Fig. 12.
In our own islands there is also evidence during the Bronze Age of the practice of engraving signs and pictographic figures on rocks and the slabs of sepulchral cists and chambers. Those found in England and Scotland consist for the most part of mere geometrical figures, such as concentric circles with connecting lines, the more elaborate figures found in the Fife Caves,[24] for example, certainly belonging to the Late Celtic Period. But in Ireland, then raised, by its abundant output of gold, to the position of a Western Eldorado, the field of primitive pictography is richer. The slabs of the chambered tumuli of Sleive-na-Calligha present groups of elaborate figures;[25] but a special interest attaches to those discernible in the great chambered barrow of New Grange. As was pointed out by Mr. Coffey,[26] one of the principal figures here carved represents in a degraded form a ship with its crew analogous to those so constantly repeated in the Scandinavian group ([Fig. 14]). This coincidence becomes the more suggestive when we recall the existence of a whole series of finds showing a connexion between Ireland and Denmark and its neighbour-lands during the Bronze Age.
These parallels extend to Brittany. The rocks and sepulchral slabs of the old Armoric region also present, as is well known, a considerable pictographic material, dating from Neolithic and Early Metal Ages. Among recently discovered remains of this class may be mentioned a group of curious inscribed rocks near Saint-Aubin in Vendée,[27] the carvings on which seem to show some analogy with the menhirs of the Aveyron, the dolmens of the Gard, and the caves of the Marne. On these, besides conventionalized linear figures of men and animals, occur a variety of unexplained signs, some of them of a remarkably alphabetiform character.
Fig. 13.