that metal. The skeletons rested against the walls. In one of the tombs some human bones, which bad been originally placed at the entrance to the cave, had been moved to the back; the vanquished had here, as in life, to give way before the conquerors. Excavations in the Mane-Lud tomb have led explorers to suppose that here too the corpses were buried in a crouching position. It is the same at Luzarches and in the Varennes cemetery near Dormans.[289] In the last named were found traces of a fire that had been lit above the tomb, and some pottery was picked up ornamented with hollow lines, filled with some white matter not unlike barbotine. M. de Baye says this mode of interment is confined to the district of Marne; but for all that he himself gives an example of its practice elsewhere.[290]
In the prehistoric tombs discovered at Cape Blanc-Nez, near Escalles (Pas-de-Calais), the position in which the body had been interred could be made out in four instances. The ends of the tibiae, humeri, and .radii were united, the bones of the hands were found near the clavicles, so that the bodies had evidently been bending forward with the arms crossed and the fingers pointing toward the shoulders.[291] Similar facts are quoted from a cave at Equehen on the plateau which stretches along the seashore on the east of Boulogne. The bodies, to the number of nine, were crouching with the face turned toward the entrance of the cave, which was closed with great blocks of sandstone. Two polished stone hatchets, broken doubtless in accordance with some sepulchral rite, had been placed near the skeletons.
Numerous human bones were found in the Cravanche Cave near Belfort, which probably dates from the close of the Neolithic period, judging from the total absence of metal and the shape of the flint and bone implements picked up. Here too the bodies were bent almost double, the head drooping forward and the knees drawn up nearly to the chin. Several of these skeletons were completely imbedded in the stalagmite which had formed in the cave, the head and knees alone emerging from the solid mass. The position in which they were originally placed had thus of necessity been maintained.[292]
A similar rite, for rite we must call this mode of burial, was practised in Italy, and the Chevalier de Rossi speaks of a tomb of the Neolithic period at Cantalupo, near Rome, in which one of the bodies wag placed in the crouching attitude, which he says is familiar to all who have studied ancient tombs.[293] This practice was still continued in protohistoric times; Schliemann noticed it in the excavations he superintended at Mykenae, and Homer says that amongst the Lybians the dead were buried seated.
The necropolis near Constantine contains numerous megalithic monuments. These are either round or square cromlechs surrounding sarcophagi, or circular ENCEINTES, in which the dead were laid in a trench. In the former there are always a great many funeral objects in the tomb, and the body of the dead is in a crouching posture; in the latter there are few things beside the corpse itself, and that is in a recumbent position. Do these peculiarities denote different races? Do the tombs all date from the same period, or are these arrangements but fresh indications of the difference everywhere maintained between social classes? It is difficult to decide, and we must be content with enumerating facts. We may add, however, that the crouching position of corpses is constantly met with in Africa[294] and in North and South America, from Canada to Patagonia.[295]
The funeral rites of which we have spoken necessarily imply burial; man did not abandon to wild beasts or birds of prey the bodies of those who had once been like himself. At Aurignac, at Bruniquel, and in the Frontal Cave, the cave man bad taken the precaution of closing with the largest stones he could find the entrances to the last resting-places of those belonging to him. The caves of L'HOMME MORT, and of Petit-Morin which date from Neolithic times, retain traces of similar blocking up. There were five entrances to the cave of Garenne de Verneuil (Marne) in which was a regular ossuary; the floor was paved and the roof kept up with eleven upright stones. The objects in the tomb with the dead were a clumsy earthenware vase, a few flint knives, and some shell necklace beads.
The sides of the almost inaccessible mountains of Peru are pierced, at a height of several hundred feet, with numerous caves which have nearly all been artificially enlarged. It was in them that the Peruvians placed their dead, and the people of the country still call them TANTAMA MARCA or abodes of desolation. The entrances were concealed with extreme care, but this care did not save the tombs from violation; the greed for the treasures supposed to be concealed in the tombs was too great for respect to the unknown dead to hold curiosity in check.
In other cases, the dead was laid near the hearth which had been that of his home when living, and his abode during life became his tomb. The dolmens, CELLA, and GANGRABEN in Germany, and the barrows in England, appear to bear witness to the prevalence of a similar custom in those countries; and we find the same idea perpetuated even when cremation became general. At Alba, in Latium, at Marino, near Albano, at Vetulonia and Corneto-Tarquinia were discovered urns with doors, windows, and a roof imitating human dwellings.[296]
Later, other modes of sepulture came into use. In Marne M. Nicaise made out seven funeral pits[297] resembling in shape, he tells us, long-necked bottles with flat bottoms. One of these pits at Tours-sur-Marne contained at least forty skeletons, and among the bones were found thirty-four polished stone hatchets, fifty knives, two flint lance-heads and a great many arrows with transverse edges, a necklace of little round bits of limestone, several fragments of coarse pottery which had been mixed with grains of silica and baked in the fire, and lastly three little flasks made of stag-horn hollowed out in a curious manner and with stoppers of the same material. These quaint little flasks doubtless contained the coloring matter with which the dead had painted their bodies when alive. All the objects of which we have spoken belonged to the Neolithic period; but a flat bronze necklace bead made by folding a thin slice of metal, a radius, and a bit of rib bearing green marks resulting from long contact with metal, appear to fix the date of this pit at the transition period between the Stone and Bronze ages. If this be so it is quite an exceptional case of a sepulchral pit dating from this time, for most of those known are of much later origin. Those for instance of Mont-Beuvray, Bernard (La Vendee), and Beaugency are not older than Gallo-Roman times.[298] According to Count Gozzadini, those of Manzabotto in Italy, which are twenty-seven in number, date from the IVth century after the foundation of Rome, and are of Etruscan origin. They are constructed with small pointed pebbles, with no trace of cement, and resemble in shape a long amphora vase, or perhaps, to be more accurate, the clapper of a bell. They are from six and a half to thirty-two and a half feet deep, with an opening varying in diameter from one foot to nearly two and a half feet.[299]
We have said so much in preceding chapters on monuments erected in memory of the dead, that but little remains to be added here. Doubtless there are many distinctions to be noted at different times and in different countries, but everywhere the aim remains the same, and the means used for attaining that end are radically the same all the world over. Take for example the Aymaras, the most ancient race of Bolivia and Callao; they laid their dead sometimes beneath megalithic monuments (Fig. 58, p. 178) resembling the dolmens of Europe, sometimes beneath towers or CHULPAS, which are however probably of more recent date.
FIGURE 105
Chulpa near Palca.
CHULPAS, generally of square or rectangular form, consist of a mass of unhewn stones faced outside with blocks of trachyte or basalt, painted red, yellow, or white. A very low door, always facing east, as if in honor of the rising sun, gives access to a cist in which the dead was laid. The CHULPA of our illustration (Fig. 105) is situated near the village of Palca; it rises from an excavation four feet deep; its height is about sixteen feet, and the cornice consists of ICHU, a coarse grass which grows in abundance on the mountains, and which after being firmly compressed was cut with the help of sharp instruments. The human bones, which were mixed together in the greatest confusion, made a heap in the sepulchral chamber more than a foot high.
The mounds of Ohio also cover over sepulchral chambers of a peculiar construction, being often formed of round pieces of wood, five to seven feet long by five to six inches in diameter; near the bodies were placed a few ornaments, chiefly copper ear-rings, shell beads, and large flint knives. Most of the skeletons lay on the bare earth; but one exception is mentioned in which the ground was paved with mussel shells. A remarkable discovery has quite recently been made at Floyd (Iowa), the account of which in Nature for January 1, 1891, we will give in the words of Clement Webster: "In making a thorough exploration of the larger mound ... the remains of five human bodies were found, the bones even those of the fingers, toes, etc., being, for the most part in a good state of preservation. First, a saucer or bowl-shaped excavation has been made, extending down three and three-quarter feet below the surface of the ground around the mound, and the bottom of this macadamized with gravel and fragments of limestone. In the centre of this floor five bodies were placed in a sitting posture with the feet drawn under them, and apparently facing the north. First above the bodies was a thin layer of earth and ashes, among which were found two or three small pieces of fine-grained charcoal. Nearly all the remaining four feet of earth had been changed to a red color by the long-continued action of fire." Mr. Webster goes on to describe the various skeletons and says of one of them, that of a woman: "The bones in their detail of structure indicated a person of low grade, the evidence of unusual muscular development being strongly marked. The skull of this personage was a wonder to behold, it equalling if not rivalling in some respects and in inferiority of grade, the famous Neanderthal skull. The forehead, if forehead it could be called, is very low, lower and more animal-like than in the Neanderthal specimen.... The question has been raised how was it that these five bodies were all buried here at the same time, their bodies being still in the flesh." ... Webster adds that the probability is that all but one of them had been sacrificed at the death of that one, who had most likely been a chief.
FIGURE 106
Dolmen at Auvernier near the Lake of Neuchatel.
We have seen that men began by placing the bodies of their dead in caves, and only later took to burying them underground when caves were not to be had. Very often the corpse was placed between large unhewn stones to keep off from it the weight of the tumulus above. Such were the last resting-places alike of the men of Solutre and of those of Merovingian times. In the necropolis of Vilanova, which is supposed to date from times prior to the foundation of Rome, the tombs enclosed a chest, the walls of which consisted of slabs of sandstone set on edge and connected by a conglomerate of small stones. At Marzabotto, the chests are made of bricks, and placed beneath a heap of pebbles. We reproduce a chest discovered near the Lake Dwellings of Auvernier in Switzerland (Fig. 106)[300] and another (Fig. 107) brought to light by MM. Siret in the south of Spain. These drawings will help us better than long descriptions to form an idea of this mode of burial.
FIGURE 107
A stone chest used as a sepulchre.
In other cases the dead body was enclosed in earthenware jars. At Biskra in Algeria, two of these jars were found together; the one containing the head, the other the feet of the departed. In some instances the jar was replaced by a large clumsy earthenware basin, some six and a half feet long by three feet wide. Such basins are mentioned as having been found near Athens, but there is nothing to help us to determine their date. The ancient Iberians used one large jar only (Fig. 108) in which the dead was placed in a crouching position, still wearing his favorite ornaments. The vase was closed with a stone cover and placed in the tomb. We meet with the practice of a similar mode of interment in historic times. The Chaldeans placed their dead in earthenware vases; two jars connected at the neck serving as a coffin. Excavations in Nebuchadnezzar's palace brought to light bodies bent nearly double and enclosed in urns not more than three feet in height by about two feet in width. On the western coast of Malabar, as far as Cape Comorin, we find near megalithic tombs large jars four feet high by three feet in diameter filled with human bones. This mode of sepulture was practised at Sfax, in the Chersonesus of Thracia, and at the foot of the hill on which Troy was built. The tumulus of Hanai-Tepeh covered over a huge amphora in which crouched a skeleton, and the wealthy Japanese loved to know they would rest in huge artistically decorated vases, masterpieces of native pottery. If we cross the Atlantic, we meet with the same custom in Peru, Mexico, and on the shores of the Mississippi. At Teotihuacan, the bodies of children were placed head downwards in funeral urns,[301] and excavations in the alluvial deposits of the Mississippi yielded, among immense quantities of pottery, two huge rectangular basins glued together with clay and containing the body of a young child. It is indeed interesting to meet with the same practice in so many different places and to find the genius of many races expressing itself in the same way in so many diverse inventions, produced at times so widely separated.
FIGURE 108
Example of burial in a jar.
It is probable that early man also turned to account the trees he saw growing around him, using them as coffins for his dead. But the rapid decay of this fragile case led to its total disappearance. A few exceptions must, however, be mentioned. In 1840 some dredgers took from the bed of the Saone, at Apremont, from beneath a bed of gravel five feet thick, the trunk of a tree which still contained the bones that had been placed in it. Similar discoveries were made in the Cher, and in the celebrated cemetery of Hallstadt, near Salzburg. The cairns of Scania covered over split trunks of oak and birch trees, which had been hollowed out to receive the dead. At Gristhorpe, near Scarborough, in England, a coffin was found made of scarcely squared planks roughly put together; and another very like it was discovered at Hove, in Sussex, the latter containing a splendid amber cup, evidence of the wealth of the man who had been buried in this primitive coffin.[302]
The ancient Caledonians sewed up their dead in the skins of oxen before burying them. The Egyptians also embalmed the ibis, the ox, the cat, the crocodile, and other animals deified by them, and the bodies of these creatures were then placed in vast subterranean chambers, where they have been discovered in the present day in great numbers. The Guanches of Teneriffe, the last representatives of the Iberians, and probably the most ancient race of Europe, took out the intestines of the corpse, dried the body in the air, painted it with a thick varnish, and finally wrapped it in the skin of a goat. This last custom was evidently a relic of the original idea of embalming, with a view to rendering the mummy as nearly as possible indestructible and, to use a happy expression of Michelet, to compel death to endure (FORCER LA MORT DE DURER). Our own contemporaries are thus able to look upon the very features of those who preceded them on the earth some forty centuries ago; and but yesterday photography reproduced in every detail what was once Ramses the Great, one of the most glorious kings of history.
FIGURE 109
Aymara mummy.
Embalming was also practised in America. Recent travellers report[303] having seen in Upper Peru tombs of the shape of beehives, made of stones cemented with clay, each tomb containing one mummy or more in a crouching position (Figs. 109 and 110). This custom was still practised for many centuries; Garcilasso de la Vega tells us that the dead Incas were seated in a temple at Cuzco, wearing their royal ornaments as if they were still alive; their hands were crossed upon their breasts, and their heads were bending slightly forward.[304]
The facts enumerated above prove that burial was long practised, though it is impossible to say when it first cattle into use. About the time of the beginning of the Bronze age, or perhaps even earlier, however, a remarkable change took place in the ideas of man, and the dead instead of being buried intact were consumed by fire on the funeral pile.
What can have been the origin of this custom? What race first practised it? It has long been supposed by many archaeologists that it was the Aryans from the lofty Hindoo Koosh Mountains who first introduced into Europe a civilization more advanced than that which had hitherto obtained there, and taught the people to cremate instead of bury their dead. This theory was accepted for a considerable time without question, but of late years a new school, headed by Penka, has arisen who claim that the reformers came not from the East but from the North. The Marquis de Saporta had indeed before suggested that the primitive races who were the contemporaries of the mammoth and the rhinoceros came originally from the polar regions, where the remains of a luxuriant vegetation prove that climatic conditions prevailed in remote times of a very different character to those of the present day. The lignites of Iceland are made up of tulip, plantain, and nut-trees, even the vine sometimes occurring. In the ferruginous sandstones, associated with the carboniferous deposits of Spitzberg, the beech, the poplar, the magnolia, the plum tree, the sequoia, and numerous coniferous trees can be made out. The sturdy sailors who dare the regions of perpetual ice come across masses of fossilized wood in Banks, Grinnell, and Francis Joseph's Lands, at 88[degree] N. Lat. Among this fossil wood Heer made out the cypress, the silver pine, the poplar, the birch, and some dicotyledons with caducous leaves. These were not relics of wood which had drifted where it was found on floating ice, but of an actual local vegetation, as proved by trunks still erect in their original positions, buds, leaves, and flowers in every stage of growth, fruits in every stage of ripening. The very insects that had lived on honey from the flowers or on the leaves themselves could be identified. In those remote days, life, abundant life, similar to that now only found in the temperate countries farther south, flourished in those polar regions, so long supposed to have never been anything but lifeless deserts.
FIGURE 110
Peruvian mummies.
All this, plausible as it is, does not, however, appear to be conclusive on the point under discussion; and though ,we may have to abandon the idea of the Aryans having introduced cremation, we are scarcely, I think, in a position to say that races from the North were the first to practise it. I have dwelt more fully on the question of the origin of races and the evidence which language seems to give of a common source in two papers called "Les Premiers Populations de l'Europe," which appeared in the CORRESPONDENT for October 1 and November 25, 1889. Whatever may be the final decision on the much contested points involved in this controversy, one thing is certain that cremation, involving though it does a complete revolution in manners and customs, spread with very great rapidity. We meet with it from Greece to Scotland and Scandinavia, from Etruria to Poland and the south of Russia, in China as in Yucatan and certain parts of Central America.
In the early days of history, cremation was practised all over Europe. The Greeks attribute its inauguration to Hercules, and the funeral pile of Patrokles is described in the Iliad. The Pelasgians and the Proto-Etruscans burned their dead,[305] and we are told of the incineration of contemporaries of Jair, the third judge of Israel.
On the other hand, the earliest inhabitants of Latium buried their dead. Visitors, who probably came by way of the valley of the Danube, introduced the new custom, and for a long tune the two rites were practised side by side. At Felsina and at Marzabotto we find instances alike of inhumation and cremation, and at Vilanova only half the tombs are those of corpses that had been cremated. In 365 of the tombs excavated in the Certosa, near Bologna, only 115 show signs of cremation having been practised. At Rome, the two rites were long both performed, probably, however, by the two distinct peoples who formed the primitive population of the town of Romulus. We know that Numa Pompilius forbade the burning of his corpse; Cicero relates that Marius was buried, and that Sulla, his fortunate rival, was the first of the Cornelia GENS whose body was committed to the flames. We do not know how early cremation was introduced in Gaul; we can only say that Caesar found it generally practised when be made his triumphal march across the country.[306] The celebrated excavations of Moreau prove that inhumation and incineration were both practised among the Gallo-Romans established in the eastern provinces of France. We may even assert that the two rites were practised long before the introduction of the use of metals. One thing is certain, the custom of cremation was but slowly abandoned as Christianity spread, for Charlemagne, in an edict dated 789, ordered the punishment of death for those who dared to burn dead bodies.
What we have just said about historic times applies equally to more remote epochs. Thanks to the learned researches of Dr. Prunieres[307] we are able to trace for a great length of time the modes of sepulture adopted in Lozere. The cave men of the eroded limestone districts of Les Causses took their dead to the caves in which their ancestors had been laid, and the invaders, who were probably more civilized than those they dispossessed, placed theirs beneath the dolmens which they erected in their honor. In the sepulchral caves of Rouquet and of L'HOMME MORT we find inhumation; beneath the megalithic monuments dating from the end of the Neolithic period, we meet with the first traces of cremation, but so far of a very incomplete cremation; the action of the funeral fire had not been intense, and the bones were hard and resisted the heat. Noting beneath certain dolmens a few bones blackened by fire mixed with large quantities unaffected by it, one is inclined to think with the learned Doctor, that after practising cremation men had reverted to the old mode of burial. In the tumuli of the Bronze age, on the other hand, where the date can be determined with the aid of the ornaments and trinkets scatered about, the ustion was more complete; the bones are friable and porous, crumbling into dust when touched, and there is nothing to indicate that inhumation and cremation were both practised.
It is strange indeed to find that incineration was practised from Neolithic times in the wild mountains of Lozere. There can be no doubt on the point, however, and excavations beneath the dolmen of Marconnieres strikingly confirm the earlier discoveries of Dr. Prunieres. Beneath a layer of broken stones and a very thin pavement, was found a mass of human bones in the greatest confusion; some still retaining their natural color, others blackened and charred by. fire. Among these bones was picked up an arrow of rock foreign to the country, three admirably polished lance-heads, and some finely cut flint-darts. The dolmen contained no metal objects, and there was no trace of metal on any of the bones.
At the same period the two rites appear to have been practised simultaneously in Armorica, but there incineration was the dominant custom. In one hundred and forty-five megalithic monuments supposed to date from the Neolithic period, seventy-two give proof of incineration and twenty of inhumation only. The others yielded a few cinders, but it was impossible to come to any definite conclusion. In many cases, as we have seen, the megalithic monument was surrounded by a double or triple ENCEINTE of stones without mortar. Inside these ENCEINTES were some small circular structures made of stones reddened by the action of heat. In the lower part of these structures were openings to admit a current of air to fan the flames. These strange structures, full of cinders and black greasy earth, bear the significant name of RUCHES DE CREMATION.[308] Of thirty-nine sepulchres of the Bronze age twenty-seven gave evidence of incineration, two of inhumation, whilst ten decided nothing one way or the other.[309] The dolmen of Mont St.-Michel and that of Tumiac are separated by a short distance only; they were erected by the same race and probably about the same period, yet at Mont St.-Michel we find incineration, while inhumation was practised at Tumiac. How explain this difference in funeral customs? Does it imply a diversity of race, of caste, of religion, or of social position, or may it not rather be explained as being merely the result of those later displacements which upset the most careful reasoning?
Whatever may have been the cause of the different modes of burial, we meet with them in every country.
In Scandinavia, during the Bronze age, cremation and burial were practised in about equal proportions. Similar facts are noticed in Germany, but in the North incineration predominates, while in the West it is inhumation. Beneath the cairns of Caithness in Scotland, we find some bodies lying at full length, while others are in a bent position, and large jars of coarse pottery filled with cinders and calcined bones which had belonged to men of medium height. One of the largest of these jars is fifteen or sixteen inches high by forty-nine wide at its largest part.[310] In excavating the barrows of the Orkney Islands, Petrie noted the practice of both modes of burial[311]; but were those buried in manners so different contemporaries? This is what we are not told, and what we have to find out.
At Blendowo in Poland, beneath a cromlech was found an urn filled with calcined bones, and thirty centimetres lower down a skeleton was discovered buried in the sand. Near this body was found a coin of Theodosius, and we wonder in vain whether both the individuals, whose remains are thus within a common tomb, lived at the same time. Throughout Prussia and in tire Grand Duchy of Posen skeletons and jars containing human ashes. are met with in the same tombs.[312] We must not forget to note, especially, the necropolis of Hallstadt, which was situated in the heart of the district of Bohemia occupied by the Boii. The most ancient of the tombs in these vast burial-places date from about two thousand years before the Christian era, and the Hallstadtian period, as it is sometimes called, culminated during the first half of the millennium immediately before the coming of Christ.[313] Nine hundred and ninety-three tombs have been excavated; all, to judge by the objects found with the human remains, belonging to the Bronze age; of these five hundred and twenty-seven contained buried bodies, and four hundred and fifty-three cremated relics.[314] This is a larger proportion than in the primitive necropoles of Italy.
In the tombs in which burial was practised, the bodies were laid in the trench without covering, and the remains of anything in the way of slabs or coffins or protecting planks are very rare; in those tombs in which cremation had been the rule, ustion had often been very incomplete, sometimes the head and. sometimes the feet having escaped the flames.
Similar facts are noted at Watsch, at San Margarethen, and at Vermo in Styria, at Rovesche in Southern Carniola, and at Rosegg in the valley of the Drave. At Watsch, but ten skeletons were found, among two hundred examples of incineration. In the cremation sepulchres, if we may so call them, the cinerary urn was protected by large slabs; while in those where burial was practised, the bodies were simply confided to the earth as at Hallstadt; but by a singular contrast, the latter tombs contained much more important relics, the objects with the dead being more valuable and of finer workmanship. At Rovesche, the urn was placed in a square chest made of unhewn stones. The buried bodies lay with the head turned toward the east, an urn was placed at their feet, and their shrouds were kept in place by bronze fibulae, while on the fingers were many rings of the same metal.
Lastly, to conclude this gloomy catalogue, excavations in the mounds of Ohio and Illinois[315] have shown that there too cremation and inhumation are met with in sepulchres which everything tends to assign to the same race and the same period.[316] The sepulchral crypts of Missouri contain several skeletons which had been subjected to intense heat. The human bones were mixed with the remains of animals, fragments of charcoal, and pieces of pottery, with sortie flint weapons. In a neighboring mound excavations revealed no trace of cremation; the bodies were stretched out upon the ground, and those who discovered them picked up near them a valuable collection of flints and of carefully made pottery. There is however nothing to show whether those who buried and those who burnt their dead belonged to the same race or lived at the same time. Cremation long survived among the most savage tribes of Alaska and California, where it is still practised, and the Indians of Florida preserve the ashes of their fathers in human skulls. In California, the relations of the deceased covered their faces with a thick paste of a kind of loam mixed with the ashes of the dead, and were compelled to wear this sign of their grief until it fell off naturally.
Although we meet with the burial of the dead either in a recumbent or a crouching position, everywhere the minor ceremonies connected with death are innumerable; each people, each race, indeed, having its own custom, handed down from one generation to another, and piously preserved intact by each successive family. Feasting was from the earliest times a feature of the funeral ceremonies. An edict of Charlemagne forbids eating and drinking on the tombs of the deceased, and Saint Boniface, the apostle of Germany, complains bitterly that the priests encouraged by their presence these feasts of death. We meet with the same kind of thing among the lower classes at the present day, and the cemeteries of Paris are surrounded with cafes and wine shops, where too often grief is drowned in wine. The custom of holding these feasts really comes down from the earliest inhabitants of Europe, and the savage cave man gorged himself with food upon the tombs of those belonging to him. At Aurignac, in the cave of L'HOMME MORT, in the Trou du Frontal, broken bones and fragments of charcoal bear witness to the repast. Similar traces of feasts are met with beneath the dolmens and the tumuli. From the Long Barrows have been taken the skulls and feet of bovidae, and it is probable that the other parts of the body had been devoured by the assistants, and that the head and feet were placed in the tomb as an offering either to the dead or to the divinities who are supposed to have presided at the death. In the ancient sepulchres of Wiltshire Sir R. Colt Hoare picked up the bones of boars, stags, sheep, horses, and dogs; which he too considered were the remains of funeral feasts.
Were feasts the only ceremonies connected with interments? We think not. The body was often placed in the centre of the sepulchral chamber, and around it were ranged the wives, servants, and slaves of the deceased, condemned to follow their chief into the unknown world to which he had gone. Beneath a dolmen of Algeria was found a crouching skeleton with two crania lying at his feet, which crania had doubtless belonged to victims immolated in his honor. The barrows of Great Britain preserve traces of human sacrifices, and Caesar says in speaking of the Gauls: "Their funerals are magnificent and sumptuous. Everything supposed to have been dear to the defunct during his life was flung upon the funeral pile; even his animals were sacrificed, and until quite recently his slaves and the dependants he had loved were burnt with him."[317]
The facts we have been noticing prove that early man cherished hopes of immortality. All was not ended for him with death; a new life commences beyond the tomb, marked — for his ideas could go no farther — by joys similar to those he had known on earth, and events such as had occurred during his life. What else could be the meaning of the weapons, the tools of his craft, the vases filled with food placed near the defunct, the ornaments and colors intended for his adornment, the wives, slaves, and horses flung into the same tomb or consumed upon the same pile? It is pleasing to find this supreme hope among our remote ancestors; and clumsily as it was expressed, it implies a belief in a being superior to man, a protecting divinity according to some, but according to some few others a malignant and tyrannical spirit. The proofs so far to hand are not enough to justify us in seriously asserting that ancestors were worshipped by prehistoric man. But the subject is too important for us to refrain from putting before the reader such indications of this worship as have been collected, and which are necessarily connected with the moral and material condition of our remote ancestors.
The radius of a mammoth was discovered at Chaleux, occupying a place of honor on a large sandstone slab near the hearth. The Chaleux Cave dates from the Reindeer period; at which time the mammoth had long since been extinct in Belgium, so that there can be no doubt that the cave man had taken this bone from the alluvial deposits of the preceding epoch, and this huge relic of an unknown creature had been the object of his veneration, a lar or protective divinity of his home. A somewhat similar fact was discovered at Laugerie-Basse and, by a strange coincidence, certain tribes of North America of the present clay preserve the bone of a mastodon or of a cetacean in their buts as a protection to their homes.
From Paleolithic times men were in the habit of cutting celts or hatchets in chalk, bitumen, and other fragile substances, which were certainly of no practical use. Thousands of similar objects in harder rock, but showing no sign of wear or tear, have also been found, and there is little doubt that they all alike served as amulets. This superstitious respect for certain objects lasted for many centuries, and was handed down from one generation to another. The tombs of the Bronze and Iron ages are often found to contain flint hatchets, some of them broken intentionally, a proof, as I have already said, that they were connected with funeral rites of the nature of which we are ignorant.
We also find votive hatchets beneath dolmens. By the side of some skeletons at Cissbury lay flint celts. A hatchet one and a quarter feet long was found in a Lake Station of Switzerland. It was of such friable rock that it can have been of no use but as a symbol; perhaps, indeed, it may have been a badge of office. Lastly, Merovingian tombs contain hundreds of small flint celts, the last pious offerings to the departed.[318]
We find hatchets engraved on the megalithic monuments of Brittany, on the walls of the caves of Marne, and we meet with them again on the other side of the Atlantic, evidently bearing the same signification, implying respect for them as. means of protection. De Longperier has published a description of a Chaldean cylinder, on which was represented a priest presenting his offering to a hatchet lying on a throne, and a ring was picked up at Mykenae, on the stone of which was engraved a double-bladed celt. We find the same idea in many different mythologies. The word NOUTER (God) is translated in Egyptian hieroglyphics by a sign resembling a celt, and the hatchet of Odin is engraved on the rocks of Kivrik. On a number of Gallo-Roman CIPPI, we find a hatchet beneath which we read the words, DIS MANIBUS, and lower down the dedication, SUB ASCIA DEDICAVIT. At all times and everywhere the hatchet appears as the emblem of force, and is the object of the respect of the people. The tradition of its value and importance is handed down from ancestors to descendants throughout many generations.
FIGURE 111
Erratic block from Scania, covered with carvings.
May we give a religious interpretation to the basins and cups hollowed out on rocks and erratic blocks and on the so-called Roches Moutonnees, with other monuments that have endured for many centuries (Figs. 111 and 112)? Or must we attribute them merely to passing caprice? Their number and importance we think forbid the latter idea. We find such blocks in Switzerland, in England, France, Italy, Portugal, and on the frozen shores of the Baltic. They are no less numerous in India, and they figure in the curious pictographs of the two Americas. There is no doubt that we have here a common idea, and one it is impossible not to recognize. How. else can we account for the similarity of arrangement in the cup-shaped sculptures from the tumuli of Schleswig-Holstein and those on the Indian rocks of Kamaou, or between those of Algeria and of England?
FIGURE 112
Engraved rock from Massibert (Lozere).
In Brittany and in Scotland these cup-like sculptures are found on rocks and menhirs, on the walls of sepulchral chambers, on stones forming the sides of KISTVAENS, accompanied in many instances with radiated circles, which do not, however, help us to understand them better. In Scandinavia they are known as ELFEN STENAVS, or elf stones, and the inhabitants come and place offerings on them for the LITTLE PEOPLE. According to a touching tradition, these little people are souls awaiting the time of their being clothed once more in human flesh. In Belgium these strangely decorated stones are attributed to the NUTONS, dwarfs who are very helpful to mortals. In every country there is some legend sacred to the sculptured stones.
Such are the only facts we have been able to collect respecting the religious feeling of prehistoric races. They are not sufficient to authorize any final conclusion on the subject. At every turn we are compelled to admit our helplessness. But yesterday this past without a limit was absolutely unknown to us, and to-day we are but beginning to be able to obtain a glimpse into its secrets. We have been the laborers of the first hour, it will be for those who come after us to complete the task we have been able but to begin. May a genuine love of truth be to them, as we may justly claim it has been to us, the only guide.
WORKS BY MARQUIS DE NADAILLAC.
Prehistoric America. By the Marquis de Nadaillac. Translated, with the permission of the Author, by Nancy Bell (N. D'Anvers), author of "History of Art." Edited, with notes, by W. H. Dall. Popular edition. $2 25
CHIEF CONTENTS. — Man and the Mastodon — The Kjokkenmoddings and Cave Relics — Mound-Builders — Pottery Weapons and Ornaments of the Mound-Builders — Cliff-Dwellers and Inhabitants of the Pueblos — People of Central America — Central American Ruins — Peru — Early Race — Origin of the American Aborigines, etc., etc.
"The best book on this subject that has yet been published, ... for the reason that, as a record of facts, it is unusually full, and because it is the first comprehensive work in which, discarding all the old and worn-out nostrums about the existence on this continent of an extinct civilization, we are brought face to face with conclusions that are based upon a careful comparison of architectural and other prehistoric remains with the arts and industries, the manners and customs, of "the only people, except the whites, who, so far as we know, have ever held the regions in which these remains are found." — NATION.
The Customs and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples. By the Marquis de Nadaillac. Translated, with the permission of the Author, by Nancy Bell (N. D'Anvers). Fully illustrated. 8vo. $3 00
CHIEF CONTENTS. — The Stone Age, its Duration, and its Place in Time — Food, Cannibalism, Mammals, Fish, Hunting and Fishing, Navigation — Weapons, Tools, Pottery; Origin of the Use of Fire, Clothing, Ornaments; Early Artistic Efforts — Caves, Kitchen-Middings, Lake Stations, "Terremares," Crannoges, Burghs, "Nurhags," "Talayoti," and "Truddhi" — Megalithic Monuments — Industry, Commerce, Social Organization; Fights, Wounds and Trepanation — Camps, Fortifications, Vitrified Forts; Santorin; the Towns upon the Hill of Hissarlik — Tombs — Index.
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK AND LONDON.
NOTES
[1] — M. Gaston.
[2] — Pliny calls them CERAUNIA GEMMA ("Natural History," book ii., ch. 59 book xxxvii., ch. 51).
[3] — S. Reinach proves clearly enough that the collections of the Emperor Augustus were from Capri.
[4] — This skeleton was discovered in 1726 by Scheuchzer, a doctor of OEningen, and by him placed in the Leyden Museum, with the pompous inscription HOMO DILUVII TESTIS (PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS, vol. xxxiv.). Cuvier, by scraping away the stone, revealed the true nature of the fossil.
[5] — "Ossium Fossilium Docimasia."
[6] — "Mem. Acad. des Inscriptions," 1734, vol. x., p. 163.
[7] — ARCHAEOLOGIA, vol. ii., p. 118.
[8] — "The Antiquities of Warwickshire," vol. iv., 1656.
[9] — ARCHAEOLOGIA, vol. xiii., p. 105.
[10] — Castelfranco: REVUE D'ANTHROPOLOGIE, 1887.
[11] — ANNALES DES SCIENCES NATURELLES, vol. xvii., p. 607. Cartailhac: MATERIAUX, 1884.
[12] — "Recherches sur les Ossements Fossiles de la Province de Liege."
[13] — ATHENAEUM, 16 July, 1859.
[14] — "Discours sur les Revolutions du Globe," third edition, p. 13, Paris, Didot, 1861.
[15] — ACAD. DES SCIENCES, 18th and 23d May, 1863.
[16] — Lubbock: "On the Evidence of the Antiquity of Man Afforded by the Physical Structure of the Somme Valley" (NAT. HIST. REVIEW, vol. ii.). Prestwich: "On the Occurrence of Flint Implements Associated with the Remains of Extinct Species in Beds of a Late Geological Period" (PHIL. TRANS., 1860). Evans: "Flint Implements in the Drift" (ARCH., 1860 — 62).
[17] — ACAD. DES SCIENCES, 1859, 1863.
[18] — Cartailhac: "L'Age de Pierre dans les Souvenirs et les Superstitions Populaires."
[19] — A short time before his tragic end, the noble and patriotic Gordon sent to Cairo three hatchets or stone wedges found amongst the Niams-Niams, who said they had fallen from Heaven, and who worshipped then with superstitious rites (BULL. INSTITUT EGYPTIEN, 1886, No. 14).
[20] — "Museo Moscardo," Padova, 1656.
[21] — According to M. Pitre de Lisle, the Bretons think that these stones vibrate at every clap of thunder.
[22] — Roulin: ACAD. DES SCIENCES, December 28, 1868.
[23] — "Congres d'Anthropologie et d'Archeologie Prehistorique," Paris, 1889.
[24] — Council of Arles in 452, of Tours in 567, of Nantes in 658, of Toledo in 681 and 692, and of Leptis in 743.
[25] — Baluze: "Capitularia Regum Francorum," vol. i., pp. 518, 1231, 1237.
[26] — Steenstrup, Forchammer, Thomsen, Worsaae, and Nillsson. The commission appointed by the Copenhagen Academy of Sciences presented six reports on the subject between 1850 and 1856.
[27] — "Die Anfang des Eisens Cultur," Berlin, 1886.
[28] — "Archeologie Celtique et Gauloise," p. 46.
[29] — Dr. Much: "L'Age de Cuivre en Europe et son Rapport avec la Civilisation des Indo-Germains," Vienna, 1886. Pulsky: "Die Kupfer Zeit im Ungarn," Budapest, 1884. Cartailhac: "Ages Prehistoriques de l'Espagne et du Portugal," p. 211. E. Chantre: MAT., June, 1887; and Berthelot: JOURNAL DES SAVANTS, September, 1889.
[30] — Irenee Cochut: "These presentee a la Faculte de Theologie Protestante de Montauban."
[31] — See my translation of the author's admirable and exhaustive work on "Prehistoric America," chapters i. and iv. — Nancy Bell.
[32] — ACADEMIE DES SCIENCES, May 23, 1881; "Antiquites du Musee de Minoussink," Tomsk, 1886 — 7.
[33] — "Les Ages Prehistoriques en Espagne et en Portugal."
[34] — "Stone Implements from the Northwestern Provinces of India," JOURNAL OF THE ASIATIC SOCIETY OF BENGAL, Calcutta, 1883.
[35] — LITERARY JOURNAL OF MADRAS, vol. xiv.
[36] — "L'Age de Pierre et la Classification Prehistorique d'apres les Sources Egyptiennes," Paris, 1879.
[37] — Pitt Rivers: "On the Discovery of Chert Implements in the Nile Valley," British Association, York, 1881.
[38] — Belluci: "L'Eta della Pietra in Tunisia," Roma, 1876, BOL. DELLA SOC. GEOG. ITALIANA, 1876.
[39] — "The Stone Age of South Africa," JOURN. ANTH. INSTITUTE, 1881.
[40] — REVUE DES DEUX-MONDES, march 1, 1878.
[41] — De Quatrefages: REV. D'ETHNOGRAPHIE, 1883, p. 97, etc.
[42] — Sir J. Lubbock: "Prehistoric Times," pp. 483, 549.
[43] — ASS. FRANCAISE, le Havre, 1877. DISCOURS D'OUVERTURE.
[44] — "Prehistoric America," Paris, New York, and London.
[45] — See my translation of "L'Amerique Prehistorique," chap. i., "Man and the Mastodon." — Nancy Bell.
[46] — Many interesting details respecting the Cliff Dwellers are given in De Nadaillac's "L'Amerique Prehistorique," chap. v. — Nancy Bell.
[47] — CONGRES DES NATURALISTES ALLEMANDS, Innsbruck, Sept., 1869,
[48] — "Quaternary man is always man in every acceptation of the word. In every case in which the bones collected have enabled us to judge, he has ever been found to have the hand and foot proper to our species, and that double curvature of the spinal column has been made out, so characteristic that Serres made it the distinctive attribute of his human kingdom. In every case with him, as with us, the skull is more fully developed than the face. In the Neanderthal skull so often quoted as bestial, the cranial capacity is more than double that ever found in the largest gorilla." De Quatrefages: "Hommes Fossiles et Hommes Sauvages," p. 60.
[49] — In this cave were found the bones of 45 bears. In the Goyet Cave (which bears the number 3), were found complete sets of the bones of 12 mammoths, 8 rhinoceroses, 57 bears, 57 horses, 24 hyaenas, 35 reindeer, 6 uruses, 2 lions, with the bones of a great number of goats, chamois, and boars. Dupont: "L'Homme pendant l'Age de la Pierre," p. 86.
[50] — These birds belonged to the rapaces, passeres, gallinaceous, wading, and web-footed groups. Every order is represented, and nearly all the bones were those of edible species, which had certainly served as food to man.
[51] — Richard Andree: "Die Anthropophagie eine Ethnographische Studie," Leipzig, 1887.
[52] — "Les Hommes de Chavaux et d'Engis" BUL. ACAD. ROY. DE BELGIQUE, vol. xx., 1853; vol. xviii. (new series), 1863; vol. xxii., 1866; MATERIAUX, 1872. p, 517.
[53] — "L'Homme pendant les Ages de la Pierre," p. 225.
[54] — "Compte Rendu," p. 363.
[55] — "Hist. Nat.," book vii., sec. 2.
[56] — Belgrand: "Le Bassin Parisien," vol. i., p. 232.
[57] — BULL. SOC. ANTH., 1869, p. 476. — AC. DES SCIENCES, 1870, first week, p. 167.
[58] — ARCHIVES DU MUSEE NATIONAL DE RIO DE JANEIRO, vol. i., 1876.
[59] — See my translation of De Nadaillac's "Prehistoric America," pp. 53, 58, and 59." — N. D'Anvers.
[60] — "Geography," book iv.
[61] — "Opera," vol. ii., Migne edition, p. 335. Richard, of Cirencester, says that the Attacotes lived on the shores of the Clyde, beyond the great wall of Hadrian.
[62] — Schweden's "Urgeschichte," p. 341.
[63] — The felidae were very numerous in Europe in Quaternary times. We may mention two species of lions, LEO NOBILIS and LEO SPELAEUS, the latter often confounded with the DELIS SPELAEUS of such frequent occurrence in French caves, two species of tigers, TIGRIS EDWARDSIANA and TIGRIS EUROPAEA, the largest of the Quaternary felidae, which was some twelve feet long. We also know of seven species of leopards, six species of cats, from the Serval to a little felis smaller than our domestic cat; two species of lynx, and lastly the MACHAIRODUS, a beast of prey of considerable size, characterized by having exceptionally long upper canines serrated like a saw. Probably these beasts of prey were not all contemporaries, but succeeded each other. (Bourguignat: "Histoire des Felidae Fossiles en France dans les Depots de la Periode Quaternaire," Paris, 1879.)
[64] — "Testimony of the Rocks," p. 127, Edinburgh and Boston, 1857.
[65] — OSSEMENTS FOSSILES TROUVES A ODESSA. The cave-hyena resembles that now living at the Cape.
[66] — Ducrost and Arcelin: "Stratigraphie de l'Eboulis de Solutre," MAT., 1876, p. 403. ARCHIVES DIE MUSEUM D'HIST. NAT. DE LYON, vol. 1.
[67] — M. de Baye found a great many similar arrow-heads in the Petit-Morin caves.
[68] — Nilsson: "The Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia."
[69] — Captain Edward Johnson, who travelled about in New England from 1628 to 1632, relates that the children there spent their days in shooting at the fish that appeared on the surface of the water, succeeding in catching them with marvellous skill. "A History of New England," London, 1654.
[70] — Reiss and Steubel: "The Necropolis of Ancon in Peru," London and Berlin.
[71] — MATERIAUX, 1870, p, 348.
[72] — WIADOMOSEI ARCHEOLOGIZNE, No. iv., Warsaw, 1882.
[73] — Ch. Rau: "Prehistoric Fishing in Europe and America."
[74] — Horace: "Odes," book i., ode iii.
[75] — Friedel: "Fuhrer durch die Fischerei Abtheilung."
[76] — "A Catalogue of the Antiquities in the Museum of the Royal Academy."
[77] — PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF SCOTLAND, vol. iii. Dr. R. Munro "Ancient Scottish Lake Dwellings or Crannoges," Edinburgh, 1882.
[78] — Geikie, EDINBURGH NEW PHILOSOPHICAL JOURNAL, vol. xv. De Lapparent "Traite de Geologie," first edition, p. 518.
[79] — "Discoveries in the more Recent Deposits of the Bovey Basin," TRANS. DEVONSHIRE ASS., 1883.
[80] — "Nordische Oldsager i der kongelige Museum i Kjobenhawn."
[81] — "Les Proto-Helvetes," NATURE, 1880, 1st week, p. 151.
[82] — "Mem. Soc. d'Emulation d'Abbeville," 1867.
[83] — Indra, the all-seer, to whom it is given to pierce the cloud, personified by Vritra, and "to open the receptacles of the waters with his far-reaching thunder-bolts," is of course the sun, the worship of which was one of the earliest and most natural instincts of humanity; whilst Vritra was in the first instance merely the symbol of the cloud, intervening between heaven and earth, shutting out from men the light of the sun, and keeping back the refreshing rain. The gradual conversion of these natural phenomena into a good and a malignant power, ever struggling for the mastery, is a forcible illustration of the way in which myths are evolved. — Trans.
[84] — De Mortillet: "Le Prehistorique," Paris, 1883, p. 133.
[85] — "Limon du Plateau du Nord de la France," Paris, 1878. Acheuleen et Mousterien: REVUE DES QUESTIONS SCIENTIFIQUES, October, 1880. BUL. SOC. ANTH., 1884, 1887.
[86] — CHELLEEN, so called from their having been found at Chelles (Seine-et-Marne), where the remains of the ELEPHAS ANTIQUUS, the most ancient of the pachyderms now known in Europe, was associated with these tools.
[87] — De Mortillet: "Musee Prehistorique," pl. xvi. to xix.
[88] — M. de Mortillet enumerates 127 polishers found at various points in thirty departments of France. "Le Prehistorique," first edition, p. 534.
[89] — Piette: ASS. FRANC. POUR L'AVANCEMENT DES SCIENCES, Nantes, 1875, p. 909.
[90] — De Mortillet: "Le Prehistorique," p. 544; "Musee Prehistorique," figs. 431 to 434.
[91] — "Musee Prehistorique," fig. 410.
[92] — Lagneau: "De l'Uusage des Fleches empoisonnees chez les Anciens Peuples l'Europe," Ac. des Insc., 2d November, 1877.
[93] — "Les Temps Prehistoriques en Belgique," p. 151.
[94] — "Reliquiae Aquitanicae," p. 127.
[95] — NATURE, 1876, second week, p. 5.
[96] — In this cave, in the second ossiferous deposit, were found four fragments of pottery. De Puydt and Lohest: "L'Homme Contemporain du mammouth."
[97] — "La poterie en Belgique a l' age du mammouth," REVUE D'ANTHROPOLOGIE, 1887.
[98] — AC. DES SCIENCES, Nov. 9, 1885. We must add that at a later seance M. Cartailhac contested, if not the facts, the conclusions deducted from them.
[99] — But what is the value of categorical assertions of this kind in presence of the fragments of pottery found at different levels in Kent's Hole? One of these fragments was so rotten that when placed in water it formed a black liquid mud as it decomposed.
[100] — I have not space to speak here of the curious pottery found in America. The most ancient specimens, moreover, are of much later date than the Quaternary epoch. I can only refer those interested in the subject to my book on "Prehistoric America," published in French by M. Masson of Paris, and in English in America by Messrs. G. P. Putnam's Sons.
[101] — "De Architectura," book ii., c. i.
[102] — On the subject of tatooing an excellent work may be consulted by Dr Magitot ("Ass. Franc. pour l'Avancement des Sciences," Alger, 1881).
[103] — CYPRAEA RUFA, CYPRAEA LURIDA (COMPTES RENDUS ACAD. DES SCIENCES, vol. lxxxiv., p. 1060).
[104] — On this point an excellent work may be consulted by S. Reinach: "Le Musee de Saint Germain,'' p. 232.
[105] — Vaudry: ACAD. DES SCIENCES, August 25, 1890.
[106] — A. Bertrand: ACAD. DES INSCRIPTIONS, April 29 and May 6, 1887.
[107] — Reinach in his "Catalogue of the Saint-Germain museum" gives the best description I know of this now celebrated reindeer.
[108] — A. Milne Edwards: ACAD. DES SCIENCES, May 8, 1888.
[109] — "De Natura Rerum," book v., v. 951, etc.
[110] — "El hombre seguramente habitaba las corazas de los Glyptodon Pero no siempre las colocaba en la posicion que acabo de indicar." — "La Antiguedad del Hombre en el Plata," vol. ii., p. 532.
[111] — "On Some Recent Researches in Cone-Caves in Wales," PROC. GEOL., ASSO., vol. ix. "On the Flynnon, Benno, and Gwyu Caves," GEOL. MAG., Dec., 1886.
[112] — REVUE DES QUESTIONS SCIENTIFIQUES, April, 1887.
[113] — "Odyssey," book ix., v. 105 — 124.
[114] — AEschylus: "Prometheus Bound."
[115] — A. Maury: "La Vieille Civilisation Scandinave," REVUE DES DEUX MONDES, September, 1880.
[116] — F. de Olivera: "As Racas dos Kjoekkenmoeddings de Mugem," Lisbon, 1881.
[117] — REPORT PEABODY MUSEUM, 1882.
[118] — REPORT PEABODY MUSEUM, 1882 and 1885.
[119] — Brinton: "Notes on the Floridian Peninsula," Philadelphia, 1849.
[120] — We take many of these details from Dr. Gross' excellent work on the "Pile Dwellings of Switzerland."
[121] — Virchow: "Drei Schadel aus der Schweiz."
[122] — REVUE D'ANTHROPOLOGIE, 1887, p. 607.
[123] — G. Cotteau: NATURE, 1877, first week, p. 161.
[124] — Rutimeyer: "Fauna der Pfahlbauten in der Schweiz."
[125] — ANZEIGER FUR SCHWEIZERISCHE ALTERTHUMS KUNDE, April, 1884.
[126] — Comte Conestabile: "Sur les Anciennes Immigrations en Italie." Heilbig: "Beitrage zur Altitalischen Kultur and Kund Geschichte," i. Band. G. Boissier: REVUE DES DEUX-MONDES, October, 1879.
[127] — BUL. DI PALETHNOLOGIA ITAL., 1879. The TERPENS of Holland, though of much more modern date, greatly resemble the TERREMARES.
[128] — "Ricerce di Archeologia Preistorica nella Valle della Vibrata."
[129] — Wylie, ARCH. BRIT., vol. xxxviii. Wylde, PROC. ROYAL IRISH ACAD., vol. i., p. 420.
[130] — ARCH. BRIT., vol. xxvi., p. 361. PROC. ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY, vol. vii., p. 155.
[131] — "Habitations Lacustres des Temps Anciens et Modernes," p. 170.
[132] — R. Munro: "Ancient Scottish Lake Dwellings or Crannoges, with a Supplementary Chapter on Remains of Lake Dwellings in England," Edinburgh, 1882.
[133] — "Prehistoric Times." Wilson: "Prehistoric Scotland."
[134] — Nicolucci: "Scelse Lavorate, Bronzi e Monumenti di Terra d'Otranto." Lenormant, REVUE D'ETHNOGRAPHIE, February, 1882 (BUL. SOC. ANTH., 1882 and 1884). S. Reinach: "Esquises Archeologiques."
[135] — "Les Premiers Ages du Metal dans le Sud-Est de l'Espagne," Brussels, 1887.
[136] — Bateman: "Ten Years' Diggings," Preface, p. 11.
[137] — W. MacAdams: "The Great Mound of Cahokia." Am. Ass., Minneapolis, 1883.
[138] — Pelagaud: "Prehistoire en Syrie."
[139] — Moore, POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, New York, March, 1880; ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ETHNOLOGIE: Berlin, 1887.
[140] — "Monuments de Roknia," p. 18.
[141] — Haxthausen: "Mem. sur la Russie," vol. ii., p. 204; A. Bogdanow: "Mat. pour Servir a l'Histoire des Kourganes," Moscow, 1879; Margaret Stokes: "La Disposition des Principaux Dolmens de l'Irlande," REV. ARCH., July, 1882.
[142] — Sir A. de Capell Brooke: "Sketches in Spain and Morocco."
[143] — Tissot: "Recherches sur la Geographie Comparee de la Mauritanie Tinigitane."
[144] — Margaret Stokes: "La Distribution des Principaux Dolmens de l'Irlande." REVUE ARCH., July, 1882.
[145] — Sir W. Wilde: "Ireland, Past and Present." Miss Buckland: "Cornish and Irish Prehistoric Monuments." ANTH. INST., NOV., 1879. O'Curry: "Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Irish History."
[146] — BUL. SOC. POL. DU MORBIHAN, April, 1885.
[147] — S. Reinach, REV. ARCH., 1888. Wilson: "Megalithic Monuments of Brittany." Cartailhac: "La France Prehistorique," in which the measurements are given of the principal monuments of Brittany.
[148] — A. Bertrand: "Archeologie Celtique et Gauloise," p. 105.
[149] — Iliad, book xxiii., v. 380.
[150] — Joshua, chap. iv., v. 13 ET SEQ.
[151] — P. du Chatellier, MEM. SOC. D'EMULATION DES COTES-DU-NORD, vol. xix.
[152] — Cartailhac: "Les Ages Prehistoriques en Espagne et en Portugal."
[153] — Verreaux, L'ANTHROPOLOGIE, 1890, p. 157.
[154] — Haxthausen: "Mem. sur la Russie Mer., Vol. ii., p. 204. "Fouilles des Kourganes," par M. Sarnokoasof, REVUE ARCH., 1879. Much: MITTHEILUNGEN DER ANTH. GESELL. IN WIEN, 1878.
[155] — On this point see the excellent work by Maury, "Les Monuments de la Russie et les Tumulus Tchoudes," and Meynier and Eichtal's "Tumulus des Anciens Habitants de la Siberie."
[156] — REVUE D' ANTH., 1880, p. 655.
[157] — MEM. DE LA SOC. ARCH. DE LA PROVINCE DE CONSTANTINE, 1863.
[158] — "Monuments Megalithiques de la Tunisie," ANT. AFRIC., July, 1884. Dr. Rouire: "Les Dolmens de l'Enfida," BULL. GEOG. HIST., 1886.
[159] — "Heth and Noah," pp. 191 and 192.
[160] — "Heth and Moab," p. 249.
[161] — "Tribes of the Hindoo Koosh," Calcutta, 1881.
[162] — MATERIAUX, 1887, p. 458. M. Pallart ("Mon. Meg. de Mascaro"), thinks that this dolmen was not erected by man, but that a long slab of stone has slipped down the slopes of the mountain and rested on two natural supports. It is not easy to accept this view.
[163] — Dr. de Closmadeuc, agreeing, I think, with Henry Martin, derives the name of DOL VARCHANT from DOL MARCH'-HENT, the table of the horse of the avenue.
[164] — COMPTE RENDU, p. 421.
[165] — MAT., 1877, p. 470.
[166] — ASS. FRANCAISE, Bordeaux, 1872, p. 725.
[167] — REV. D'ANTH., 1881, p. 283.
[168] — By permission of the author, the translator adds the following quotation from Taylor's "Origin of the Aryans," p. 17, which is referred to by Professor Huxley in his paper on the Aryan question in the NINETEENTH CENTURY for November, 1890. Taylor says: "It is now contended that there is no such thing as an Aryan race in the same sense that there is an Aryan language, and the question of late so frequently discussed as to the origin of the Aryans can only mean, if it means anything, a discussion of the ethnic affinities of those numerous races which have acquired Aryan speech; with the further question, which is perhaps insoluble, among which of these races did Aryan speech arise and where was the cradle of that race?"
[169] — This poet is one of those whose work is to be found in the so-called "Black Book of Caermarthen." See also "The Four Ancient Books of Wales, Containing the Cymric Poems Attributed to the Bards of the Sixth Century." Edinburgh, 1868.
[170] — Foureau, BUL. SOC. GEOG., June 1, 1883.
[171] — Munck has just discovered a similar station at Oburg (Hainault), where similar implements, produced by similar processes as those at Spiennes, were discovered.
[172] — Briart, Cornet, and Houzeau: RAPPORT SUR LES DECOUVERTES FAITES A SPIENNES EN 1867. Malise: BUL. ACAD. ROYALE DE BELGIQUE.
[173] — JOURNAL, ETHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY, 1818, p. 419.
[174] — ACADEMIE DES SCIENCES, Nov., 1883. MAT. Jan., 1884. Nature, June 18, 1887.
[175] — NATURE, June 16, 1887.
[176] — Heilbig: "Osservazioni sopra il Commercio del l'Ambra" (ACAD. DEI LINCEI). We must not confound the yellow amber of the Baltic with the red amber found in Italy, in the mountains of Lebanon, and even in some lignites in the south of France. Sadowski: "Le Commerce de l'Ambre chez les Anciens."
[177] — Nephrite is found in Turkestan, in Siberia, and in New Zealand. Deposits of jadeite are known in Burmah, Jeannetay, and Michel — "Note stir la Nephrite ou jade de Siberie" (BUL. SOC. MINERALOGIQUE DE FRANCE, 1881). Meyer: "Die Nephritfrage kein ethnologische Problem," Berlin, 1882.
[178] — Objects made of chloromelanite have been picked up in thirty-eight of the departments of France. No deposit of it is known now. — Fischer and Damour: REV. ARCH., 1877.
[179] — Obsidian is chiefly found in the mines and quarries of Terro de las Navajas (Mexico), known in the time of the Aztecs. Deposits have also lately been discovered in Hungary and the island of Melos.
[180] — Calaite differs from the turquoise by an equivalent of aluminium; it was described by M. Damour in 1864. It is said that traces of it have been found in the tin mines of Montebras, which appear to have been worked from prehistoric times. — MAT., 1881, p. 166, etc. Cartailhac: BUL. SOC. ANTH., 1881, p. 295. |
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