The Antiquity of Man Part 3

The lake-dwellings of the British isles, although not explored as yet with scientific zeal, as those of Switzerland have been in the last ten years, are yet known to be very numerous, and when carefully examined will not fail to throw great light on the history of the bronze and stone periods.

In the lakes of Ireland alone, no less than forty-six examples of artificial islands, called crannoges, have been discovered. They occur in Leitrim, Roscommon, Cavan, Down, Monaghan, Limerick, Meath, King's County, and Tyrone.*

(* W.M. Wylie "Archaeologia" volume 38 1859 page 8.)

One cla.s.s of these "stockaded islands," as they have been sometimes called, was formed, according to Mr. Digby Wyatt, by placing horizontal oak beams at the bottom of the lake, into which oak posts, from 6 to 8 feet high, were mortised, and held together by cross beams, till a circular enclosure was obtained.

A s.p.a.ce of 520 feet diameter, thus enclosed at Lagore, was divided into sundry timbered compartments, which were found filled up with mud or earth, from which were taken "vast quant.i.ties of the bones of oxen, swine, deer, goats, sheep, dogs, foxes, horses, and a.s.ses." All these were discovered beneath 16 feet of bog, and were used for manure; but specimens of them are said to be preserved in the museum of the Royal Irish Academy. From the same spot were obtained a great collection of antiquities, which, according to Lord Talbot de Malahide and Mr. Wylie, were referable to the ages of stone, bronze, and iron.*

(* W.M. Wylie "Archaeologia" volume 38 1859 page 8, who cites "Archaeological Journal" volume 6 page 101.)

In Ardekillin Lake, in Roscommon, an islet of an oval form was observed, made of a layer of stones resting on logs of timber. Round this artificial islet or crannoge thus formed was a stone wall raised on oak piles. A careful description has been put on record by Captain Mudge, R.N., of a curious log-cabin discovered by him in 1833 in Drumkellin bog, in Donegal, at a depth of 14 feet from the surface. It was 12 feet square and 9 feet high, being divided into two stories each 4 feet high.

The planking was of oak split with wedges of stone, one of which was found in the building. The roof was flat. A staked enclosure had been raised round the cabin, and remains of other similar huts adjoining were seen but not explored. A stone celt, found in the interior of the hut, and a piece of leather sandal, also an arrow-head of flint, and in the bog close at hand a wooden sword, give evidence of the remote antiquity of this building, which may be taken as a type of the early dwellings on the Crannoge islands.

"The whole structure," says Captain Mudge, "was wrought with the rudest kind of implements, and the labour bestowed on it must have been immense. The wood of the mortises was more bruised than cut, as if by a blunt stone chisel."*

(* Mudge "Archaeologia" volume 26.)

Such a chisel lay on the floor of the hut, and by comparing it with the marks of the tool used in forming the mortises, they were found "to correspond exactly, even to the slight curved exterior of the chisel; but the logs had been hewn by a larger instrument, in the shape of an axe. On the floor of the dwelling lay a slab of freestone, 3 feet long and 14 inches thick, in the centre of which was a small pit three quarters of an inch deep, which had been chiselled out. This is presumed to have been used for holding nuts to be cracked by means of one of the round s.h.i.+ngle stones, also found there, which had served as a hammer.

Some entire hazel-nuts and a great quant.i.ty of broken sh.e.l.ls were strewed about the floor."

The foundations of the house were made of fine sand, such as is found with s.h.i.+ngle on the seash.o.r.e about 2 miles distant. Below the layer of sand the bog or peat was ascertained, on probing it with an instrument, to be at least 15 feet thick. Although the interior of the building when discovered was full of "bog" or peaty matter, it seems when inhabited to have been surrounded by growing trees, some of the trunks and roots of which are still preserved in their natural position. The depth of overlying peat affords no safe criterion for calculating the age of the cabin or village, for I have shown in the "Principles of Geology" that both in England and Ireland, within historical times, bogs have burst and sent forth great volumes of black mud, which has been known to creep over the country at a slow pace, flowing somewhat at the rate of ordinary lava-currents, and sometimes overwhelming woods and cottages, and leaving a deposit upon them of bog-earth 15 feet thick.

None of these Irish lake-dwellings were built, like those of Helvetia, on platforms supported by piles deeply driven into the mud. "The Crannoge system of Ireland seems," says Mr. Wylie, "well nigh without a parallel in Swiss waters."

CHAPTER 3. -- FOSSIL HUMAN REMAINS AND WORKS OF ART OF THE RECENT PERIOD--CONTINUED.

Delta and Alluvial Plain of the Nile.

Burnt Bricks in Egypt before the Roman Era.

Borings in 1851-54.

Ancient Mounds of the Valley of the Ohio.

Their Antiquity.

Sepulchral Mound at Santos in Brazil.

Delta of the Mississippi.

Ancient Human Remains in Coral Reefs of Florida.

Changes in Physical Geography in the Human Period.

Buried Canoes in Marine Strata near Glasgow.

Upheaval since the Roman Occupation of the Sh.o.r.es of the Firth of Forth.

Fossil Whales near Stirling.

Upraised Marine Strata of Sweden on Sh.o.r.es of the Baltic and the Ocean.

Attempts to compute their Age.

DELTA AND ALLUVIAL PLAIN OF THE NILE.

Some new facts of high interest ill.u.s.trating the geology of the alluvial land of Egypt were brought to light between the years 1851 and 1854, in consequence of investigations suggested to the Royal Society by Mr.

Leonard Horner, and which were partly carried out at the expense of the Society. The practical part of the undertaking was entrusted by Mr.

Horner to an Armenian officer of engineers, Hekekyan Bey, who had for many years pursued his scientific studies in England, and was in every way highly qualified for the task.

It was soon found that to obtain the required information respecting the nature, depth, and contents of the Nile mud in various parts of the valley, a larger outlay was called for than had been originally contemplated. This expense the late viceroy, Abbas Pasha, munificently undertook to defray out of his treasury, and his successor, after his death, continued the operations with the same princely liberality.

Several engineers and a body of sixty workmen were employed under the superintendence of Hekekyan Bey, men inured to the climate and able to carry on the sinking of shafts and borings during the hot months, after the waters of the Nile had subsided, and in a season which would have been fatal to Europeans.

The results of chief importance arising out of this inquiry were obtained from two sets of shafts and borings sunk at intervals in lines crossing the great valley from east to west. One of these consisted of no fewer than fifty-one pits and artesian borings, made where the valley is 16 miles wide from side to side between the Arabian and Libyan deserts, in the lat.i.tude of Heliopolis, about 8 miles above the apex of the delta. The other line of borings and pits, twenty-seven in number, was in the parallel of Memphis, where the valley is only five miles broad.

Everywhere in these sections the sediment pa.s.sed through was similar in composition to the ordinary Nile mud of the present day, except near the margin of the valley, where thin layers of quartzose sand, such as is sometimes blown from the adjacent desert by violent winds, were observed to alternate with the loam.

A remarkable absence of lamination and stratification was observed almost universally in the sediment brought up from all points except where the sandy layers above alluded to occurred. Mr. Horner attributes this want of all indication of successive deposition to the extreme thinness of the film of matter which is thrown down annually on the great alluvial plain during the season of inundation. The tenuity of this layer must indeed be extreme, if the French engineers are tolerably correct in their estimate of the amount of sediment formed in a century, which they suppose not to exceed on the average 5 inches. When the waters subside, this thin layer of new soil, exposed to a hot sun, dries rapidly, and clouds of dust are raised by the winds. The superficial deposit, moreover, is disturbed almost everywhere by agricultural labours, and even were this not the case, the action of worms, insects, and the roots of plants would suffice to confound together the deposits of two successive years.

All the remains of organic bodies, such as land-sh.e.l.ls, and the bones of quadrupeds, found during the excavations belonged to living species.

Bones of the ox, hog, dog, dromedary and a.s.s were not uncommon, but no vestiges of extinct mammalia. No marine sh.e.l.ls were anywhere detected; but this was to be expected, as the borings, though they sometimes reached as low as the level of the Mediterranean, were never carried down below it--a circ.u.mstance much to be regretted, since where artesian borings have been made in deltas, as in those of the Po and Ganges, to the depth of several hundred feet below the sea level it has been found, contrary to expectation, that the deposits pa.s.sed through were fluviatile throughout, implying, probably, that a general subsidence of those deltas and alluvial formations has taken place. Whether there has been in like manner a sinking of the land in Egypt, we have as yet no means of proving; but Sir Gardner Wilkinson infers it from the position in the delta on the sh.o.r.e near Alexandria of the tombs commonly called Cleopatra's Baths, which cannot, he says, have been originally built so as to be exposed to the sea which now fills them, but must have stood on land above the level of the Mediterranean. The same author adduces, as additional signs of subsidence, some ruined towns, now half under water, in the Lake Menzaleh, and channels of ancient arms of the Nile submerged with their banks beneath the waters of that same lagoon.

In some instances, the excavations made under the superintendence of Hekekyan Bey were on a large scale for the first 16 or 24 feet, in which cases jars, vases, pots and a small human figure in burnt clay, a copper knife, and other entire articles were dug up; but when water soaking through from the Nile was reached the boring instrument used was too small to allow of more than fragments of works of art being brought up.

Pieces of burnt brick and pottery were extracted almost everywhere, and from all depths, even where they sank 60 feet below the surface towards the central parts of the valley. In none of these cases did they get to the bottom of the alluvial soil. It has been objected, among other criticisms, that the Arabs can always find whatever their employers desire to obtain. Even those who are too well acquainted with the sagacity and energy of Hekekyan Bey to suspect him of having been deceived, have suggested that the artificial objects might have fallen into old wells which had been filled up. This notion is inadmissible for many reasons. Of the ninety-five shafts and borings, seventy or more were made far from the sites of towns or villages; and allowing that every field may once have had its well, there would be but small chance of the borings striking upon the site even of a small number of them in seventy experiments.

Others have suggested that the Nile may have wandered over the whole valley, undermining its banks on one side and filling up old channels on the other. It has also been asked whether the delta with the numerous s.h.i.+fting arms of the river may not once have been at every point where the auger pierced.*

(* For a detailed account of these sections, see Mr.

Horner's paper in the "Philosophical Transactions" for 1855 to 1858.)

To all these objections there are two obvious answers:--First, in historical times the Nile has on the whole been very stationary, and has not s.h.i.+fted its position in the valley; secondly, if the mud pierced through had been thrown down by the river in ancient channels, it would have been stratified, and would not have corresponded so closely with inundation mud, we learn from Captain Newbold that he observed in some excavations in the great plain alternations of sand and clay, such as are seen in the modern banks of the Nile; but in the borings made by Hekekyan Bey, such stratification seems scarcely in any case to have been detected.

The great aim of the criticisms above enumerated has been to get rid of the supposed anomaly of finding burnt brick and pottery at depths and places which would give them claim to an antiquity far exceeding that of the Roman domination in Egypt. For until the time of the Romans, it is said, no clay was burnt into bricks in the valley of the Nile. But a distinguished antiquary, Mr. S. Birch, a.s.sures me that this notion is altogether erroneous, and that he has under his charge in the British Museum, first, a small rectangular baked brick, which came from a Theban tomb which bears the name of Thothmes, a superintendent of the granaries of the G.o.d Amen Ra, the style of art, inscription, and name, showing that it is as old as the 18th dynasty (about 1450 B.C.); secondly, a brick bearing an inscription, partly obliterated, but ending with the words "of the temple of Amen Ra." This brick, decidedly long anterior to the Roman dominion, is referred conjecturally, by Mr. Birch, to the 19th dynasty, or 1300 B.C. Sir Gardner Wilkinson has also in his possession pieces of mortar, which he took from each of the three great pyramids, in which bits of broken pottery and of burnt clay or brick are embedded.

M. Girard, of the French expedition to Egypt, supposed the average rate of the increase of Nile mud on the plain between a.s.souan and Cairo to be five English inches in a century. This conclusion, according to Mr.

Horner, is very vague, and founded on insufficient data; the amount of matter thrown down by the waters in different parts of the plain varying so much that to strike an average with any approach to accuracy must be most difficult. Were we to a.s.sume six inches in a century, the burnt brick met with at a depth of 60 feet would be 12,000 years old.

Another fragment of red brick was found by Linant Bey, in a boring 72 feet deep, being 2 or 3 feet below the level of the Mediterranean, in the parallel of the apex of the delta, 200 metres distant from the river, on the Libyan side of the Rosetta branch.*

(* Horner "Philosophical Transactions" 1858.)

M. Rosiere, in the great French work on Egypt, has estimated the mean rate of deposit of sediment in the delta at 2 1/4 inches in a century;*

were we to take 2 1/2 inches, a work of art 72 feet deep must have been buried more than 30,000 years ago.

(* Description de l'Egypte "Histoire Naturelle" tome 2 page 494.)

But if the boring of Linant Bey was made where an arm of the river had been silted up at a time when the apex of the delta was somewhat farther south, or more distant from the sea than now, the brick in question might be comparatively very modern.

The experiments inst.i.tuted by Mr. Horner at the pedestal of the fallen statue of King Rameses at Memphis, in the hope of obtaining an accurate chronometric scale for testing the age of a given thickness of Nile sediment, are held by some experienced Egyptologists not to be satisfactory, on the ground of the uncertainty of the rate of deposit acc.u.mulated at that locality. The point sought to be determined was the exact amount of Nile mud which had acc.u.mulated there since the time when that statue is supposed by some antiquaries to have been erected. Could we have obtained possession of such a measure, the rate of deposition might be judged of, approximately at least, whenever similar mud was observed in other places, or below the foundations of those same monuments. But the ancient Egyptians are known to have been in the habit of enclosing with embankments the areas on which they erected temples, statues, and obelisks, so as to exclude the waters of the Nile; and the point of time to be ascertained, in every case where we find a monument buried to a certain depth in mud, as at Memphis and Heliopolis, is the era when the city fell into such decay that the ancient embankments were neglected, and the river allowed to inundate the site of the temple, obelisk, or statue.

Even if we knew the date of the abandonment of such embankments, the enclosed areas would not afford a favourable opportunity for ascertaining the average rate of deposit in the alluvial plain; for Herodotus tells us that in his time those spots from which the Nile waters had been shut out for centuries appeared sunk, and could be looked down into from the surrounding grounds, which had been raised by the gradual acc.u.mulation over them of sediment annually thrown down. If the waters at length should break into such depressions, they must at first carry with them into the enclosure much mud washed from the steep surrounding banks, so that a greater quant.i.ty would be deposited in a few years than perhaps in as many centuries on the great plain outside the depressed area, where no such disturbing causes intervened.

ANCIENT MOUNDS OF THE VALLEY OF THE OHIO.

As I have already given several European examples of monuments of prehistoric date belonging to the Recent period, I will now turn to the American continent. Before the scientific investigation by Messrs.