Fig. 144.—Group of Danish Cromlechs.
Among all these various monuments the "passage-tombs" and the tumuli are the only ones which will come within the scope of this work; for these only have furnished us with any relics of pre-historic times, and have given us any information with respect to the peoples who occupied a great part of Europe at a date far anterior to any traditionary record.
These stone monuments, as we have already stated, are neither Celtic nor Druidical. The Celts—a nation which occupied a portion of Gaul at a period long before the Christian era—were altogether innocent of any megalithic construction. They found these monuments already in existence at the time of their immigration, and, doubtless, looked upon them with as much astonishment as is shown by observers of the present day. Whenever there appeared any advantage in utilising them, the Celts did not fail to avail themselves of them. The priests of this ancient people, the Druids, who plucked from off the oak the sacred mistletoe, performed their religious ceremonies in the depths of some obscure forest. Now, no dolmen was ever built in the midst of a forest; all the stone monuments which now exist stand in comparatively unwooded parts of the country. We must, therefore, renounce the ancient and poetical idea which recognised in these dolmens the sacrificial altars of the religion of our ancestors.
Some tumuli attain proportions which are really colossal. Among these is Silbury Hill, the largest in Great Britain, which is nearly 200 feet high. The enormous amount of labour which would be involved in constructions of this kind has led to the idea that they were not raised except in honour of chiefs and other great personages.
On consulting those records of history which extend back to the most remote antiquity, we arrive at the fact that the custom of raising colossal tombs to the illustrious dead was one that was much in vogue in the ancient Eastern world. Traces of these monuments are found among the Hebrews, the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Egyptians, &c.
Thus Semiramis, Queen of Nineveh, raised a mound over the tomb of Ninus, her husband. Stones were likewise piled up over the remains of Laïus, father of Œdipus. In the 'Iliad,' Homer speaks of the mounds that were raised to the memory of Hector and Patroclus. That dedicated to Patroclus—the pious work of Achilles—was more than 100 feet in diameter. Homer speaks of the tumuli existing in Greece, which, even in his time, were considered very ancient, and calls them the tombs of the heroes. A tumulus was raised by Alexander the Great over the ashes of his friend Hephæstio, and so great were the dimensions of this monument that it is said to have cost 1200 talents, that is about £240,000 of our money. In Roman history, too, we find instances of the same kind. Lastly, the pyramids of Egypt, those costly and colossal funeral monuments, are the still visible representations of the highest expression of posthumous homage which was rendered by the generations of antiquity to their most illustrious and mighty men.
This, however, could not have been in every case the prevailing idea in the men of the Stone Age, in causing the construction of these tumuli. The large number of bodies which have been found in some of these monuments completely does away with the notion that they were raised in honour of a single personage, or even of a single family. They were often sepulchres or burial-places common to the use of all. Among this class we must rank the tumuli of Axevalla and of Luttra, situated not far from one another in Sweden. The first, which was opened in 1805, contained twenty tombs of an almost cubical form, each containing a skeleton in a crouching or contracted attitude. When the second was opened, the explorers found themselves in the presence of hundreds of skeletons placed in four rows one upon another, all in a contracted position like those at Axevalla; along with these human remains various relics of the Stone Age were also discovered.
