190. Talyot at Alajor, Minorca. From De la Marmora.
Externally they generally resemble the nurhags in appearance, and apparently have always chambers in their interior, but De la Marmora was unable to determine whether any of them had the internal staircase[506] leading to the summit which is the invariable and essential characteristic of the nurhag. If they had not this, they must be considered as more nearly approaching to our chambered cairns than to nurhags; and till this point is settled, and we know more about them, we must refrain from speculations on the subject. One characteristic feature they have, however, which it is useful to note. It is a bilithon, if such a term is admissible—an upright flat stone, with one across it forming a sort of table. In appearance it very much resembles those stone tables which are found inside the chambers of the Maltese sepulchres, but these are always larger, and placed, so far as is known, externally. What their use may have been, it is difficult to conjecture, but they were evidently considered important here, as in woodcut No. 190 one is shown surrounded by a sacred enclosure, as if being itself the "Numen" to be honoured. At Malta, as before remarked, they certainly were not altars, because pedestals, which were unmistakably altars, are found in the same apartments, and they are very unlike them. They seem more like the great saucers in the Irish tombs, and may have served the same purposes; but altogether these Balearic outside tables are unlike anything we know of elsewhere.
Rude-Stone circles seem to be not uncommon in combination with the talyots and tall altars, and on the whole they seem to bear as much affinity to the monuments of Spain as to those of Sardinia, but again till we know more it is idle to speculate on either their age or uses beyond the conclusion drawn from all similar monuments—that their destination was to honour departed greatness.
It would be not only interesting but instructive to pursue the subject further, for the monuments of these islands deserve a more complete investigation than they have yet received; but this is not the place to pursue it. Indeed, it is only indirectly that they have any connection with the subject of this work. They are not megalithic in the sense in which the word is generally used. Nor are they rude, for all the stones are more or less shaped by art, and all are used constructively. In none of them is the stone itself the object and end of the erection. In all it is only a means to an end.
It is their locality and their age that import them into our argument if there is anything in the connection between the monuments of France and Algeria, as attempted to be shown above. Whether the African ones came from Europe, or vice versâ, it must have been in consequence of long-continued intercourse between the two countries, and of an influence of the dolmen builders in the Western Mediterranean which could hardly have failed to leave traces in the intermediate islands, unless they had been previously civilized and had fixed and long-established modes of dealing with their own dead.
Assuming that the nurhags and giants' towers extend back to the mythic times of Grecian history, say the war of Troy—and some of them can hardly be more modern—it will hardly be contended now that the dolmens are earlier. If they were so, it must be by centuries or by thousands of years, if we are to assume that the one had any influence on the other, for it must have taken long before a truly rude-stone monument could have grown into a constructive style like that of Sardinia or Malta; and I do not think, after what has been said above, any one would now contend for so remote an antiquity. If neither anterior nor coeval, the conclusion, if we admit any influence at all, seems inevitable that the dolmens must be subsequent. But this is just the point at issue. The nurhags did not grow out of dolmens, nor dolmens out of nurhags. They are separate and distinct creations, so far as we know, belonging to different races, and practically uninfluenced by one another. Here, as elsewhere, each group must be judged by itself, and stand on its own merits. If any direct influence can be shown to exist between any two groups, there is generally very little difficulty in arranging them in a sequence and seeing which is the oldest, but till such connection is established, all such attempts are futile.
In so far as any argument can now be got out of these insular monuments, it seems to take this form. If the dolmen people were earlier than the nurhag-builders, they certainly would have occupied the islands that lay in their path between France or Spain and Africa, and we should find traces of them there. If, on the contrary, the nurhag-builders were the earlier race, and colonised these islands so completely as to fill them before the age of the dolmen-builders, the latter, in passing from north to south, or vice versâ, could only have touched at the islands as emigrants or traders, and not as colonists, and consequently could have neither altered nor influenced to any great extent the more practically civilized people who had already occupied them.