The archæology and prehistoric annals of Scotland

by Sir Daniel Wilson

Returning to the same book of Moses, called Genesis, we find in it another record of things since the Beginning, thus noted in a passing parenthesis of the sacred narrative: "And God made the stars also." Very brief words; yet these are all our written materials about worlds and suns so filling the azure vault, that the astronomer, scarcely conscious of using figurative language, speaks of nebulous spaces as powdered with stars. Science has added somewhat to our knowledge of these also, without written annals. The Chaldean shepherds, who had never travelled beyond the central plain of Asia, where we recognise the cradle-land of the human race, began the work of unriddling these mysterious records. Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler, added largely, with unassisted vision, to the accumulated observations of astronomy. Galileo supplied a new key that unlocked many secret stores. Huygens, Newton, Herschel, Dollond, Lord Rosse, have each given us others wherewith many more are being opened. Astronomy and geology have both accomplished much, and have yet to accomplish far more ere their scattered leaves can be bound up, or their thousand lacunæ filled in. Nevertheless, histories, it seems, may be based on other than written materials—may, indeed, be all the more sure and incontrovertible because their evidence is traceable to no such doubtful records.

It is in curious consistency with human nature that we find the order of its investigations in the inverse ratio of their relation to itself. In the infancy of our race men studied the stars, bringing to the aid of their human sympathies the fancies of the astrologer to fill the void which Astronomy could not satisfy. The earth had grown older, and its patriarchal age was long past, when Cosmogony and Geology had their rise. Now at length when the studies of many generations have furnished materials for Astronomy, and the history of the earth's crust is being patiently unravelled by numerous independent labourers, some students of the past have inquired if the annals of our own race may not also be recoverable. Men with zeal no less earnest than that which has done so much for Astronomy and Geology, have found that this also lay around the older generations, recorded in characters no less intelligible, and containing the history of beings no less interesting to us than the Saurians or Mammoths, to whose inheritance we have succeeded. Bacon has remarked, in treating of the vicissitudes of things,[10] "The great winding-sheets that bury all things in oblivion, are two—deluges and earthquakes." But the weft of our historic winding-sheet is of a feebler texture, and its unnoted folds envelop an ampler oblivion, which also will yield secrets worth the knowing. Not a day passes that some fact is not stored in that strange treasury, some of them wittingly, but far more unwittingly, as the chronicles of man. To decipher these and to apply them as the elements of a new historic chronometry, are the legitimate ends of Archæology.

Slowly and grudgingly is its true position conceded to the study of the archæologist. The world has had its laugh at him, not always without reason. The antiquary, indeed, in our own day, has taken the first of the laugh himself, feeling that it was not unmerited, so long as he was the mere gatherer of shreds from the tattered and waste leaves of the past. Now, however, when these same shreds are being pieced together and read anew, it is found that they well repay the labours both of collector and decipherer. But Archæology is yet in its infancy. Little more has been done for it than to accumulate and classify a few isolated facts. We are indeed only learning the meaning of the several characters in which its records are engrossed.

The history of one of the oldest and most faithfully studied branches of the science, may afford an example, as well as encouraging assurance, for the whole. In 1636 the learned Jesuit, Father Kirchner, published his "Œdipus Ægyptiacus," a ponderous treatise on Egyptian hieroglyphics, completed in six folios, containing abundance of learning, and no lack of confident assurance, but never a word of truth in the whole. It is a fair specimen of the labours of hieroglyphic students down to the year 1799, when M. Bouchard, a French officer of Engineers, in digging the foundation of Fort St. Julien, on the western bank of the Nile, between Rosetta and the sea, discovered a mutilated block of black basalt, containing three versions of one inscription graven in the year B.C. 196, or 1995 years prior to its discovery. Inscribed in this late era of hieroglyphic literature, Epiphanes, whose accession it records, had decreed it to be graven not only in the hieroglyphic or sacred characters, but also in the enchorial or popular Egyptian writing, and in the Greek character and language. Here then seemed to be the long-coveted key to the mysterious records of Egypt. Casts of it were taken, fac-similes engraved and distributed throughout Europe; and expectation, roused to the utmost pitch of excitement, paused for a reply. But eighteen years elapsed before Dr. Thomas Young, one of the greatest scholars of his age, mastered the riddle of the key, established beyond doubt the alphabetic use of hieroglyphics, and demonstrated the phonetic value of five of its characters. It seems, perhaps, a small result for so long a period of study, during which the attention of many of the first scholars of Europe had been directed to the critical investigation of the inscriptions of the Rosetta stone, and the comparison of their diverse characters. Nevertheless it was the insertion of the point of the wedge. All that followed was easy in comparison with it. What has since been accomplished by the scholars of Europe in this old field of archæological investigation, where they dealt with written though unread materials, is now being attempted for the whole compass of its legitimate operations by a similar union of learning and zeal, and Archæology at length claims its just rank among the inductive sciences.

The visitor to the British Museum passes through galleries containing fossil relics of the secondary and tertiary geological periods—the gigantic evidences of former life, the tropical fauna of the carboniferous system, and all the organic and inorganic proofs by which we are guided in investigating the physical changes, and classifying the extinct beings, that pertained to the older world of which they speak. Thence he proceeds to galleries filled with the inscribed sarcophagi and obelisks, the votive tablets, the sculptured altars, deities, or historic decorations of Assyria, Egypt, India, Greece, and Rome, relics which belong no less to extinct, though newer systems and orders of being. "The antiquities," says an eminent geologist, when instituting a nearly similar comparison, "piece on in natural sequence to the geology; and it seems but rational to indulge in the same sort of reasonings regarding them. They are the fossils of an extinct order of things newer than the tertiary; of an extinct race, of an extinct religion, of a state of society and a class of enterprises which the world saw once, but which it will never see again; and with but little assistance from the direct testimony of history, one has to grope one's way along this comparatively modern formation, guided chiefly, as in the more ancient deposits, by the clue of circumstantial evidence."[11] Such are the reflections of an intelligent geologist, suggested by a similar combination of geological and historic relics to that which offers itself to the visitor of our great National Museum. But it is even in a more absolute sense than the geologist dreams of that the antiquities piece on to the geology, and show the researches of the archæologist to follow up the closing data of the older systems without a pause. He labours to build up that most important of all the branches of palæontology which pertains to ethnological investigations, and which when brought to maturity will be found not less valuable as an element in the elucidation of the history of nations and of mankind, than the grammatical construction and the affiliations of languages, which the ethnologist now chiefly favours. The archæologist applies to the accumulated facts of his own science the same process of inductive reasoning which the geologist has already employed with such success in investigating still earlier states of being. Both deal with unwritten history, and aim at the recovery of annals long deemed irretrievably erased. Nor is it merely in a parallelism of process, or a continuity of subject, that the affinity is traceable between them. It will be found that they meet on common ground, and dispute the heirship of some of old Time's bequests. The detritus records archæological as well as geological facts. The more recent alluvial strata are the legitimate property of both; while above these lie the evidences of still later changes on the earth's surface—the debris of successive ages, the buried ruins, the entombed works of art, and "the heaps of reedy clay, into which chambered cities melt in their mortality"[12]—the undisputed heirlooms of the archæologist. The younger science treats, it is true, of recent periods, when compared with the eras of geological computation, and of a race newer than any of those whose organic remains are classified in the systems into which the strata of the earth's crust have been grouped. But this race which last of all has peopled the globe, once teeming with living beings so strangely diverse from all that now inhabit it, is the race of man, whose history embraces nobler records, and has claims to a deeper interest for us than the most wonderful of all the extinct monsters that once

"Prone on the flood, extended long and large,
Lay floating many a rood."

Among the recent contributors to archæological science, the Danish antiquaries have surpassed all others in the value and extent of their researches. Occupying as they do a comparatively isolated seat of early northern civilisation, where the relics of the primeval and secondary archæological periods escaped to a great extent the disturbing influences of Roman invasion, they possess many facilities for its study. Notwithstanding this, however, the mute but eloquent relics of antiquity which abound there, excited, until a very recent period, even less notice than they have done among the archæologists of Ireland and Scotland, where also aboriginal traces have been little modified by the invading legions, whose memorials nearly superseded all others in the southern part of the British Isle. The Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, held the chief power among the races of the remote north in early times. Rome scarcely interfered with their growing strength, and left their wild mythology and poetic traditions and myths untinctured by the artificial creed which grew up amid the luxurious scepticism of the conquerors of the world. When the flood-tide of the legionary invaders had given back, and left the scenes of their brief occupation like the waste lands of a forsaken shore, the Scandinavians were the first to step into their deserted conquests. Fearlessly navigating seas where no Roman galley dared to have sailed, the Scandinavian warriors conquered the coasts of the Baltic and the German Ocean, occupied many parts of the British Isles, and especially established permanent settlements in the north of Scotland, and the isles on its northern and western coasts. Their power was felt on the shores of France and Spain, and they retaliated even on Italy the unavenged wrongs of the north. America was visited and partially occupied by them fully three centuries before Columbus steered his venturous course across the Atlantic. Greenland was colonized by them, and Iceland became the central point in their system of maritime operations. In that remote island the old northern language still lives, dialects of which were anciently spoken among the Scandinavian races, including the Anglo-Saxons of the south, and the Norsemen of the Scottish mainland and the Northern Isles.

Enduring traces of these hardy colonists still remain to furnish evidence of the source of much of our national character and hereditary customs. The religion of the Angles, the Saxons, the Scottish Norsemen, the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish Scandinavians, was similar. Christianity, which supplanted so much else, could not root out the memorials of their wild creed, which preserve in the names of the days of the week those of Tyr, Woden, Thur, and Frea, favourite deities of the Scandinavian mythology. In Iceland a large portion of the literature of this northern race still survives, in the form of mythic songs, sagas, laws, and other historic treasures. To this the attention of Danish and Norwegian antiquaries is now devoted with untiring enthusiasm, and already we are possessed of some of its fruits. These are of immense value to all the nations allied to the common stock, and among them Scotland ranks more directly than any other portion of the British Isles. The promised contribution by the antiquaries of Copenhagen to the written materials of history, of the "Antiquitates Britannicæ et Hibernicæ," cannot fail to add a historic era to early Scottish annals, richer in suggestive interest even than the romantic chronicles of the long lost "Vinland," by which, in their "Antiquitates Americanæ," they have added three centuries to the history of the new world.

A mingled race now occupies Britain, diverse in name, and still distinct in blood. The names of England and Scotland, however, contradict the character of the races. While the natives of the South retain the name of Angul, the father of the Scandinavian colonists, long since nearly superseded by Germano-Teutonic races, the Celtic Highlanders, and the Lowlanders of the North, alike take that of the Irish Scoti, the conquerors of the older Celtæ; though there is not wanting evidence to show, that the peculiar characteristics of the hardy Lowland race, including those of the whole north-eastern mainland, and the Northern Isles, are chiefly derived from the mingled Norse and Saxon blood of a Teutonic ancestry. But older races than the Scandinavian Vikings were colonists of the British Isles. Christianity has failed to obliterate the traces of the creed of Woden. Still less influential have been the modifications of Teutonic and Scandinavian dialects in supplanting the older Celtic names which cling to every hill, valley, and stream, though the Celtic race has, for nearly eight centuries, ceased to occupy aught but the north-western Highlands of Wales and Scotland. The ethnologist has yet to solve the problem as to whether there exist not among these traces of still older tongues, pertaining to races who have left other but no less certain memorials of their former presence. From the remotest era to which historical tradition points, the Celtæ are found in possession of the north-west of Europe, whither they appear to have been gradually driven, by successive migrations of younger races from the same eastern centre, to which we refer the origin of the whole human family. We can trace, by unmistakable indications, the gradual western migration of this people, until we find them hemmed in between the younger races and the sea, on the north-west coasts of France, and along the mountainous regions of the west in the British Isles, where the invaders of the more fertile regions of the low countries have not cared to follow them. Modern philologists discover a clear affinity between the Celtic dialects and the languages known by the general title of Indo-European, affording confirmation of that eastern origin assigned to them, both by tradition and history, but which is no less true of the newer races which supplanted them. The essential differences between these remain markedly distinguishable after centuries of peaceful intercourse, and a common interchange of rights and privileges. The Scottish Gael, though by no means to be now regarded as sprung from a pure Celtic stock, scarcely differs more widely in language than in moral and intellectual characteristics from the race that peoples the fertile Lowlands. Yet the names of the most remarkable Lowland localities prove their possession by a Celtic race, whom therefore we cannot doubt to have been the prior, if not the aboriginal, occupants of the soil.

Of late years the direct evidence of the character of the primitive races of Europe, furnished by their sepulchral remains, has been made the subject of careful investigation by distinguished ethnologists, both of Denmark and Sweden. Eschricht, Nillson, and Retzius, have all aimed by this means to recover the traces of the colonists of the north of Europe, and have discovered different physical types, apparently corresponding to the successive stages of advancement in civilisation, which the more direct archæological evidence establishes. Arguing from these results, Professor Nillson arrives at the conclusion that the northern relics of the Stone Period are not the memorials of the Celtæ, but of a much older and unknown race, which in the course of time has disappeared before the immigration of more powerful nations. Similar ideas are now generally gaining ground among ethnologists. "Within their own pale," Dr. Latham remarks, "the Celts were the encroaching family of the oldest, the Romans of the next oldest, and the Anglo-Saxons and Slavonians of the recent periods of history."[13] On like grounds to those by which Professor Nillson arrives at the conclusion that the Celtæ were preceded in the north by other races, Danish and Swedish ethnologists concur in rejecting the idea of the Fins having been the aboriginal race of Scandinavia. The earliest people, whose remains are found accompanied with the primitive class of implements, prior to the introduction of metals, appear to have belonged to a family of different physical character from those of any of the Arian races, and have been supposed to present features of greater affinity to the nations of Northern Asia. Professor Nillson, who has carefully examined the skeletons of the aboriginal Swedish colonists, and especially noted the conformation of their crania, states that they are readily distinguished from all the subsequent inhabitants of Scandinavia. They present the same peculiar form of cranium which has been recognised as existing among several ancient peoples, such as the Iberians or Basques of the Pyrenees, the Lapps and Samoyedes, and the Pelasgi, some traces of whom are still found in Greece.[14] The last noted coincidence is of considerable interest, both from the ancient prevalence there of cyclopean architecture, and other traces of primitive arts of unknown antiquity, and also from its vicinity to the Asiatic centre of aboriginal emigration. Dr. Latham remarks, in reply to the question, "Is there reason to believe that any definite stock or division of our species has become either wholly extinct, or so incorporated as to be virtually beyond the recognition and analysis of the investigator? With the vast majority of the so-called extinct stocks, this is not the case; e.g., it is not the case with the old Gauls of Gallia, who, though no longer extant, have extant congeners—the Welsh and Gaels. To an extinction of this kind among the better known historic nations of Europe and Asia, the nearest approach is to be found in the history of the Pelasgi."[15] It will be of no slight interest if we can trace the congeners of this ancient people among the extinct aborigines of the north of Europe.