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Updated: May 27, 2025
Excavations have brought to light arrow-heads, rings, and bronze spirals, but Chantre, an authority of considerable weight, and who has moreover had the advantage of actually seeing these megalithic monuments of the south of Russia, attributes the objects found beneath them to secondary interments, and does not hesitate in assigning the more ancient monuments themselves to the Stone age.
Our own contemporaries, however civilized we may flatter ourselves by considering them, would not prove themselves as disinterested. Hatchets, pottery, and personal ornaments of stone bone, etc., are not the only artificial objects found beneath the megalithic monuments.
There is here nothing to suggest the Doric of Paestum and Selinus, much to recall the megalithic buildings of Syria, and the sculpture of the farther East. The evidence is almost entirely that of pottery discovered on the site. The whole question of the relations of Minoan to Mycenaean art, and of this archaic art to the earlier civilizations of Egypt and Chaldea, is very obscure and uncertain.
Beginning with a scrutiny of megalithic building and sun-worship, he has subsequently deduced, from evidence of common distribution, the existence of a culture-complex, including in addition to these two elements the varied practices of tattooing, circumcision, ear-piercing, that quaint custom known as couvade, head-deformation, and the prevalence of serpent-cults, myths of petrifaction and the Deluge, and finally of mummification.
Megalithic monuments of Ireland and certain stones in Northumberland are ornamented in a manner resembling the Gavr'innis engraving, similar designs being produced by similar means, and although the engravings of Morbihan are generally more clearly cut and distinct, Ave note in all alike the same absence of regularity, the same roughness of execution, the same strange types, the same disorder in the arrangement of the signs, and the same care to preserve the surface of the block in its natural condition.
"So evident is this resemblance," says Vogt, "that we may easily confound together implements brought from such very different sources." The same observation applies to megalithic monuments. Everywhere we find these primitive structures assuming similar forms.
Megalithic monuments are perhaps the most interesting of all the witnesses of the remote past, into the history of which we are now inquiring, and of which so little is known.
Sardinia furnishes some fine examples of rectilinear work, while the best of the curved designs are found in Malta, where elaborate conventional and even naturalistic patterns are traced out with wonderful freedom and steadiness of hand. The pottery of the megalithic area is not all alike; it would be surprising if it were.
From the megalithic tombs of old Japan to the little urn that holds the handful of ashes representing a cremated body, the transition is immense. It has been shown that one of the signal reforms of the Daika era was the setting of limits to the size of sepulchres, a measure which afforded to the lower classes much relief from forced labour.
It is more than accident that the many places in which, according to this theory, the megalithic phase independently arose all lie in most natural sea connection with each other, while not one is in the interior of Europe.
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