Page:Rude Stone Monuments.djvu/73

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Chap. II.
CIRCLES.
47

the crowd on certain festivals, it is difficult to understand where they were kept, except in some external case like this. In every instance, however, in which a relic has been found it has been in the centre of the Tope and never in the Tee. A still more apposite illustration, however, is found in the tombs around Agra and Delhi. In all those of any pretension the body is buried in the earth in a vault below the floor of the tomb and a gravestone laid over if, but on the floor of the chamber, under the dome, there is always a simulated sarcophagus, which is the only one seen by visitors. This is carried even further in the tomb of the Great Akbar (1556, 1605). Over the vault is raised a pyramid surrounded, not like this tumulus by three rows of stones, but by three rows of pavilions, and on the top, exposed to the air, is a simulated tomb placed exactly as this dolmen is. No two buildings could well seem more different at first sight, but their common parentage and purpose can hardly be mistaken, and it must he curious to know whether the likeness extends to the double tomb also.

Rude Stone Monuments 0073.png

9.
Tee cut in the rock on a Dagoba at Ajunta.

This, like many other questions, must he left to the spade to determine, but, unless attention is turned to the analogy above alluded to, the purpose of the double tomb may he misunderstood, even when found, and frequently, I suspect, has already been mistaken for a secondary interment.

Circles.

Circles form another group of the monuments we are about to treat of, in this country more important than the dolmens to which the last section was devoted. In France, however, they are hardly known, though in Algeria they are very frequent. In Denmark and Sweden they are both numerous and important, but it is in the British Islands that circles attained their greatest development, and assumed the importance they maintain in all the works of our antiquaries which treat of megalithic art.

The cognate examples in the microlithic styles afford us very