Carvings on a grave-stone at Novilara, Italy
As therefore this representation of the ship’s stern-post does not correspond to any known type of ancient boat or ship, as it is also difficult to understand how the people of the rock-carvings came to represent a boat with two upturned prows, and as further there is a striking similarity between the lowest line of the keel and a sledge-runner, one might be tempted to believe that by an association of ideas these delineations have become a combination of ship and sledge. These rock-carvings may originally have been connected with burials, and the ship, which was to bear the dead, may have been imagined as gliding on the water, on ice, or through the air, to the realms of the departed, and thus unconsciously the keel may have been given the form of a runner. It may be mentioned as a parallel that in the “kennings” of the far later poetry of the Skalds a ship is called, for instance, the “ski” of the sea, or, vice versa, a ski or sledge may be called the ship of the snow. The sledge was moreover the earliest form of contrivance for transport. In this connection there may also be a certain interest in the fact that in Egypt the mummies of royal personages were borne to the grave in funereal boats upon sledges. That the rock-carvings were originally associated with burials may also be indicated by the fact that the carved stones of the Iron Age, which in a way took the place of the rock-carvings, frequently represent the dead in boats on their way to the underworld or the world beyond the grave (see illustration, [p. 243]). That ships played a prominent part in connection with the dead appears also from the remarkable burial-places formed by stones set up in the form of a ship, the so-called ship-settings, in Sweden and the Baltic provinces, as well as in Denmark and North Germany. These belong to the early Iron Age. The usual burial in a ship covered by a mound, in the later Iron Age, is well known. We seem thus to be able to trace a certain continuity in these customs. A certain continuity even in the representation of ships may also be indicated by the striking resemblance that exists between the two- or three-leaved, lily-like prow ornament on the rock-carvings, on the knives of the later Bronze Age, on the grave-stone of Novilara, and on such late representations as some of the ships of the Bayeux tapestry. The upturned prows of the ships of the rock-carvings also frequently end in spirals like the stern-post on the stone at Stenkyrka in Gotland ([p. 243]), and both prows and stern on other stones of the later Iron Age from Gotland.
Ship from the Bayeux tapestry (eleventh century), and rock-carving
All are agreed in referring the rock-carvings to the Bronze Age; but while O. Montelius, for example, puts certain of them as early as between 1450 and 1250 B.C., A. M. Hansen has sought to bring them down to as late as 500 B.C. In any case they belong to a period that is long anterior to the beginning of history in the North. From whence and by what route this art came it is difficult to say. Along the same line of coasts by which the megalithic graves, dolmens and chambered barrows made their way from the Mediterranean to the North (see [p. 22]) rock-carvings are also to be found scattered through North Africa, Italy (the Alps), Southern France, Spain, Portugal, Brittany, England, Ireland and Scotland. It may be reasonable to suppose that this practice of engraving figures on stone came first from Egypt at the close of the Stone Age; but the rock-carvings of the west coast of Europe and of the British Isles are distinct in their whole character from those of Scandinavia, and do not contain representations of ships[223] and men, which are such prominent features of the latter; but common to both are the characteristic cup-markings, besides the wheel, or solar signs (with a cross), foot-soles, and also spirals. There may thus be a connection, but we must suppose that the rock-carvings underwent an independent development in Scandinavia (like the Bronze Age culture as a whole)—if it could not be explained by an eastern communication with the south through Russia, which however is not probable—and as the representation of ships came to be so common, we must conclude it to be here connected with a people of strong seafaring tendencies. Since the ships depicted on the rock-carvings cannot, so far as we know at present, have been direct imitations of delineations of ships derived from abroad—even though they may be connected with forms of religion and burial customs that were more or less imported—we are, as yet at least, bound to believe that the people who made the rock-carvings had boats or ships which furnished the models for their conventional representations. And when we see that these people went to work to engrave on the rocks pictures of ships which are fifteen feet in length, and have as many as fifty rowers,[224] we are bound to believe that in any case they were able to imagine ships of this size. It is also remarkable that rock-carvings are most numerous precisely in those districts, Viken and Bohuslen, where we may expect that the seamanship of the Scandinavians first attained a higher degree of perfection if it was first imported from the south-east. With this would also agree Professor Montelius’s theory: that at a very much earlier time, about the close of the Stone Age, direct communication already existed between the west coast of Sweden and Britain, which he concludes from remarkable points of correspondence in stone cists with a hole at the end, and other features.
Shipment of tribute. From the bronze doors from Babavat, Assyria (British Museum)
Warship of Ramses III., circa 1200 B.C.