Fig. 19.
To return to the European shores of the Mediterranean, a remarkable group of prehistoric rock-carvings already known in mediaeval times as the Maraviglie, or ‘Marivels’,[33] is found near the Col di Tenda in the Maritime Alps—in the neighbourhood, that is, of a very old line of communication between Provence and the Po Valley. The earliest known groups of these figures lay at an elevation of between 7,000 and 8,000 feet about the Laghi delle Maraviglie, in the heart of Monte Bego.[34] More recently a still more extensive series has been discovered by Mr. Clarence Bicknell, cut like the others in the glaciated schist rocks and at a similar lofty elevation in the neighbouring Val di Fontanalba.[35] I have myself visited a more outlying group at Orco Feglino[36] in the Finalese, only a few miles from the Ligurian coast.
These figures, of which examples are given in Figs. 19 and 20, represent oxen, often engaged in ploughing, and men in various positions, sometimes brandishing weapons and apparently signalling, and a variety of arms, implements, and other objects. Among the weapons, the halberds and daggers are characteristic of the earlier part of the Bronze Age,[37] and it is noteworthy that the sword which characterized the later phase of that culture is entirely absent. The figures of the oxen ploughing are depicted as if seen from above—a circumstance explained by the way in which these rock terraces look down on the cultivated lands below.[38] Many of these oxen are conventionalized to such an extent that they have rather the appearance of rude figures of scorpions or beetles with tails.
The same figures are often repeated [in] the schist slopes, and we have not here such connected groups as we see, for instance, on the sculptured slabs of Scandinavia. The picture-signs of the Maraviglie had perhaps a votive intention. It seems to me that some of the figures may represent packs, and that merchants as well as warriors and tillers of the soil took part in their representations.
The records of primitive pictography extend to the Vosges and Jura, and reappear east of the Adriatic. In a fiord of the Bocche di Cattaro, not far from the site of Rhisinium, the capital of the old Illyrian kingdom, my own explorations were rewarded by the discovery of a curious group of painted signs on a rock-face above a sacred grotto, and in a somewhat inaccessible position. They consisted mainly of animals and varieties of the swastika sign. That they were of pre-Christian date may be regarded as certain, but a fuller investigation of them at my own hands was cut short by force majeure.
Up to the present the old pictography of the lands between the Adriatic and the Black Sea and the lower Danubian basin is best illustrated by the linear incised figures found on the primitive pottery of that region. The best collection of such signs is due to the researches of Fräulein Torma, at Broos, in Transylvania. In view of the ethnic and archaeological connexions which are shown to have existed between the lower Danubian regions and the western part of Asia, it is specially interesting to note the analogies that these Transylvanian graffiti present with those noted by Schliemann on the whorls and pottery of Hissarlik ([Fig. 21]).[39] Both groups, moreover, belong approximately to the same epoch, marked by the transition from the Neolithic to the Early Metal Age.
