[5]. Preliminary Discourse pronounced before the University College of London, upon the commencement of a series of Lectures on Architecture, pp. 17-24. London, 1842.
[6]. Museum of Classical Antiquities, Vol. I. p. 1. London, 1851.
I desire therefore to express in language as strong as may be consistent with propriety, my entire disapproval of pitting one branch of archæology against another, or indeed any study against another study. And on this very account I rejoice that the Disney Professor’s field of choice is as wide as the world itself, so far as concerns its archæology. There is no country, there is no period about which he may not occupy himself, or on which he may not lecture, if he feel himself qualified to do so. He is in a manner bound by the tenure of his office to treat every branch of archæology with honourable respect; and this in itself may not be without a wholesome influence both upon his words and sentiments. I have been somewhat longer over this matter than I could have wished; but I thought it desirable that the position of the Disney Professor should be rightly understood; and I have also endeavoured to shew the real advantage of that position.
His field then is the world itself; but as this is so (and as I think rightly so) there is a very true and real danger lest he and his hearers should be mazed and bewildered at the contemplation of its magnitude. Yet in spite of that danger I will venture to invite you to follow the outlines of the great entirety of the relics of the ages that have for ever passed away. I say the outlines, and even this is almost too much, for I am compelled to shade some parts of the picture so obscurely, and to throw so much of other parts into the background, that even of the outlines I can distinctly present to you but a portion. Thus I will say little more of the archæology of the New World, than that there is one which reaches far beyond the period of Spanish conquest, comprising among many other things ruins of Mexican cities, exquisite monuments of bas-reliefs and other carvings in stone; I will not invite you into the far East of the Old World, to explore the long walls and Buddhist temples of the ancient and stationary civilisation of China, or to dwell upon the objects of its fictile and other arts; but leaving both this and all the adjacent countries of Thibet, Japan and even India without further notice, or with only passing allusions, spatiis conclusus iniquis, I will endeavour, so far as my very limited knowledge permits, the delineation of the most salient peculiarities of the various remains of the old world till the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, and then attempt to trace briefly the remains of successive medieval classes of antiquities, until we arrive at almost modern times. I can name but few objects under each division of the vast subject; but these will be selected so as to suggest as much as possible others of a kindred kind. In addressing myself to such an audience, I may, if anywhere, act upon the assumption, Verbum sapienti sat est: a single word may suggest a train of thought. If I cannot wholly escape the charge of tediousness, I must still be content: for I am firmly convinced after the most careful consideration that I can pursue no course which is equally profitable, though I might take many others which might be more amusing.
It would now appear probable that the earliest extant remains of human handicraft or skill have as yet been found, not on the banks of the Nile or the Euphrates, but in the drift and in the caverns of Western Europe. Only yesterday, as I may say, it has been found out that in a geological period when the reindeer was the denizen of Southern France, and when the climate was possibly arctic, there dwelt in the caverns of the Périgord a race of men, who were unacquainted with the use of metals, but who made flint and bone weapons and instruments; who lived by fishing and the chase, eating the flesh of the reindeer, the aurochs, the wild goat and the chamois; using their skins for clothes which they stitched with bone needles, and their bones for weapon handles, on which they have etched representations of the animals themselves. Specimens of these things were placed last year in the British Museum; and a full account of the discoveries in 1862 and 1863 may be seen in the Revue Archéologique. Some distinguished antiquaries consider that they are the earliest human remains in Western Europe. Various other discoveries in the same regions of late years have tended towards shewing that the time during which man has lived upon the earth is much greater than we had commonly supposed. The geological and archæological circumstances under which the flint implements were found at Abbeville, and St Acheul, near Amiens, in the valley of the Somme, left no doubt that they were anterior by many ages to the Roman Empire. They have a few points of similarity to those found in the caverns of the Périgord, and as they occur along with the remains of the Elephas Antiquus and the hippopotamus, Sir Charles Lyell infers that both these animals coexisted with man; and perhaps on the whole we may consider them rather than those of the Périgord to be the earliest European remains of man, or of man at all. Similar weapons have been found in the drift in this country, in Suffolk, Bedfordshire, and elsewhere. At Brixham, near Torquay, a cavern was examined in 1858, covered with a floor of stalagmite, in which were imbedded bones of the reindeer and also an entire hind leg of the extinct cave-bear, every bone of which was in its proper place; the leg must consequently have been deposited there when the separate bones were held together by their ligaments. Below this floor was a mass of loam or bone-earth, varying from one to fifteen feet in thickness, and amongst it, and the gravel lying below it, were discovered about fifteen flint knives, recognised by practised archæologists as artificially formed, and among them one very perfect tool close to the leg of the bear. It thus becomes manifest that the extinct bear lived after the flint tools were made, or at any rate not earlier; so that man in this district was either the contemporary of the cave-bear, or (as would seem more probable) his predecessor. But shortness of time forbids me to do more than to indicate that in western Europe generally, as well as in Britain, we have an archæology beginning with the age of the extinct animals or quaternary geological epoch and connecting itself with the age of the Roman Empire, when the first literary notices of those countries, with slight exceptions, commence. The antiquaries and naturalists of Denmark conjointly (these indeed should always be united, having much in common; and I am happy in being able to say that a love of archæology has often been united with a love of natural science by members of this University, among whom the late and the present Professor of Botany may be quoted as examples)—these Danish archæologists and naturalists I say, have made out three distinct periods during this interval: the age of stone contemporary with the pine forests; the age of bronze commencing with the oak forests which lie over the pine in the peat; and the age of iron co-extensive with the beech forests which succeeded the oak, and which covered the country in the Roman times as they cover it now. The skulls belonging to the oldest or stone age resemble those of the modern Laplanders; those of the second and third are of a more elongated type.
The refuse-heaps along the shores of the islands of the Baltic, consisting of the remains of mollusks and vertebrated animals, mingled with stone weapons, prove the great antiquity of the age of stone; the oyster then flourished in places where, by reason of the exclusion of the ocean from the brackish Baltic, it does not now exist. None of the animals now extinct, however, occur in these Kjökkenmödding, as they are called, except the wild bull, the Bos primigenius, which was alive in Roman times; but the bones of the auk, now, in all probability, extinct in Europe, are frequent; also those of the capercailzie, now very rare in the southern districts of Scandinavia, though abundant in Norway, which would find abundant food in the buds of the pines growing in pre-historic times in the peat bogs. Similar refuse-heaps, left in Massachusetts and in Georgia by the North American Indians, are considered by Sir C. Lyell, who has seen them, to have been there for centuries before the white man arrived. They have also been found, I understand, very recently in Scotland in Caithness. The stone weapons have now been sharpened by rubbing, and are less rude and probably more recent than those of the drift of the Somme valley, or of the caverns of the Périgord. The only domestic animal belonging to the stone age, yet found in Scandinavia, is the dog; and even this appears to have been wanting in France. In the ages of bronze and iron various domestic animals existed; but no cereal grains, as it would seem, in the whole of Scandinavia. Weapons and tools belonging to these three periods, as well as fragments of pottery and other articles, are very widely diffused over Europe, and have been met with in great abundance in our own country (in Ireland more especially), as well as near the Swiss-lake habitations, built on piles, to which attention has only been called since 1853. It is strange that all the Lake settlements of the bronze period are confined to West and Central Switzerland: in the more Eastern Lakes those of the stone period alone have been discovered.
Similar habitations of a Pæonian tribe dwelling in Lake Prasias, in modern Roumelia, are mentioned by Herodotus, and they may be compared, in some degree, with the Irish Lake-dwellings or Crannoges, i.e. artificial islands, and more especially with the stockaded islands, occurring in various parts of the country: and which are accompanied by the weapons and instruments and pottery of the three aforesaid periods. Even in England slight traces of similar dwellings have been found near Thetford, not accompanied by any antiquities, but by the bones of various animals, the goat, the pig, the red deer, and the extinct ox, the Bos longifrons, the skulls of which last were in almost all instances fractured by the butcher.
As to the chronology and duration of the three periods I shall say nothing, though not ignorant that some attempts have been made to determine them. They must have comprehended several thousand years, but how many seems at present extremely uncertain. I should perhaps say that Greek coins of Marseilles, which would probably be of the age of the Roman Republic, have been found in Switzerland in some few aquatic stations, and in tumuli among bronze and iron implements mixed. The cereals wanting in Scandinavia appear in Switzerland from the most remote period; and domestic animals, the ox, sheep, and goat, as well as the dog, even in the earliest stone-settlements. Among the ancient mounds of the valley of the Ohio, in North America, have been found (besides pottery and sculpture and various articles in silver and copper) stone weapons much resembling those discovered in France and other places in Europe. Before passing from these pre-historic remains, as they are badly called, to the historic, let me beg you to observe a striking illustration of the relation of archæology to history. Archæology is not the handmaid of history; she occupies a far higher position than that: archæology is, as I said at the outset, the science of teaching history by its monuments. Now for all western and northern Europe nearly the whole of its early history must be deduced, so far as it can be deduced at all, from the monuments themselves; for the so-called monuments of literature afford scanty aid, and for that reason our knowledge of these early ages is necessarily very incomplete. Doubtless, many a brave Hector and many a brave Agamemnon lived, fought, and died in the ages of stone and of bronze; but they are oppressed in eternal night, unwept and unknown, because no Scandinavian Homer has recorded their illustrious deeds. Still, we must be thankful for what we can get; and if archæological remains (on which not a letter of an alphabet is inscribed) cannot tell us everything, yet, at least, everything that we do know about these ages, or very nearly so, is deduced by archæology alone.
We must now take a few rapid glances at the remains of the great civilised nations of the ancient world. Mr Kenrick observes that the seats of its earliest civilisation extend across southern Asia in a chain, of which China forms the Eastern, and Egypt the Western extremity; Syria, Mesopotamia, Assyria, and India, are the intermediate links. In all these countries, when they become known to us, we find the people cultivating the soil, dwelling in cities, and practising the mechanical arts, while their neighbours lie in barbarism and ignorance. We cannot, he thinks, fix by direct historical evidence the transmission of this earliest civilisation from one country to another. But we may determine with which of them ancient history and archæology must begin. The monuments of Egypt surpass those of all the rest, as it would appear, by many centuries. None of the others exercised much influence on European civilisation till a later period, some exception being made for the Phœnician commerce; but the connection of European with Egyptian civilisation is both direct and important. “From Egypt,” he remarks, “it came to Greece, from Greece to Rome, from Rome to the remoter nations of the West, by whom it has been carried throughout the globe[[7]].” As regards its archæology, which is very peculiar and indeed in some respects unique, I must now say a few words. The present remains of Memphis, the earliest capital, said to have been founded by Athothis, the son of Menes, the first king of the first dynasty, are not great; but so late as the fourteenth century they were very considerable. Temples and gateways, colossal statues and colossal lions then existed, which are now no more. Whether any of them approached the date of the foundation it is useless to enquire. Now, the most remarkable relic is a colossal statue of Rameses II., which, when perfect, must have been about forty-three feet high. This monarch is of the XVIIIth dynasty, which embraces the most splendid and flourishing period of Egyptian history; and though much uncertainty still prevails for the early Egyptian chronology, it appears to be well made out and agreed that this dynasty began to reign about fifteen centuries before the Christian era. But the pyramids and tombs of Ghizeh, and of several other places at no great distance from Memphis, are of a much earlier date; and the great pyramid is securely referred to a king of the fourth dynasty. “Probably at no place in the entire history of Egypt,” says Mr Osburn, “do the lists and the Greek authors harmonize better with the historical notices on the monuments than at the commencement of this dynasty[[8]].” The system of hieroglyphic writing was the same (according to Mr Kenrick) in all its leading peculiarities, as it continued to the end of the monarchy. I regret to say that some eminent men have tried to throw discredit, and even ridicule, on the attempts which, I think, have been most laudably made with great patience, great acuteness, and great learning, to decipher and interpret the Egyptian and other ancient languages. Many of us, doubtless, have seen a piece of pleasantry in which Heigh-diddle-diddle, The cat and the fiddle is treated as an unknown language; the letters are divided into words—all wrongly, of course—these words are analysed with a great show of erudition, and a literal Latin version accompanies the whole. If I remember (for I have mislaid the amusing production) it proves to be an invocation of the gods, to be used at a sacrifice. Now, a joke is a good thing in its place; only do not let it be made too much of. Every archæologist, beginning with Jonathan Oldbuck, must sometimes fall into blunders, when he takes inscriptions in hand, even if the language be a known one; and, of course, à fortiori, when but little known. My own opinion on hieroglyphics would be of no value whatever, as I know nothing beyond what I have read in a few modern authors, and have never studied the subject; but, allow me to observe, that I had a conversation very lately with my learned and excellent friend, Dr Birch, of the British Museum, who is now engaged in making a dictionary of hieroglyphics, and he assured me that a real progress has been made in the study of them, that a great deal of certainty has been attained to; while there is still much that requires further elucidation. To the judgment of such a man, who has spent a great part of his life in the study of Egyptian antiquities, though he has splendidly illustrated other antiquities also, I must think that greater weight should be attached than to the judgment of others, eminent as they may be in some branches of learning, who have never studied this as a specialty.
[7]. Ancient Egypt, Vol. I. p. 3. London, 1850.